Day 5

This morning I road from Tucumcari, NM to Santa Fe. The weather was great this morning; partly cloudy and about 80. As the rose higher, I also was heading up to a higher altitude which kept the temperature from getting oppressively hot like it has been the last few days. At one point today I checked the altimeter on my GPS and it read 7,340 feet above sea level. This was just about 30 miles from Santa Fe. In Santa Fe itself the altitude was about 6,800 feet. I arrived in Santa Fe at about 1:30 p.m. I headed directly to the visitors center to what was available there. The town of Santa Fe is really nice looking. Pretty much every home and building is an adobe type constructed building. The visitor’s center was right in the center of town which was build many years ago, thus the streets are very narrow. Being there gave me a somewhat claustrophobic feeling. My intent was to stick around town and check out some of the sights, but instead I decided to head back out on the road. I decided to try to get as close to Arizona as I could because I want to stop at the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert in AZ. Not too long after getting by Albuquerque I could see several thunderstorms looming on the horizon. As they got closer, the temperature began to drop. Eventually it became apparent that I was not going to miss the rain so I stopped to put on my rain suit. I no sooner got it on and I began to feel a few rain drops. Within a minute it was a major downpour so I stopped under an overpass. After about 45 minutes the rain slowed a little. You could see that the main storm was moving to the south but there was another one coming in from the north. I got back on the bike to see if I could get to Gallup, NM, which was about 60 miles ahead. As the one storm moved off, there was only a brief slow down in the rain. The other one was only minutes away and it started raining again. Eventually I made it to Gallup and found a motel. It continued to rain for another 2 hours but then is slowed down enough to get out and wipe down the bike and cover it with the new rain cover that I bought a couple of months ago.

On the way to Santa Fe, I tried out the helmet cam. That is, I duct taped my Sony Camcorder to my helmet and took so videos of a very scenic drive along old Route 66. This time I even tried narrating a little as I drove and took videos. When I checked it out tonight I found out that I had the camera pointed too high, so all I have is pictures of the sky and the clouds. That is disappointing, because the place was really neat looking.

Other than for the rain today, it was a really good day. No breakdowns of any kind.

Because it was raining when I got hear I forgot to check the odometer to see what my miles driven were, but I know that not too long before getting to Gallup, my odometer turned 24,000. This would mean that I traveled about 500 miles today and overall a total of 1900 in the 5 days.

The picture of the Cross is in Groom, TX. It is 190 feet tall and is said to be the tallest cross in the Westeren Hemisphere.