120 miles in a day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hi everyone,

Let's hear it for the bicyclists!!!  121 miles from Sanderson to Del Rio today!!!  Yippee!!

Weather today was cloudy most of the way with intermittent sunshine, no rain (PTL) and some wind.  The scenery was really spectacular with canyons, mountains, rivers (some even had water in them!), and cactus, cactus, cactus!  

We started out (Paula and I) at the garage in Sanderson for wheel bearing repacking on the front wheels.  Then Paula and I started walking around town.  We stopped at a place called the Brown Bag.  Tomi Harrell the proprietor, cooked us up a breakfast taco and fresh, homemade cinnamon rolls.  Her cousin Scott and his son Josh were visiting and helped out.  Two town locals, Reid and Bebe, sat around and told us all the history of Sanderson they could in an hour.  The town has 200 kids in its school system and a football team that went to state several years back but one of the abandoned stores still had the proud notice in its windows "Good luck at State!!".  Tomi had the walls of the 10' x 15' room filled with pictures of her ancestors and she and Scott identified them plus other old timers.  It was like sitting in her living room while she cooked in the kitchen next to it.  Her menu has a picture of a 1950's high school band on the cover.

Then we walked a little further and stopped in at the local newspaper and talked to Jim Street the editor.  Kim Rapp, a reporter and production manager, had come out to the RV park last night and taken a picture of Dave and Mike.  Jim is a former aviation reporter and when I gave him our address so that he could mail a paper to us he put ORD, the airport identifier for O'Hare, for West Chicago.  He is trying very hard to start a rebirth of Sanderson after buying the newspaper about 8 years ago.  

We walked through a little garden beside the tourist information shop that depicted much of what caused Sanderson to put itself on the map--the railroad, mining, wagon trains, a train robbery, Judge Roy Bean, and cactus.  They claim to be the cactus capital of Texas.  The Brown Bag crew just laughed at that!

When we got back to the garage they were about finished, helped us back up to hitch the trailer up, and off we went.  The guys had peddled almost 40 miles by the time we caught up to them.  They were ready for a rest.

We crossed the Pecos River flowing through a beautiful canyon and over the Amistad Reservoir into Del Rio.  Mike had flat #15 today and so before we got into the RV park we drove to the bike shop to deplete their supply of slime tubes, 6 in all.  

This is a very nice park with great bathrooms, showers and laundry (these are the important criteria on which we rate each park!).  

We will stop at the newspaper office in the morning on the way out of town.  Katy and Carrie have been working hard to set up interviews when there is any interest.

Goodnight, ya'll, ma'ams and sirs,

Lana