We arrived in Albuquerque around 11 a.m. after a bathroom stop in Roswell, the town that has aliens in all their shop windows. Around here, the highway interchanges are painted to look like adobe.
© Lily Baldwin, 2008
A group of us biked down along Central Avenue — past tempting looking Mexican restaurants and thrift stores and a wedding in progress in Old Town — to a park that runs along the banks of the Rio Grande. A well-maintained gravel road runs on top of a levee, but I, possibly (and in retrospect, very) unwisely, steered everyone to a primitive trail that runs along the riverbank. (You can barely see the river from the levee trail.) After biking through some scrub and scratchy bushes, we arrived at a kind of little beach. I slipped in, keeping my jellies on. The banks were of squishy clay and the water was muddy but seemed clean. The current wasn’t too strong and as we waded out, the bottom turned to sand and the depth was only about up to our knees most of the time. Little by little, we all made our way to the opposite riverbank. A kind of baptism of sorts. Had this been a little further downstream we would have found ourselves in Mexico.
More biking through itchy scratchy sunflowers and brush. Though we were still on a path, it was barely a path, and eventually we headed up to the road along the ridge of the levee. By this time, due to the goat’s head burrs that clung to tires and pant legs and socks, 3 of us had gotten flat tires. More will happen to others as more goat’s head thorns worm their way into some tires. Apparently the locals know to coat their tires with some kind of slime that helps prevent these flats, but we didn’t know about it. I biked by a bike store later and got some replacement inner tubes. A generous helpful customer at a gas station assisted in repairing Natalie’s pedal that had fallen off.
