Days 23 & 24: Sanderson to Bracketville

Comments and emails from my friends and readers suggest that my portrayal of this ride has been on the negative side.  We did have the one nice day riding to Sanderson and it looked like we might have turned a corner.  So not the case!  Yesterday was, I thought, the worst riding day of my life-- 81 miles of misery with high temperatures, very bad headwinds, heavy traffic, bad road surface, lots of hills, hideous landscape and, perhaps the worst of all, the seeming death of my iPod.  Turns out that it got a bit wet when I was being "misted" at a SAG stop but recovered function once it had time to dry out.  Desperately searching for positive things about the ride, I will say that neither John nor I had a flat, and the road cuts were very interesting geologically.

My riding time for the day was 9.5 hours and I was so late getting in and the wiring and wi-fi situation was so sketchy that I abandoned all thoughts of the blog and just sat and drank beer.  We were at Seminole Canyon State Park, just east of the Pecos River, and it was nice in that weird desert way-- particularly at sundown.  We had a decent night sleep and woke refreshed and ready for another ride.  We left at 7:30 and rode about 12 miles before we were again riding into a headwind-- soon worse than the day before.  I feel that I can deal with heat and hills but not headwinds-- especially not two days in a row.  The route crossed a very long bridge over the Amistad Reservoir west of Del Rio and the wind blew so hard on the bridge that I was barely able to maintain 5mph working as hard as I could.  I struggled on for 40 miles but when I reached the lunch spot in Del Rio I knew that I was done.  Several other people also sagged today but John decided to keep riding.  I feel like a failure when I sag but John said the ride was extremely difficult and I probably made a good choice.

One of the better bathrooms we have encounted-- better than the roadside, that is...

We are Fort Clark Spring in Bracketville, an old Army fort that was closed in 1942.  It is now a retirement home for military personnel, an rv park, a tent ground and a motel.  The distance between this place and where we were last night is only 76 miles but the landscape has changed markedly.  The Fort has lots of trees and real grass and things in general are much less desolate and dusty than we have been used to.

Geologic layers in road cut West Texas