Cold, Calm & Collected....People are good and today showed it.

Day 11
Grants NM to Albuquerque NM
79 Miles with a starting temperature of 35* with a light rain.

Below is a group picture of the gang from last nights dinner at the hotel. We have group dinners every night except the day before an off day and off days. Dana and Dianne  leave the tour tonight and we will be lose a couple more in Dodge City.

The tour will have different faces throughout the crossing, at this time it looks like we have 12 people who hope to go EFI (every fantastic inch).

Every morning begins with a bike check to make sure that there aren't any issues before we hit the road. Today started with Ray finding a small "bump" in his front tire so he wisely decided to change it prior to today's ride, you will see later why this was a really good decision.

This morning was very cold, there was even fresh snow in the nearby foothills. This is the first day that I was able to wear my arm & leg warmers plus my rain pants and rain jacket and long gloves.
There is definitely an advantage to being a Oregonian on days like this, there were some people who had trouble with the wet and cold today, lets hop we can get back to the warmer weather soon.

I rode the first part of the ride solo since I was stopping on a regular basis due to unsettled stomach. I caught up with Dave, Adriane & Penny at a store at mile 30 where the owner gave our bikes an Indian Blessing and allowed us to use his bathroom.

To get to the bathroom we needed to go through the back room, out the back dock door, across the street and unlock the padlock to a door of a quest house that had been converted to storage. After working our way through a few rooms of "stuff" we found paradise in the form of a pepto-pink bathroom. To have a stranger bless the bikes and allow us to use his bathroom out back and across the street really was kind, these are the things that make adventures great.

At about mile 50 while riding on the interstate we came across some very intense road construction that had traffic down to one lane each way with no shoulder. It was a very unsafe condition but after dave spoke with the road crew thay allowed us to travel on the closed part of the interstate, all we had to do was avoid the heavy machinery and trucks and we were good to go.

Here is a picture of Adriane, Dave & Penny riding on our private highway while we avoided the construction.



At a SAG stop at mile 60 we had another issue with road construction and this time we didn't have our own construction road to ride on. Tracy, the ride director, put on her Wonder Woman outfit and procured a highway maintenance truck with big flashing arrows and they did a rolling roadblock for the 1/2 mile we needed to get us to a safe shoulder. Tip o' The Topper to Tracy for getting er' done.

Just outside of town we has a very nice long decent and I was able to reach 49 mph. Having a malfunction, such as a tire issue, at high sppeds can really put a damper in your day and Ray mentioned how happy he was that he changed his tire in the morning and didn't have to worry about it on the fast downhill. Ruby Jean is running great and really enjoyed blowing the dust off coming into Albuquerque.

We crossed The Rio Grande as we entered town. You can tell by the gear that we had cold weather all day long but it was a good ride and we are another day closer to success.

Tomorrows ride is all climbing. We ride to Santa Fe with about 6,000 ft of gain. At 7,000 ft elevation Santa Fe will be the highest elevation that we will spend the night.

Knowing that I will need the extra energy tomorrow I was sure to carbo load (have a couple beers) and have a big slice of cheese cake after dinner. Riding is all about preparation.

For those keeping score the flat total for me now stands at 4, all rear tire.

Dream Big, Jeff