The Journal. Los Angeles to Daytona...

Day 5 – Cold as Ice – Tombstone to El Paso

For our early morning set off we woke up to ice on our saddles. The desert certainly can be beautifully cruel, offering brilliant clear blue skies bathed in sunshine but can be bitterly cold at the same time and even colder at night. Heading towards the town of Bisbee, the road, still highway 80, offered more delights, fantastically smooth surface with plenty of twisting bends. Old town Bisbee appears on your left hand side almost on the side of a ravine and at this time of the morning (7.30 ish) was itself all lit up by the rising sun, it’s houses and stores delightfully picturesque set into the hillside. We pulled off the highway seeking breakfast, but being too early we donned our gear and marched on towards Douglas.

Just outside of Bisbee is the old copper mine, in fact the road skirts the rim of the old mine, a cavernous hole on your right hand side that draws you in as your eyes endeavor to look for the bottom of this man made chasm. Douglas was our breakfast stop, right on the Mexican border. We ordered waffles and coffee for the journey ahead from a lovely small coffee shop that was more boutique than Starbucks, what a refreshing stop. Nudging right up to the protective border crossing point we then turned North towards Road Forks. It is worth mentioning at this point that you should be prepared to stop, many border patrols operate in the vicinity of the Mexico border requiring papers to be presented.

About 30 miles out of Douglas is Apache and the Geronimo monument, we pulled in, to be greeted by other
members of the Hadrian V Twin group led by Nige.  All along this road you see the remnants of old rail roads, it’s bridges and station halts, as well as the scars from mines that litter the hillsides. How industrious this must have been then as copper and silver were pulled from the earth for our ultimate consumption. Nature takes back though, and the old homesteads have succumbed to weather and vegetation and begin to blend into the canvas backdrop

At Rodeo we crossed the state line into New Mexico and shortly thereafter we picked up the I10 and headed towards El Paso, taking a stop to recover from the strong plain winds and rain showers that came in at Las Cruces.

This was already a long day and the cross winds coming into El Paso with the heavy traffic doubled if not trebled the effort required to stay shiny side up, but what a day traveling almost through time, from mining communities of old, abandoned houses and deserted gas stations to the big city lights as far as you could see, the sprawl that is El Paso. Before finding the motel, we stopped off at El Paso HD, the largest dealer in the country, at least for bikes anyhow, pity about the car park, but that is another story.

Laner
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