New Mexico

20 miles from our hotel in Gallup, New Mexico, we crossed into our third state. We have ridden over 750 miles in 9 days. Our legs are tired and butts sore. Today was a long day – 102 miles. We woke up in the Wigwam motel in Hollbrook, rode about 4.5 miles to breakfast and on with the rest of the ride.

Our first major point of interest today was the Petrified Forest. Rt. 66 use to go through what is now a national park. We navigated what is left of the old road, some gravel and a lot of sand. Some of the sand was deep and makes your bicycle skid. In other places it’s deeper than the rim of the wheel so we had to walk it. There was also a lot of fence jumping along the way.

The ride through all the “off road” part was slow and we got to our 57 mile rest stop at 2:30 PM. We realized we were running late and were going to lose an hour at the destination due to the time zone change, so we rode the next 45 miles without stopping, except to remove a front derailleur that Jim broke. His then became “fixed” in the front. Since we had good tailwinds, he put this on the largest cog and had no difficulty on the way back.

Finally we are in New Mexico and I am really looking forward to what are some of my favorite parts of Rt. 66…