And Onwards...

Howdy, all, from Las Cruces, New Mexico!

I'm keeping a very nice janitor-man late here at NMSU, so must be speedy.

Everything continues to be fabulous, including my tanlines, which are reaching epic proportions of bizarreness. It's a good thing I'll be coming back in the winter, though the weirdo brown dots on my hands are going to raise a lot of questions! We've just finished with the mountain portion of our trip, climbing to over 8,000 feet at Emory Pass in New Mexico. We paused at the top to take some euphoric photos when the gods took notice and...rumble rumble...the skies opened and we were instantly soaked in an enormous downpour which quickly turned to hail, pounding at us from all sides at once. Scurrying downhill on windy roads with numb fingers holding onto brakes that wouldn't work in the rain was kinda stressful, so we took a 2-day mental health break in the tiny town (30 residents) of Kingston, NM, which, believe it or not, was the biggest town in New Mexico during the gold rush. (The 1880 census recorded 7,000 residents, NOT including, of course, women, children, or 'Chinamen', none of whom counted at the time. ahem.) Anyway, lots of cool old buildings, and an old b&b that served the most divine sourdough waffles in the mornings. The place is super into environmentally-friendly building, which is one of kt's passions, so she begged me to stay an extra day and build walls with mud and straw and stuff; long baths and hot tubs being more up MY alley, I agreed, and so we stayed an extra day and built and they let us stay for free! Lovely to spend some time in a real bed.

Coming down into the desert we passed through the chile capital of the world ...they grow green chiles here, which are also RED chiles that are just green chiles left on the vine to ripen, and then thrown onto any available flat surface to dry out even more, before being tied into all kinds of decorative wreaths and being smoked and things. You get the idea. But anyway, biking all through these incredible valleys you smell peppers everywhere, and it's fabulous. And all the pickers are out kneeling in the rows...all day today we would be biking along when all of a sudden heads would pop up and arms would wave frantically, and long choruses of aieieieieieieee and woohoooooos and, my personal favorite, ARRRRRRRRRIBAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!s followed us down the road.

This is also, unfortunately, the mangy dog capital of the world, and my those critters have exciting lives. There they are, innocently soaking up the sun in their front yards, and here come two lumbering creatures on bikes straight into their path. Beats tv any day. Luckily I was biking first for much of the day, which meant the dogs just barely caught site of me before I whizzed past. (i imagine that they also took one look at the look of ferocious concentration on my face, and decided to back off. smart move doggies.) but then came katie, and they were prepared!! Poor kt had dogs trailing her for miles today. So yeah, mangy dogs, scorpions that have tried to crawl into hot tubs with us, TARANTULAS, and the occasional moth-eaten emu...it's been a trip. We're passing into Texas tomorrow, so keep your fingers crossed for us...all the nice liberal bumper stickers plastered all over our bikes (including kt's favorite: "bushoncrack.com"), aren't guaranteed to make us many friends.

So that's it from me! Hope all are well.

xoxo,
Sylvia
10/19/2002