Abiquiu, NM

75 miles, 5:40/ 8:30

We wake to rain and fog this morning. So much for our morning sun! Dave sets up the rain tarp to cook and eat breakfast under and we discuss today’s ride. We’re in New Mexico now, and the roads here are rugged and isolated. Today and tomorrow’s rides state that if it’s raining we should take the paved highway because of the “wheel sucking” mud. Well, it does certainly look like rain. Guess we’ll take the road. That means a long ride today riding well to the West of our intended route and then South and finally East into Abiquiu.

The ride is absolutely beautiful, lush and green with dramatic dark storm clouds all around us. We get rained on most of the day, but it’s not a super cold rain so we stay pretty comfortable, even drying out between bouts of it. We sail down a few thousand feet and then we’re rolling up and down over and over again. We see several kinds of forests, from aspens and hearty pines to mixed conifer and down to pinyon and juniper and finally grasslands with sage. There are purple and yellow flowers everywhere down low, asters and sunflowers and other yellow flowers I don’t know.

But as the day and the rain go on we are feeling the rolling hills more and more, and by the time we finally make it to Abiquiu we are thoroughly soaked again and this time getting cool too. Then I get a flat, my first of the Divide, from a screw on the shoulder of the road. The one place in town that offers camping, the Abiquiu Inn just a few hundred feet from where I flat, only has RV spots with no restroom or shower facilities. We normally wouldn’t mind too much, but we’re soaked and it sure would be nice to get clean and dry off a bit. Our tent will be wet from this morning’s rain, and that never sounds good to me. So we stand in the lobby and debate and debate what to do. We’ve camped every single night so far and we also have a bit of a budget we’d like to stick to. They have only one room left and it’s their most expensive, a casita with kitchen, fireplace and everything. There are very few places to stay. Uh, what to do? Well, the manager gets off the phone and assesses the situation and offers the casita to us for their cheapest room price. We take it!

The casita smells beautiful the instant I open the door. We don’t want to track in all our mud and muck, so we leave our shoes and stuff outside. There’s a fireplace so I get started on a fire. Dave sets off for groceries after he sees the full kitchen and comes back with a bounty for dinner and breakfast too. The bed is king size and super extra puffy. There’s a covered porch where I set up the tent to dry, along with other various things. I wash clothes in the tub with yummy smelling soap they have on the counter and hang them in front of the fire. We both have huge smiles on our faces as we go through the evening. We take showers and dry with real full-size towels, and it’s warm! Wow. We enjoy everything possible in this beautiful, spacious, spotless place.