Day 22 - Camp Wood, TX - Comstock, TX

Why doesn’t Texas like me? Today, we awoke and it was nice and calm and cool out. We ran through the process and got ourselves ready to start riding. Today’s ride did not have a lot of turns in it; it was all pretty straight forward.

At mile 14 we noticed a guy on the side of the road with a camera, Shane remembered him as the owner of the cabin we stayed at last night. He wanted to get our picture, and since we were up and gone so early, he tracked us down! We stopped and lined up and smiled? At this point in the day we all had smiles in us. Then we thanked him for his support and rode on. We stopped at 18 miles today for our first stop. I had my usual peanut butter and jelly sandwich, top of the fluids and rode on.

Something we noticed right away was the amount of dead deer on the side of the road. I kid you not we passed at least 50 deer lying dead on the side of the road, most of them were just fur and bones, as the buzzers picked the meat off and left what they didn’t want. At one point we passed a good size doe that looked to be wounded lying there. She picked up her head to see what was going on then laid her head back down. I am guessing it had a broken leg or something. We were informed a few days ago that this area is over populated with deer, and because they are in a 3 year drought down here the deer are all over looking for food and water.

We stopped for lunch at mile 64, which is a little later then normal, but we knew we had a long day so we pushed it back some to make the miles shorter after lunch. As always it was nice to take the shoes off and get out of the sun. We relaxed some, talked about the ride and what the RV driver had been up to in the morning.

After about 45 minutes we put our show back on and got ready to ride again. We left the RV and headed into Del Rio. The roads were long and straight, we had some hills but they were drawn out and the grades were manageable. Once in Del Rio we made a few turns and headed out of town and like a light switch the wind turned on and just punched us on in the mouth! It was coming at us head on and gusting at least 30+mph. It was intense and we fought it all afternoon. We rode the remaining miles in this wind, and it was very frustrating. We cruised by a pretty reservoir that had white caps on the water because the wind was so intense. At the reservoir we rode over a large bridge. Bridges are cool to ride on, EXCEPT the wind is always worse on a bridge! This happened to be a very narrow bridge and the semi trucks gave us as much room as possible, but it still gets a little scary out there every once and a while. We all made it across safely and made the final push into Comstock, TX

We even rode through a border control check point on our bikes, they asked us if we were citizens, and where we were headed. They could see that we weren’t trying to smuggle anything. It was about 4 miles after the check point to our hotel.

I have to say this has had to been the toughest 2 days of the ride so far for me. The miles have been high, the hills and wind have been intense. I have been sleeping extremely sound at night, because I am completely wiped out every night.

Tomorrow we have a shorter day, but I have learned that it doesn’t mean it will be any easier. It will just end sooner….hopefully!

This was day 22 of riding, yesterday was the half way mark for days, we are at 1714 miles right now, and we are more then halfway on mileage.

It is Sunday night; hopefully you got everything done that you wanted to this weekend. Have a great week everyone!