Van Horn Texas

Another leisurely start today, leaving the hotel at 10:30. Plus only 120 miles. I got back on the route our maps said we should be on which turned out to be only 5 miles from last’s night hotel. I should probably have just used the freeway because we had to ride 20 miles of Alameda Avenue (Highway 20) through the barrio of El Paso/Juarez which was mostly one car lot after another interrupted only by the occasional school zone. We finally hit some open road to get up to speeds over 4mph.

We stopped for a break in a small town whose name I never saw where there were four Border Patrolmen on mountain bikes taking a lunch break in front of a convenience store. We talked to them for a few minutes. One was familiar with the route we are taking to get to Big Bend and said that a hundred mile stretch of it is very winding mountain road along the Rio Grande. That will be nice after the long straight stretches we have seen so far.

After getting on I-10 at Fort Hancock I discovered that the load on the trike is enough to cause handling issues at speeds over 70mph. The speed limit in Texas is 80 and the fastest I had been prior to this was 65. We already had been having some problems with ground clearance and have been running the air bags at 60 pounds, twice what is usual. I am in the market for a trailer to pull behind the trike now. There’s no way we could to the Alaskan Highway the way it is loaded now.

We pulled into a Border Patrol checkpoint (roadblock) on I-10 and the oil pressure gauge on the trike dropped to 0. I pulled over about a hundred yards short of the “checkpoint” to check the oil and while I was doing that two Border Patrol dudes came walking up to see what was up. They were not-quite-friendly in that cop-like way. They asked if there was a problem. I explained what was up and asked how far to the nearest service station. Once they determined to their satisfaction we weren’t foreigners they relaxed, at least a bit.

I was about a half quart low on oil is all so I don’t know why the pressure dropped enough to make me gulp. The next town with an auto parts store where I could get high temperature motorcycle oil was here in Van Horn, some 40 miles from the “checkpoint” so we pulled in here. We decided to stay the night since the weather remains iffy and we lost another hour to time zones and the hotels here are cheap.

I did figure out the time zone thing. Yesterday we went from Arizona Mountain Time(never does daylight savings) to regular Mountain Time which uses daylight savings. There went an hour. Then we went into the Central time zone today. Another hour. Suddenly we are two hours later than when we left. That’s two hours in fewer than 400 miles. At least that works out well for us in terms of our stamina. No problem stopping at 4:30 instead of 2:30!

We are in a cheap ($30 a night plus tax and five bucks for the dog) hotel. Not fancy but clean. Run by an Indian or Pakistani from the accent. One of those properties I have discussed in the past. We look for them all the time for a night’s lodging that doesn’t break the budget. In this case that may turn out to be a very good thing because the wind is forecast to be 25 to 30 mph and gusting even higher. No way we want to travel in that unless we have no choice so we may hole up here another day hoping for better weather.