Day 38 (Into the Desert)

Our new riding buddy, Jeff, has one of those tiny laptops that uses the Verizon Wireless Network to conect to the internet, which now allows me (Karl) to update a little more frequently. So here is a recap of the crazyness that was day 38.

We left Cortez around 8:30 or so after stocking up on food for the desert. We were only 40 miles from Four Coners (the point where Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico come together). We had awesome cloud cover, tempature, and a steady down hill. We made it to Four Corners relatively easily, however, it costs $3 to see it.Fuck that. So we just ate lunch near some horse shit in New Mexico then continued on our way.

We were trying to get to Kayenta, Az, which was roughly 120 miles from Cortez, Co. We knew it was gonna be a push, but we were feeling great and had good weather. It rained a few times to cool us off and stayed relatively cloudy, cool all day. Around 3 pm we had gone around 80 miles and were still feeling great. We took off from a rest break to crush the last 40 miles.

Around 100 miles we crossed into our last time zone. This is when things got brutal. A super gnarly head wind brewed up and began beating our asses. The last 20 miles were relentless. It took us almost 3 hours to do the last stretch, which drained us of everything we had. Then sun went down just before we rolled into town and we still had no idea where we were gonna sleep

Luckily we ran into a guy at a gas station who said he would let us camp by his trailer. He lived only a mile away and gave us what we thought were simple directions. We wound up getting lost in this trailer park and hit a dead end. People were telling us to turn around, which made us feel a little uncomfortable. Lucky this lady pulled up and asked us what we were looking for. She told us we could stay at the church around the corner. After following here there the church member lut us stay in the church trailer complete with a bed, shower, and kitchen.

We were super exhausted and ready to crash, but also realy hungry. Jeff and Todd took showers while I cooked up a meal of lentils and potatos with fresh organic garlic and basil I picked up from a farmers market a few days back. We slammed the food and were getting ready for bed when Jeff found a Brown Recluse in the kitchen. We killed it but were sufficiently freaked out about falling asleep. But things worked out and we are fine. Hopefully we will reach the Grand Canyon on Wed. Later -K