Now this is what bike touring is all about: a 35 mph tailwind, winding descents through gorgeous canyons, no traffic, smooth roads. The 30 mile cruise from JPC's BMW to our primitive oasis-surrounded campsite was as good as it gets. It was like riding a motorcycle; all we had to do is hang on and stop for the occasional piss break. All the punishment and masochism of the previous week was washed away in a sea of riding bliss, better than sex, drugs, rock and roll, and maybe even video games. Even the weirdos at the general store in Agua Caliente couldn't diminish our mood with their warnings of high winds and bad weather.
However, as the cheesy slasher flicks from the 80s taught us, you should always heed the advice of old weird dudes who run general stores in ghost towns. We set up camp amidst gathering black clouds and winds that turned the sandy arroyo into a veritable dust storm. It was a night to break out the guy lines, but it didn't stop us from waking up buried under a layer of sand.
One of the challenges of desert riding is the constant attention you must give to your water supply lest you be shit outta luck. Our supplies were rather depleted as we shook the sand out of our shorts and shoved off in the morning. Fortuantely, our pitifully crude maps showed a "developed" campsite just a mile or so down the road with fresh water available. What the map didn't show was the fact that this water supply was a good four miles from the highway through touring-bike-unfreindly ankle-deep sand. Needless to say there was much swearing and gnashing of teeth as we pushed our now-useless loaded bikes up the road in search of this mythical water source, which turned out to be a forlorn tap with "Unpotable-Boil Before Drinking" in a dangerous looking font written above it. At least it was raining.
The glorious tailwind from the day before had also disappeared. We rolled into the town of Octillo pretty dejected and hungry, only to find out that there were no restaurants in town, just a Texaco station and the Laughing Lizard Lounge, which looked like you'd be a fool to walk in unarmed. We sat on the parking lot curb choking down peanut butter and tortillas, keeping our spirits up through tall tales of the legendary Tahoe ski bum known only as Devo.
The road may have been flat, but the day continued to go downhill. We soon found ourselves smack in the middle of Industrial Agriculture America in the hideous town of El Centro. It was impossible to have a conversation as massive straw or cattle laden trucks hurled past us at unreasonable speeds just inches from our bikes, sending us teetering towards the ditch. ML was visibly (and audibly) sketched out by the scenario, but we were afforded a well-needed break when it became my turn to have a flat on the side of a highway.
The sunset was beautiful, but we didn't have much time for admiration for we were trying to find a campsite that wouldn't attract rabid homicidal bike tourist rapists, but that's all we found. One particular patch of earth was so forbidding you instantly became nauseated, but I'm sure the decaying corpses and torn up childrens' clothes had something to do with it. We eventually settled on the most decrepit "hunting preserve" in the US (actually, we were much closer to Mexico than the US) for a crash site. After 80 miserable miles, we were thoroughly knackered, but the final act of the evening was running over a pile of barbed wire that blended in quite well with its surroundings in the twilight. Anybody within earshot would have thought that I was suffering from a severe case of Tourette's.
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