Today we road a modest 35 miles because this was a potential Buffer Day, which we fortunately did not have to rely on. Let me explain Buffer Days as designed into our tour by Doug. If you read and recalled my Trip Preparation Post, you know that our daily routes and hotel reservations have been made for the entire tour. Should we have any incident that prevented us from staying on schedule, we would use a buffer day to make up for a previous lost day of riding. This would painfully require us to double up on two days of riding to get us back on track with our schedule. In this case we would have to do yesterday’s 72 miles and today’s 36 all today for 108 miles. It would mean that we would have had to traverse El Paso’s rush hour near the end, which would have been more difficult that your typical 108 mile ride (read as an oxymoron when I say typical and 108 mile ride).
As today actually went, we all completed our weekly laundry this morning before the ride, and I got to enjoy this therapeutic jacuzzi yesterday and again before our ride this morning.
Carol and Julie visited a pecan farm with a gift shop and got us all pecan sweet treats and, you guessed it, pecan ice cream for tomorrow’s big ride. We saw many pecan groves today, as pictured. Meanwhile we made another excellent ice cream stop at a family owned shop, and after sharing our stories we took some pictures there.
A 36 mile ride, that must’ve been a cakewalk for you guys! Pictures are beautiful and I bet those ice cream stores have very delicious ice cream, I’m envious. I’m really glad things are going well. However, I heard in the news that you guys might be in for some warm weather.