As soon as we went out of the hotel room we noticed our tires needed some more pressure. While we were there pumping air into the tires we saw the manager of the hotel getting into our room and making the beds, replacing the plastic cups, folding the used towels and closing the door. I guess the room was all set to the next customer… no sheets or pillowcases washed, no towels exchanged. We then spent almost thirty minutes with our pump but no luck: our pump is just not strong tough to put the 95 psi our tires require. We then rode to a nearby tire shop and adjusted the pressure. As soon as we finished we were on our way out of the hotel. We then returned back about a mile to get a Subway sandwich for lunch since we knew there was pretty much nothing on our path.
By 10:30 am we finally were on the road. The first five miles were fine; the wind was blowing against us but was not too strong. We kept moving forward as the winds started to pick up strength. Then the suffering started.
We started to move very slowly. Each mile was painful and took many minutes to cover. We had to stop every couple of miles to drink water since the effort to move against the wind was huge, and also the hot sun was not making it any better.
We spent about three hours to find a shade. During those three hours we had covered just twenty miles. On a small city we found a church with a tree on its side. The church was closed, so we just parked our bikes and decided to eat there. The lunch was good and we recovered the energies somewhat.
As we left that spot the suffering resumed, but there was nothing could do to help the situation: the next hotel was on our destination and we would not return after having covered twenty miles.
The day passed slowly as we inched forward under the hot sun. We drunk about a gallon of water each that day, and what was planned to be a seven hours ride ended up being a torture session eleven hours long.
By 8:00 pm we arrived on the Gallup city limits. We were planning on riding to a Walmart, but we found a cheap hotel which had a supermarket across the street. We were so tired that we decided to stay on that hotel without analyzing the situation very well. It turns out the room was awful: smelly, old and with most furniture broken. But we were just too tired to go somewhere else, so we decided to stay.
We bought our food on that supermarket and came back to the room. There we eat, washed clothes and prepared to sleep, but of course this day would not end so easily.
As I opened the bed covers I saw many yellow marks on the sheets. There was also lots of hair below the covers, lipstick and some other marks I could not identify. My uncle’s bed was better, but still not clean. I then decided to sleep on my sleeping bag. I opened it up over the covers and slept on it, touching the sheets and covers as little as possible.
With that I was able to rest very well for the long day that was ahead of us.
