(January 20)

Day 26 - Alpine to Marfa TX

It Finally Happened

 

 

Views like this are the essence of the great American West. I took this pic while riding up and over Paisano Pass. Supposedly, two Spaniards met each other while traveling in opposite directions in 1684 and greeted each other with a hearty "Mi Paisano!" Hard to imagine that 300 years before I graduated from college there were folks traveling through the exact same place I was today.

 

In this pass is also the Paisano Volcano, a main feature of one of the major local mountain ranges.

I encourage you to zoom in and read what is written on this roadside marker. It pleases me that there are still mysteries left in the world that science can't explain.

I have always loved Texas. And, now, because of this kind of sense of humor adorning public roadways, I love it even more.

If I were going to make a movie about two friends robbing banks throughout the empty places of Texas, I'd definitely shoot the "final heist goes wrong" scene on this street.

I almost never go out into the local town to play tourist, but I had a bit of extra daylight and snapped this pic of the beautiful county courthouse on the square in Marfa.

A two-bay auto repair garage turned pizza joint. It took FOREVER for them to make and bring me my pizza (well over an hour), but it was perfectly authentic NY/NJ thin crust pizza. Delicious.

 

 

It is just before 10pm this past Christmas Eve. Daniel, my fabulous LBS mechanic, has just completed building my touring bike and I'm there to pick it up. In amidst things like making sure I have some spare innertubes, etc., he shows me the completely-not-like-my-regular-road-bike process for changing the tube on my bike's rear tire in case I get a flat. Because of the Rohloff hub and carbon belt drive, there is no derailleur. And at one point, you need a quarter. And it has disc brakes. Etc.. In short, totally different.

 

So I'd dreaded...for now nearly 4 weeks...experiencing a flat on my rear tire. While my class was done perfectly in the short time we had that evening, I'd never actually done it. Just watched it done. Moreover, I was pretty certain that I'd forget some tiny, yet crucial detail when the time actually came for me to remember everything perfectly.

 

And if you can't change the tire on your bike, you are done. Stick a fork in it. It's all over.

As the days and miles have increased and my robust tires just kept on rolling, I began to think that MAYBE...just MAYBE...I could go all the way to San Diego without a flat.

 

And, yes, you are all now laughing hysterically because you KNOW what happened next.

 

Aside from the fact the flat happened at all, I was pretty lucky in two respects:

 

1) I was a slow leak, so I could ride it to a picnic stop so that I had a surface of some kind to set things on and work on top of, and

 

2) No cold or rain. Wind, yes, but that isn't nearly as bad as the other two.

 

I'll spare you all the details of how Daniel's quick class proved picture perfect, or how I miraculously didn't let the 25mph wind blow anything crucial out into the desert and simply say: I did it. The tire has been rolling now, fully inflated, for several hours which tells me I did it well.

 

The benefit, of course, being that there is now one less bad experience to dread on this trip, with one of the only mechanically-related dread items remaining on that list being "forced to patch a tire with my patch kit"..something I've never done before either. Viva la Experience!

 

Just a quick note about the town I'm in, Marfa Texas. It is quite an interesting place in that it is, for its size, a pretty serious arts center. And I don't mean starving, hippy artists. I mean real, honest-to-goodness artists. Think boutique hotels, swank restaurants and art galleries. Film festivals. Major art exhibitions. All in a town that is 3 hours away from the nearest airport and with only about 1,000 residents. I'm continually amazed at the variety of surprises I've found on this trip when it comes to the towns and people I've come across. I suppose that's why you go on a bike tour :)