Las Cruces, Phoenix, the Gila, and Solpugids

Been busy while on vacation. Thursday, I spent the day with my mom in Las Cruces. We bought stuff. Friday afternoon I ended up going with Tour Divide riders Paul, Trevor, and Per, to Phoenix. Paul had rented a Dodge Caravan to get them to Phoenix where they could take a direct British Airways flight to London. Problem was they needed to get it back to Silver City, so that was my job. We had dinner at Ruby Tuesdays across from their hotel. Its one of typical American feed troughs with an obnoxious, somewhat insulting and indifferent waitress. The TD riders were still in carbo-loading mode and chowed down on extra french fries and cheese cake and a second beer. After dinner I took off and drove the van back to Silver City. Pretty uneventful. Around Benson, AZ, I was getting pretty bored and sleepy, so I pulled out my camera just to have some fun. Some of the pics turned out pretty surreal.

I stopped in Lordsburg for some coffee, then headed up to Silver City. I got in at 2:00 AM.

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Saturday (yesterday), after only 4 hours sleep, I drove up to Signal Peak in the Gila, the site of our mountain bike race. I rode 2/3 of the intermediate lap which was probably around 15 miles of total riding.
I was feeling very lazy and slow up the hills. I got onto the "New Trail" and was taking a break and eating an energy bar when I came across a group of single speed riders from Sierra Vista, AZ. I rode with them, so it forced me to pick up my pace a bit. I had to walk up a couple of grades, but on the downhill sections I did pretty good. Betto, is the single speed champ of our local Signal Peak Challenge. I hung out at the AZ camp for a while, had a couple of Pacificos, then headed back to my car. At the car I meet an old time Grant County couple who kind of knew me. They gave me a Budweiser while we visited.

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Later in the evening a friend and I went down to the brew-pub and listened to Melanie Zipen. She was great!
When we were leaving, saw a solpugid scurry across the patio. They distance cousins to spiders, and are very strange critters. It was a busy but rewarding Thursday - Saturday.