Winter is closing in. I can feel it. The air is super crisp and bites hard at the ears and nose. We’ve been cycling every day with long rides on weekends. We’ve been wanting to go bikepacking just one time before winter descends and we lose all opportunity until next spring. So we decided on a spontaneous week long trip to New Mexico bikepack a loop in the desert over the Thanksgiving holiday.
We are closer to New Mexico now than we were in Oregon, by a long shot, which means we can slip away more often to one of our favorite places in the whole world! I’m not gonna lie, a big part of why I love it is the food. And food tastes better when you’ve worked hard for it, so I think bikepacking in New Mexico must be perfect.
No amount of planning can prepare you for some things. The weather turned at the last minute and parts of the route were deep in water from a recent rain. A raccoon stole my backpack in the night with my wallet in it (yes, this really happened). A blizzard caused us to stay an extra night in Colorado on the way home because all of the roads were closing down… But every misadventure spawned a new adventure. We had to adjust our route and schedule, and so got to see some incredible new things that I’d never seen before (White Sands, Roswell, Bottomless Lakes). While holed up for the night in a crummy Colorado Springs hotel, we ate at an amazing Korean restaurant and I had the best kimchi of my life. My backpack being stolen by a raccoon was just impossibly unfortunate, but now I have a hilarious story to tell that is ridiculous, but true. We had a ton of fun.
A really neat historical fort that we rode through.
The owner Bryan was very nice and made us some killer vegan wraps!
This should more appropriately read, “Support your local raccoon”.
