| Cross-Country Ramble 18: 2
Down, 5 To Go. Sent: 96-05-10 00:44:30 EDT
Riding the 40 miles to El Paso from Mesilla was fun. We biked on
good country roads down the Rio Grande valley through the lushest
farmland we've seen so far. We biked through groves of pecans whose
branches sometimes met over us, providing us the first shady
pedaling since we started our tour. We got to the outskirts of El
Paso by lunchtime. The last 15 miles across hot, crowded and hilly
El Paso from west to east took the rest of the day and wasn't quite
so much fun. We got to our motel near the airport in time for early
supper. We fell onto the bed for a nap instead and took our supper
fashionably late.
We fly out of here on Saturday. After our business break in
Washington, DC, we'll be back in El Paso on Thursday, the 16th,
eager to get back on the tour in earnest. I can't believe it! For
the first time in my life, I'm actually looking forward to hard
physical effort. Amazing!
I wonder when we'll actually get to St. Augustine? Let's see
now... By the maps, we're two sevenths of the way done, in that
we've now completed two of the seven Adventure Cycling Maps we're
more-or-less following across the country. We did 39 miles per
biking day on the first map between Ventura and Phoenix. We did 50
from Phoenix to here--11 more miles per biking day on the second map
than on the first. Figuring that we'll do 11 more miles per biking
day on each of the remaining five maps and that we rest 1 day out of
7, we'll get to St. Augustine a week before July 1. On the other
hand, if we do the 50 miles per biking day that we did on the last
map and rest 1 day out of 5, then we'll arrive ten days after July
1. Finally, if I use multiple regression of our actual performance,
which includes all our recent rest days, then we'll arrive September
7 and over the territory covered by the last map we'll be averaging
only 14 miles per day. When we started this trip, we figured we'd
finish in "early July." Looks like all my figuring leaves our
initial WAG (wild ankle guess) as good an estimate as any.
Some technophiles have asked how we're getting our Ramblings onto
the Internet. Here's the scoop.
We compose our messages and store your replies on a Toshiba
Satellite T2135CS I bought from an office supply store a couple of
weeks before we left. I was afraid this might be one of those toys
one buys that ends up gathering dust, but happily, that hasn't been
the case. This laptop weighs about seven pounds. It has a 66 MHz 486
processor, 8 megabytes of ram, a 500 megabyte hard drive and a 14.4
kbaud modem. I've been watching computers get cheaper and better for
over 30 years but I'm still amazed with what I can carry around in
one hand for under $2000.
When we get to a place that has a phone we can use, I connect the
laptop to the nearest phone outlet and access America Online via
their 800 number. My sessions are very short--less than a couple of
minutes--because all I do when I'm on-line is transmit any messages
I've previously written and then receive all messages sent to me
onto my laptop's hard drive for later reading. We haven't found a
campground yet--even those with so-called "full hookups"--which
includes phones. I'm afraid that this is affecting where we stay. We
had intended to camp about as much as we motel, but we find
ourselves looking forward to being in touch with you-all at each
day's end.
Ken
next ramble.... |