Safe in El Paso

For me it was a little hard this morning, saying goodbye to Katie for 8 weeks. But Andrew and I had a good time doing some final prep, then my old friend Scott drove us from Santa Cruz to San Jose airport. There was literally no waiting to check in and American Airlines didn’t bother to weigh our slightly overweight boxes, which just count as regular baggage.

The plane was on time, we had lunch and changed planes in Phoenix, then made it to El Paso a little after 6. It was amazing to see both our bike boxes come out on the regular baggage conveyor belt so quickly.

After we put the bikes together and loaded up, we pulled up the course I had made to the Airbnb and took off. It was an easy ride, mostly downhill for 5 km, under 15 minutes. The house is very spacious with four nice bedrooms and a modern kitchen. There are guitars, music albums and posters everywhere.

We unloaded our bikes and rode over to a nearby supermarket (the biggest one Andrew had ever seen) for dinner, breakfast and beer. Back at home as we ate we received some fun messages from the other guys as they arrived in El Paso. Daniel sent a video of two maintenance guys properly disposing of Andrew and my bike boxes from three hours before. Wytze later sent a photo of Daniel’s box captioned “Leaving your trash. Disgusting!”

Sometime after 10 pm they arrived together and the beer and snacks flowed as we caught up. So fun! We talked for a couple of hours then called it a night. So far so good!