Wild West Winds
Written by Jon on 03 April 2010
When we woke up the regulars at the hostel all seemed to have hangovers from Norbert’s going away party the night before. They invited us to breakfast at the local café. We both had breakfast burritos and discussed the best route through the mountains. The cook had his laptop and helped us figure it out. He said instead of following the adventure cycling route to Hwy 118 we would be better off staying on US-90 until Van Horn, TX where we would reconnect with the route. This would be slightly shorter the flatter. We pedaled on and about an hour into our ride we got heavy headwinds of almost 40mph.

It seemed to take forever to get to Alpine. We stopped at the Dairy Queen for lunch. A few people in there asked us about our trip. A trucker thought I was lying when I told him it only took about 20 riding days to get from Fernandina Beach, FL to Alpine, TX. As we were leaving another local also told us to take the US-90 route from here to Van Horn. We stopped at the local bike shop in town and were lucky in that the owner has also done this route and had a ton of knowledge. He advised us on all sorts of areas including routes, safety, and our bikes. We pedaled on to Marfa battling the high winds all day.

On the way there a cross wind hit me and knocked me into the rumble strips on the highway. The force of the impact caused me to get a flat tire. We got to Marfa at sunset and ate at the local Subway. I called the RV place and a nice old lady told me we could tent camp there for $10 each tent. Personally I think these campgrounds should just charge us for one tent.

Our two small tents don’t equal the size of most big tents. Unfortunately, the campground didn’t have showers or electrical hookups. We got the tents setup much quicker than before. The high winds continued on all night and the temperature dropped into the 30’s. I had to put on extra clothes in the middle of the night just to keep warm.