We rode 68 more miles today and we are enjoying  the smooth, pothole free Florida roads.  Most of the time there is a bike lane and when there isn’t, there is a sidewalk but traffic is pretty light anyway. Even this morning, I was worried about riding the two miles back to Adventure Cycling route from our hotel, on a four lane highway with no shoulder but there was no rush hour traffic and I didn’t die. Tim refused a ferry ride in the van and I told him if I died in a bike accident, my tombstone would read, ” Tim caused his death. Rest in Peace.”

Lots of long rolling hills all day long. Who knew Florida isn’t flat? We would hit 30 mph downhill and struggle to keep it above 10 going up the next one.  At one point in the ride we were only about two miles from the Georgia border but with all these long mileage days, Brian and I declined adding more just to cross another state line on a bike. We started to get annoyed with the hills toward the end and Tallahassee, we hit some really short, steep ones. As far as my knee is concerned, Tylenol plus Aleve did the trick and icing it tonight will help. Today’s trivia game was naming iconic lines from movies, such as ” …there is no crying in baseball” and ” WILSON” and ” STELLA” . We came up up with lots of movies and it will be hard to think of our next trivia contest but we will need a good one to entertain Matt, who will be joining us tomorrow.

At breakfast at our Best Western in Ville Platte, we all discussed the fact that we all had crazy dreams on Saturday night – maybe that was an omen we should have paid more attention to at the time.  I was able to remember 2 of my crazy dreams.  In one of them, I was a rookie playing for the Phillies and I was being interviewed by Harry Kalas.  I kept making references to Joe Hardy of “The Year the Yankees lost the pennant” fame, except that I was using my own body and not that of a 20-something kid after selling my soul to the devil.  Harry didn’t have any idea what I was talking about.  In my second dream I was teaching at Villanova before the days on Distance Learning and On-line courses, so I was using a blackboard and white and yellow chalk, except that I was giving a lecture on the U.S. Constitution and not the Engineering Math I usually teach – all very strange…..

We got going right around 8 a.m. and it started raining almost immediately and rained for about 20-30 minutes, at which point Tim located some shelter which we decided to use, even though it was early in the ride.  It drizzled off and on, more off than on, for most of the day, but it was nevertheless a very memorable day.  Tim had mapped out a route using roads not on the Adventure Cycling Association maps, because their maps would have had us biking 108 miles, and our route was only supposed to be about 80 miles – it eventually came out to 82 miles, quite a savings!  But after biking over a 4 mile long bridge with no shoulder, we figured out why our route is not the ACA recommended route.  What was most memorable about the ride was the bridge with no shoulder, biking over the Mississippi River (which was really quite awesome!), three flat tires, and Beth’s rescue of Tim, who finally had enough of changing flat tires.

One more memorable item from the day’s ride was all of the things we saw on the roads we biked, which included lots and lots of road kill, lots of discarded Mardi Gras beads from last week’s Fat Tuesday celebrations, and an almost unbelievable number of empty Bud Light beer cans – don’t people from Louisiana drink any other kind of beer?

Ok, enough talk – here are the pictures from the day’s ride.

Tim consults map at 1st rest stop. We were really just trying to get out of the rain for a few minutes. Mark put on rain paints (which is why he is bent over) which naturally made the rain stop. Thanks Mark!

View of Interstate 49 near its intersection with LA 190. Before this trip I never even knew there was an I-49!

Wall Mart Distribution Center near I-49 and LA 763. Every single town we have been in on this leg has its very own Wall Mart!

Tim and Mark at end of 4 mile long bridge along US 190. It really seemed like this bridge was never going to end. Fortunately, since it was a Sunday, the traffic was light and all of the LA drivers were very courteous!

Cemetery in New Roads, LA. I am guessing the water table is high throughout all of southern Louisiana, because even here (as in the Big Easy), all of the burial sites are above ground.

Tim inspects tire for one of our numerous flats. We had a total of 3 flats on Sunday’s ride.

Approach to bridge over the Mississippi River along LA 10. This bridge was built in 2010 – before that everyone, bikers and drivers, had to take a ferry into St. Francisville, LA.

Mark and Brian and Mississippi River. I know everyone else has posted this picture, but it’s a good one, so I want to post it too!

The “big muddy” at the top of the bridge overlooking the Mississippi River on LA 10. It is really wide here and incredibly muddy!

Another flat – this one on LA 61. One of the things about riding on wet roads is that your tires hold onto sharp things they would normally push aside – hence you’re prone to getting way more flats than you normally would riding on dry roads.

Photo of Live Oaks with their Spanish Moss on grounds of Butler Greenwood Plantation B&B. Sorry it’s a bit blurry ….

Mark and Tim relaxing after we made it to the Butler Greenwood Plantation B&B. This place has been in the Butler family for about 8 generations, since the 1790’s!

Tim reads from Conquering the Borderlands at Tim and Mark’s lodgings at B-G B&B.  Those are Mark’s size 14 sneakers on the far right of the photo.

We finally made it to our lodging quarters right around 5 p.m., about one hour after we should have made it.  Monday was an off “rest” day, which I used to catch up on work, and I did have a productive, though not very restful, day.  It turned out to be a really good thing that we didn’t ride today because it rained “cats and dogs” all day long! Matt (Tim’s oldest son) flew into to Baton Rouge and Tim picked him up around 8 p.m. and Matt will be riding with us the rest of this week.  Tomorrow we ride about 75 miles or so to Amite City, LA.  Hopefully the weather will cooperate and it won’t rain.

I’m writing this blog the morning after, thankful today is a rest day. First of all it is pouring rain and I mean pouring. It started raining for real just as we arrived at Butler Greenwood Plantation and seems to be getting worse as the hours tick by, There is a huge puddle at the bottom step of the cottage Mark and I are sharing. It must be 10 ft in diameter. We are supposed to go sight seeing in Baton Rouge but not if it keeps raining like this.

We do need to go into Baton Rouge (about 25 miles from here) to get some bike supplies and pick up Matt at the airport. My dumb Irish luck of NO FLATS on L1 thru L4 ran out big time. I had two flats yesterday and since the second one was only two and a half miles from our B&B, I surrendered and called Beth to come get me. Sometimes it’s better to know when to call it a day. So today I need to buy a new tire and a supply of tubes. I’ve had three flats so far (I only carry two spares) and needed to borrow a spare from Brian. Fortunately his tire is the same size as mine and he hasn’t had any flats yet on this leg. Don’t worry Brian I didn’t jinx you. I knocked on wood; Mark will cofirm it.

Besides the flats, yesterday was pretty good. We dodged the rain for the most part. We got in a good groove-our legs are holding up just fine. My butt is sore but today’s rest day should help that. It finally warmed up. No one was cold and we rode in shorts all day with only two layers on our torsos.
There was one scary part that we had no idea was coming.

We probably should have guessed we were in for a surprize when we had a hard time plotting our route for the ride from Ville Platte to St. Francisville. We had to cross the Atchifalaya (don’t ask me how to pronounce it) River and there are only two bridges, which are 40 miles apart. The Adventure cycling maps take you on the northern bridge but it was out of the way and would have added 40 miles to an already long day. So we headed south and used LA 190 as our route which is a 4 lane highway.

It’s a busy road with a crappy shoulder but it was saving us 40 miles. There were some long bridges over swamps, most of which had shoulders. We crossed a steep bridge over the river and I had to use my granny gear for the only time this leg and then came up to another bridge over a swamp. Yes there was no shoulder and it was 5 miles long. It reminded me of the old causeway into Ocean City with bulky concrete railings on both sides of the road with the white line right up against the concrete railing. Freaking scary is all I’m going to say about that other than I let out a big sigh when I finally saw the end approaching.

Did we stick together? Hell no, I took off like a bat out of hell. Brian brought up the rear and I mean rear. When Mark and I asked what took him so long, he told us he stopped at one point to adjust his handle bar bag. Are you kidding me? That was way scarier than the tunnel back on L2.

Well sorry for the long post. As I said it’s pouring rain and there isn’t much else to do. I bet everyone else’s posts will be long too. I got a great picture of Mark and Brian at the top of the bridge over the Mississippi which I will (hopefully) get Beth to include in this post. It’s still raining. Time to check out my bike.

Before we retired for the night last night, we all agreed we would be down at breakfast at the El Capitan Hotel (a great place, by the way) by 6:30 am.  We all had a great big breakfast (OK, maybe not Beth, but Tim, Mark and I definitely did!), but when we finished, it was still dark outside.  Being on the western edge of the Central Time Zone, sunrise doesn’t occur until just before 8 a.m.; however, we didn’t know that when we made our plans the night before.  So we had about an hour wait before we could get going.  But by 8 o’clock, we were on our bikes and riding the 76 miles to Marfa.  And boy was it ever cold!  I should have worn my full-fingered biking gloves and tomorrow I will.  But we warmed up after about an hour, so it wasn’t a big deal.

The 76 miles we did today was the toughest ride of L3 because 1) it was all uphill (we climbed about 1000 feet), 2) the road surface in Presidio County, where we were for most of today’s ride is Texas chip seal, a very rough road surface that’s pretty tough on my already sore backside, and 3) we had a decent head wind at least for the last third of the ride.

We rode parallel to some train tracks most of the ride and those tracks were busy the entire day!  We must have seen 6 or so different trains using the rails, including one Amtrak passenger train.  I took a couple of videos of the trains, but my connection tonight is really slow, so I won’t be uploading them tonight.

But after about a half dozen stops, we finally made it into Marfa right at 3pm.  Tim says our average speed (when we were riding) was over 14 mph, so I guess we stopped a lot during the 7 hours we were on the road.

When we made it to Marfa, Beth met us at The Pizza Foundation restaurant, where we had a Margarita pizza and some beer – it was all excellent.  After that, we loaded up the truck with our bikes and drove an hour east to Marathon, TX, where we will stay tonight and tomorrow night.  Tomorrow morning, Beth will drive us back to Marfa and we’ll bike back to Marathon and stay overnight again at the Gage Hotel, which is a beautiful old hotel originally opened around 1930.  I have some pictures of it below.  We all enjoyed an excellent dinner at the Gage Hotel Restaurant, before heading back to our rooms for our nightly tasks, calling our loved ones and blogging!

Here are today’s photos.

Historical marker on US90 outside Van Horn, TX. We fixed Mark’s flat at this spot.

PRADA art project outside Valentine, TX on US 90. It was installed by some of the artists of the Marfa artist community.

Trains carrying turbine blades on RR parallel to US90. We saw 6 or 7 trains on Sunday, including one Amtrak passenger rail train.

Photo of Captain Shepard House, a part of the Gage Hotel where we stayed. We all agreed this was the nicest place we’ve stayed in so far. We have the entire house to ourselves.

Barrel cacti in cactus garden at Capt Shepard House of Gage Hotel. This cactus garden was really beautiful, but then I’m very partial to desert gardens! 🙂

Tim, Beth and Mark at dinner at the Gage Hotel Restaurant on Sunday night. We ate outside by a fireplace so both the food and the ambiance were really good!

We started the day at about 8 a.m. by having a nice breakfast together, including Mary, Nalla and Suokamo.  We got on our bikes and began the last ride of this cross country leg L2 at a bit after 9:00 a.m.  Not too far from our hotel, we came back to Mesilla, where there is a historic district containing a small, wood construction Catholic Cathedral, the jail in which Billy the Kid was once held, and the La Posta restaurant we visited last night.  Here is a shot of the Cathedral.

Catholic Cathedral in Mesilla, NM.

I took my last video along NM 28.  The trees in the video are pecan groves, which we first began to see yesterday along NM 187 and NM 185.  Pecan groves very much like the ones in this video line a good portion of NM 28.   Also, as you will notice in this clip, it was very comforting to see bikers coming the other way on NM 28, since it meant this was a bike-friendly route.

Not too much after this, we again came upon the Rio Grande, which we had crossed a few times during yesterday’s long ride.  Yesterday, the two times we crossed it, it had water in it.  Today, further south and almost to Texas, the river bed was completely dry.

View of the Rio Grande from NM 28, not too far from the NM – Texas border.

The most difficult part of today’s 54 mile trek was when we rode into El Paso on Texas 20.  The rode became very urban and there was quite a lot of traffic.  We met Beth along Mesa Blvd (which is also Texas 20), took on a few more fluids, and retrieved printed biking directions of the route to our hotel, which I had printed out from Google maps before leaving on this trip.  At times they were a little difficult to follow, but they definitely worked and we made it to our hotel (the Courtyard by Marriott at the El Paso Airport) safe and sound.  We celebrated with some cold beers Beth picked up for us after she had made it to the hotel ahead of us.  After tossing down the beers, intermingled with the rest of our salty snacks, we all went down to the pool and hot tub.  So here are a few pictures we took while relaxing there.

Mark and Beth relaxing in hot tub of Courtyard Hotel, El Paso Airport.

Tim reading “Conquering the Borderlands” while relaxing in hotel hot tub.

We finished off the evening by enjoying another good Mexican meal at Los Bandidos De Carlos And Mickey’s, a short drive from our hotel.  Tomorrow some of us (like me) plan to finish disassembling our bikes and then taking in a few sights that El Paso has to offer.

We started this day pretty bundled up, since it was only 31 degrees Fahrenheit with a wind chill that made it feel like 21 degrees.  But we warmed up quickly as we started to climb out of Silver City.  We left NM 180 behind and got onto NM 152 shortly out of Silver City.  NM 152 was originally constructed in the 1930’s as part of a Works Progress Administration project and it is a beautiful road with very little traffic.  Silver City is at an elevation of 5,938 feet and Kingston is at about 6,200 feet, but first we needed to climb up to Emory Pass, which is at an elevation of 8,228 feet.  So we need ahead of time that it would be challenging, even though our total mileage for the trip was about 45 miles.  I took a few photos while on the ride, but I was mainly focused on completing the day’s ride, which had been on my mind for several days in advance.  Here are some photos to give you an idea of what we saw on this ride.

Mark drinking coffee at first break of the day.

Tim and Mark at second break.

This was the first day using the new seat that Mark, Tim and Beth had strongly encouraged me to purchase the previous afternoon when we were in downtown Silver City.  I was really glad they were all so insistent, because the new seat actually made this ride possible.  We climbed almost the entire day, using switchbacks that had been carved into the mountain to make the grade tolerable for motorists.  I’m pretty sure the transportation engineers that designed the road were not really thinking of cyclists, but the grade is fine for bike riders also.  My one video of the day was when Beth met us exactly as planned at 12:30 p.m. along NM 152.  Beth had told us she was going to work out in the Exercise Room of the Silver City hotel and then go shopping for contents of the meal I would be cooking that evening, leaving the hotel around 10:45 aa.m.  By checking the driving directions on Google Maps for our destination,  she was confident that she would catch up to us at about 12:30 p.m. and she was right on target.

After meeting up with Beth and filling up on all our fluids and snack items, Beth continued on her way and we did too, with about another 6 miles or so of climbing ahead of us.  About the best I could do climbing the mountain was 4 miles per hour, and I told myself that if the grade got any stepper so that I slowed down even more, I would just get off the bike and walk, since my walking speed would be about the same as my biking speed.  But fortunately that did not happen and I never needed to walk.  It felt really good to make it to the top of Emory Pass, at which point I took some photos.

Tim and Mark at Emory Pass sign.

View of Kingston, NM from Emory Pass lookout.  The road in the center of the photo was our destination for the night.

Here is another view from the Emory Pass lookout.  The white spots on the mountains are snow.

View of snowy mountains from Emory Pass lookout.

After making it to Emory pass, we had about eight more miles of riding, and all of it was downhill, a drop of 2,000 feet.  It took concentration and strong hands on the brakes to make it safely which, of course, we all did.  We made it to the Black Range Lodge in Kingston, where we stayed for the night.  Kingston was once a town of about 7000 people in the 1880’s and early 1890’s, when silver was still backing U.S. currency.  When that changed in 1893, the town’s economy plummeted, as did the population.  Today there are only about 2 dozen people still living there, and that includes Katherine (the proprietor of the lodge) and Gary and Tom, who help her run it.

Beth and I made dinner for this night, which consisted of breaded boneless chicken, white rice spiced up with hot salsa, and a green salad.  We invited Katherine and Gary to join us, and they both seemed to appreciate both the dinner and the conversation, which somehow included a fair share of history, politics, and bashing of Republicans.  It was all in fun and I know we all enjoyed it.

We all called home on the lodge’s landline.  There was no cell service to speak of and internet coverage was via satellite and spotty at best.  So there was no blogging this night.