Day Twenty-Three — Tatum Bunnett

Day 23

56.24 miles

1,519 ft (elevation gain)

867.5 total miles

Sierra Blanca -> Van Horn

Today was awesome, we woke up and walked the dogs around the Cattlemen's property. The zoo was really cute they had sheep l, deer, an ostrich, bunny’s, snakes, and a ton of cool birds. All of the animals totally confused and horrified Gilligan. We then drove to the traveling tiger truck stop to start our ride. We started the ride on 10 and were on the highway for a couple of miles before riding in the frontage road. The frontage road was a little bit bumpy but significantly quieter than the highway. Our big climb started soon after we began the ride, we thought this was going to take around an hour and a half but with a really nice tail wind we finished it in about 45 minutes. As we were climbing a German Shepard started chasing after us, we had to power up to out run him, since we were in low gears and didn’t have time to shift our legs were spinning really really fast. At the ended of the climb we had a slight delema, we stopped to wait for mom and she did the same but we didn’t realize that we were a mile apart, both of us were waiting for about an hour before we found each other. We had no cell service at this time so it was a little scary for both groups. We then road another 10 miles to lunch, we ate at a small Mexican restaurant in a super tiny town. The rest of the ride was really fun and really fast, we continued to have a big tail wind so we were going really fast! We had a slight uphill grade for most of the second half, but with the tail wind we were going between 20 and 23 mph. On this stretch of road dad and I discovered that we could get the trucks going the opposite direction to honk at us! This was pretty fun, it kept us busy while the riding was fairly boring. Once the second climb ended we descended into Van Horn. In this descent we crossed into the central time zone. Wahooooo it’s awesome to have one more time zone behind us!!! Today we road a fairly short day because tomorrow there is nothing between Van Horn and our ending destination. We have to ride the roughly 90 miles to the next town or else we’ll be camping on the side of the road. Going to bed early tonight so we are all ready for our longbottom ride tomorrow.

Heading out from the traveling tiger truck stop.

We don’t need a bike rack.

Our elevation profile.

Please help raise funds for Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) at https://www.firstgiving.com/event/rsds/Ride-Across-The-Country-For-CRPS