Day 15 - Mile 725 - 820 (95 miles, 509 ft ascent, 682 ft descent) - Brewery Count: 4

Columbus, NM to El Paso, TX

Daily Route

Daily Elevation

The alarm went off at 6 AM, but it was still dark out, so I pushed snooze and went back to sleep for 15 more minutes.  Even though the sun was still not up (it winds up that the sunrise was around 6:30 AM), my bladder was ready for a bathroom visit.  Somehow, our tent was down and our gear was stowed by 7 AM giving us 1 hour to eat breakfast and prepare for the 95 mile ride ahead of us.
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The plan was to leave at 8 AM, and we left just a few minutes after.

Ready to ride (Great group shot by Patrick)

As soon as we turned onto NM Route 9, the flags at the campground told the whole story.  We had a pretty good tailwind. ​

Woohoo....a tailwind

This was proven when we made it to our first break at 24 miles in just 1.5 hours giving us over 17.5 mph average.  This stop was just on the side of the road and lasted only 15 minutes.​

Roadside stop

The plan for our next break is for Patrick to meet us around the 45 mile point.  We would ride until he passes us and pulls over.  Since we were in the middle of nowhere Patrick had no idea where we were or that we were flying with this very favorable tailwind.

Everyone enjoying the tailwind

As it turned out, Patrick didn’t meet us until we went 53 miles.  It was great seeing him since we were all short on water since we haven’t had a place to refill our water bottles all day.  After a nice 30 minute break, we were back on the road.

Next stop planned is DeadBeach Brewery in El Paso, Texas.  That is right…we are crossing over into Texas today.  7 miles after leaving Patrick we came to the end of New Mexico 9 and the end of our nice secluded roads.  We were now on the outskirts of El Paso and riding on roads with more traffic than we have seen for a while.​

Just before crossing over the Rio Grande into Texas I rolled over something metal and popped my rear tire. 

Gerri's turn to change a flat

Everyone seemed cool about it since they all liked the short break.  I got it changed pretty quickly (with the help of Bill), and then, a couple of miles later I hit a hole and popped the rear tire again…OY!  I think the second pop was because we didn’t get enough air pressure in the tire when we changed it, so this time we put the work into getting the tire pumped to 90 PSI.​  At this point I figured the others where getting pretty tired of the stops, but Mary shared this photo with me of the others while I was changing my second flat.  Everyone is obviously cool with it all.

The others goofing around as I work on my second flat.

By the way....during this time we were riding right along the "Wall".

Tim riding along the Texas / Mexico border

We finally made it to the brewery and had the required flight of beer.  DeadBeach Brewery brewed pretty good beer.  We only stayed there for about 40 minutes since we still had 16 miles to go for the day. ​

Flight of beer at DeadBeach Brewery

Everyone enjoying the beer and the break

We were on the west side of El Paso and had to get to the far east side.  Some of the trip took us through neighborhoods, and some took us on somewhat busy roads.  We were all glad when we made it to the RV park at 4:30 PM.  
After that long ride everyone was anxious to take a shower.  Since we knew that we were going to have a long day today, we planned in advance to go out to dinner.  We went to BJ’s Restaurant and Brewery which everyone seemed to enjoy, and was back to the RV by 8 PM.  After a quick planning session for the next day, everyone retired to their tents.

Tomorrow we have 76 miles to ride…another long one.  We decided to leave at 8:30 AM, so we won’t have to wake up in the dark tomorrow morning.  It seems much warmer tonight in the tent, so it should be a good night sleep.  Now that we are in Texas, we have 3 states down, 4 to go!