Done
I think the last time I wrote anything here was in Southern Colorado.
Riding into New Mexico was nice, with a super sudden change of scenery. I had a really crap day and pulled up stumps and fell asleep in a camp ground at 6pm, and woke up feeling better than I had in ages. I got to Abiquiu lake on the first night in NM, which was also the friday of labour day weekend, so the campground was packed. Some nice people gave me fish tacos for dinner. Then they asked where I had been riding and did the usual pause-and-then-utter-profanity-in-disbelief response. They watched me destroy some food and then asked if I had ever been jetskiing. So I took a day off while they fed me and went wakeboarding and jetskiing. fun.
I rode on the road to cuba and visited chaco canyon. This is a really, really cool ruin from 850-1250AD. The road in absolutely destroyed my wrists through (25mi or corrugations each way) but got into grants dry, once again threading the needle between thunderstorms.
The next day I set off in the drizzle for pie town. I have never been so miserable. Literally 4 inches of mud caked on to my bike, hail, 2x 5-mile hike-a-bikes through claggy, clay mud. Gross. I woke up the next day at 11 and pretty much just ate pie and drank beer all day. That night, another muddy figure appeared on the doorstep of toaster house (trail angel place to stay in pie town) and it was the guy that I met in Eureka on my first day on the trail. I rode ahead of him and never saw him, but the distance I made up, combined with my giardia and broken frame resulted in him catching me. It seemed serendipitous, so we decided to roll out the last few days to Antelope Wells together. We were forced to take the highway to Reserve and Silver City, meaning we missed out on the ride through Gila NF, which was a bit of a bummer, as I have heard it is amazing, but I just was not in the mood for 160mi of mud and damp. (the 32mi on the pie town road took like 8 hrs, and conditions in gila were worse).
As we rolled out of Silver someone asked if we had seen Jay Petervary, who was co-incidentally about an hour behind us. He was doing an ITT record attempt (which he bagged) and a bunch of peeps were following his spot.
The ride out of silver was fast, on nice buff fire trail. Me and Matt met up at Separ (he stopped to fix a flat) and as we were riding out we saw Jay sitting on the c-store porch stuffing a few thousand calories down. We talked, and he had ridden the past 500mi with only 5 hours of sleep (that's over 4 days!) and seemed decidedly like he was on meth. But he had a lift from the border, and so we decided to push it out and ride to the border that night. I was happy about that and it would make for a 120-130mi day, and I was glad to finish with a bang.
Jay caught us up with about 30mi to go, and I rode with him all the way to the border. We got there close to 10pm and matt rolled in about 10min back. We pretty much hauled arse to get there, sitting on ~23mi/hr. I wish I had Jays setup, 31lb vs. my ~150lb... I was hurting trying to spin out the big ring with him, but it was an awesome, memorable way to finish.
We took the requisite photos and loaded up our bikes. We all pretty much passed out in the truck, but were chipper as we got back to Lordsburg. We found a $35 motel, dropped our gear off and went to the 24hr dennys. We stank like death. I got a glimpse of myself in a mirror and I pretty much looked like death too, and the waitress was very confused at these 3 guys who ordered two lumberjack breakfasts and a chocolate milkshake each at 1.30am.
Passed the fuck out having had the best day on a bike I've ever had. I kept saying to myself "I can't believe I rode to mexico... mother fucker, everything hurts."
Jay got a lift out to Tucson at 7am, Matt had a coupler bike and threw it into a box he got from the grocery store and got on greyhound at lunchtime to get back to Denver. I called Amtrak and found that I can't get luggage on the train at Lordsburg or Deming, so I took another night at the motel, stayed in bed, had a shave, ate some food and had a bath. Checked out this morning and am going to ride to Tucson, Arizona to sort out transport to LA. 157mi, so 2 days of easy highway riding.
I'm glad I'm done, I feel like the whole trail is a bit of a blur of tiredness, happiness and fun. It seems kind of dream like. Now I'm awake, I'm a little bit like "did that really happen?" but I am looking forward to getting to california. I need to rest. Then I have a few weeks of easy, flat, sea level riding down Baja, where I can eat tacos and drink beer all the way to La Paz.