So after El Rito, I rode up to the Abiqui resevoir and grabbed a campsite. Nice place run by the Corps of Engineers. Only $5 with shower. Felt like I should give them more given their required investment in New Orleans.
Anyway, the camp hosts were super cool. They gave me a mountain dew and let me borrow their needle nosed pliers which I used to fix the zipper on my tent. If anyone cares, you can fix a broken zipper by pinching down on the back side of the zipper closure. Or throw it away and buy a new one. Earth Killer. But I digress.
I also stopped by the convenience store to juice up my gorp, which is already heavily centered around sugared and dried fruit, with a bit of candy (cherry sours and gumdrops).
In the morning, the clouds were looking ominous. So I phoned dad for a quick check of satellite weather which confirmed that the chances of thunderstorms were "only" 40%. Which my dad pointed out means that there's a 60% chance you won't see anything.
Hmmm. Makes sense I guess. Plus I'm ready to ride. So I rolled out.
Before I get into the details of how soaked I got about 8 miles down the road, I have a question. Since you can look at the hour by hour weather and determine that from say 10-11 am there is a 20% chance of rain, shouldn't 5 hours of 20% rain chance constitute a 100% chance of rain at some point during that window? Would someone that I copied off of in Stats class at SMU chime in?
Anyway, I got soaked. To the bone. And I also discovered that the soil in NM becomes immediately unrideable in a deluge. So I was pretty much caught out in the middle of a plain, only 1 mile from the national forest, with a bike I couldn't ride (or push for that matter). So I waited for a break in the rain. Drug my bike under a tree just into the National forest. And quickly set up camp while the rain had stopped.
Fortunate, because it pretty much rained and thundered for the rest of the night.
Oh wait. I also bought a strawberry cupcake from this little girl before riding out of town.
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