El Paso & New Mexico!

October 9, 2015
Fort Hancock, TX -> El Paso: 58miles

This morning was awesome! We got great sleep & woke up not having to deal with wet camping gear! On top of that, I got to make pancakes on a real stove (way faster than our tiny little camp stove), made a pot of coffee, and watched the sun warm the mountains across the field in Mexico. 

Just shortly out of town we met Matt who started biking from Vancouver in August. 

We were riding next to the border all day and everything around us looked like Mexico. Biking into El Paso we had a heavy tailwind and managed to get into town pretty early. Joe and I wanted to stay near El Paso or just past El Paso. We ended up at Coffee Box, this really cool coffee shop and met a girl named Marina. She told us about an art event going on called Chalk The Block with DJ's and live painting! Marina also got one of her friends to have us at their house for the night! Very, very nice lady! CTB was awesome. Joe and I were biking around watching people paint with chalk. A guy named Victor biked up to us that night and asked us to join the pub crawl...on bikes. Him and his friends were going to the bars that are around CTB. We had all of our bags on the bikes, but we definitely wanted to ride with them anyways. It was fun! We still had a couple mile ride to Gus' house though so we left after going to a few bars...which was plenty! 

We found out some interesting facts while we were in El Paso. It is the largest border city in the world. Juarez and El Paso are basically one city, but Juarez being on the Mexico side. Both cities together have a population of about 3 million!  

Lunch! YUMMMMMM

 coffee fuels tours

We missed the lasers & DJ while doing the pub crawl

 Artists doing their chalk paintings

October 10, 2015
El Paso,TX -> Las Cruces, NEW MEXICO: 47miles
Time on bikes: 3:46hrs

So my Aunt Lee emailed me a week ago and said she had a great friend in Las Cruces, Sara, that would love to have us :)  We decided that would be our stopping point for the day. Since we knew we had a short day ahead of us Gus took us out to breakfast in El Paso! He also showed us around town a little and took us up a mountain that had an awesome view of the city. After that we headed to Las Cruces. Got in around 3:30 and met Sara & Jason. They are awesome people with the coolest house ever! Jason made pizza for dinner...4 pizzas from scratch! So delicious! Then we went to High Desert Brewery for a couple beers.