We made it to Trinidad, Colorado which has the highest number of sex change doctors per capita in the world! The ride through new Mexico was beautiful, but definitely somewhere I could never live - I need more greenery in my life! We have our longest ride day coming up (116 miles), but because of the wildfires out in Colorado, we may end up having to get shuttled for the next few days because of all the smoke in the air.
These past couple days have been some of our hardest ride days. Today we biked 86 miles into a 15 mph headwind the entire day, and at times I was struggling to go 8 mph. It's also been over 100 degrees pretty much all day, no shade, lots of semis passing us, and big ole hills. Yesterday was the same conditions, plus we did 15 miles on a slippery gravel road and a lot of people fell. Guess who was one of thirteen riders yesterday and one of nine riders today to actually make it in?? All the rest of our riders got picked up by the van because they couldn't make it in at a reasonable hour. I tried to take a panorama shot of the vast nothingness we are biking through in Texas. However, because my phone takes panorama shots by detecting differences in the scenery, and there were no differences in the scenery of the picture I tried to take, my phone didn't understand that I was pointing it at different spots.
Makes for a tired-legged Cindy. We made it here to Oklahoma city. The church we are staying at's sanctuary was apparently blown up by the Oklahoma bombing a few years back. There's a memorial nearby but I haven't had a chance to check it out yet. We've had awesome riding weather the past few days (read: under 95 degrees) but it's been so nice compared to that 100 degree heat we had a few days back. We're building with habitat in Oklahoma city. I thought we might do tornado relief but they are keeping us on track with the original build day plans in hopes of getting people into their new homes! :-)
55 miles on flats feels like a breeze! Today we coasted into little rock, Arkansas and we went about 19 mph and got here at 1130 am which was awesome because we beat the heat! Yesterday we rode 97 miles in 25 mph cross winds with high humidity and a heat index of 107. It was sooo hard!! I was on my bike from 630 am until 530 pm. I thought we would be picked up by the van because we are not supposed to be on the road after 4 pm, but there were so many of us we couldn't all fit in the van so those of us who felt we could continue kept on trucking on. We have had such amazing hosts, and I feel like I'm learning more about the affordable housing issue on this trip than I learned on my last one. We also recently hit 1000 miles. Can't believe we're already a fourth of the way through!
