I poured a cup of coffee and joined Allison and Pete, sitting outside at one of those giant wooden industrial spools that Allison uses as a table, the sun already bright and hot even though it had just risen above the mountains, and enjoyed a lazy morning hearing more fascinating stories.

In addition to being "3 miles from the middle of nowhere," as it says on her business card, Allison's property is also 15 miles from White Sands Missile Range where they test various missiles (including some for other countries who don't have the kind of open space so readily available in New Mexico). Every so often the military makes everyone in the vicinity evacuate, so Allison gets paid to head into Socorro for the day and do her grocery shopping.

Once the military approached Allison and wanted to use the caves on her property. They couldn't say what for exactly, but they said if their experiment worked, Saddam Hussein would no longer be able to hide out in underground bunkers. They asked what kind of compensation she wanted, and she said, "If you pay me, you'll just charge the taxpayers, and I'll end up paying for it anyway." She asked them to take aerial photos of her property in lieu of payment, which they did. "So I feel just a teeny tiny bit responsible for the apprehension of Saddam Hussein."

Around 11:00 or so I finally mobilized, packed up, had a small photo shoot with everyone in the driveway, and got on the road. Along the way I passed the roadside marker describing the Trinity site where the first atomic bomb was detonated. You can only visit the site 2 days out of the year, and from what I hear there is not much to see there, but I stopped for a moment, read the roadside historical marker, and solemnly contemplated the incredible destructive power of this weapon. Most chilling were the words that Oppenheimer uttered on witnessing the bomb, quoting the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

This brought to mind another of Allison's stories. She had met an old rancher who had been asked to evacuate when the atomic bomb was dropped, but didn't and went about his business tending to the cattle. He saw the mushroom cloud, and his hair and beard all turned white and fell out, then gre back in normally.

That day I hit the 3,000 mile mark. . . sort of. I made a slightly disturbing discovery on my ride that day that the miles shown on my odometer did not quite match up with the physical mile markers on the road. The bike odometer works by putting a magnet on one of the spokes and a sensor on the fork. You tell it the size of your wheel so it can calculate the distance you've traveled with each revolution, so I suppose if the magnet and sensor are not positioned quite right it can throw off the results. I determined that my odomoter ends up adding a quarter mile about every 10 miles. I'm not about to go back and subtract 2.5% from all my mileages listed on this blog, but it seems I've really ridden only 2925 miles. Oh well, it's still quite a few miles.

Later I hit another milestone when I crossed the Rio Grande. I was trying to figure out why this particular river looked so novel and unusual, and I realized that it was because it was lined with actual deciduous trees that require water and can't get it elsewhere in the desert. I pushed my bike down a dirt trail to the river to see if it was swimmable (no, it was both muddy and frigid, with thin sheets of ice forming near the edges) and noticed a trail along it so I went for a little hike to explore and take pictures. Eventually the trail became so overgrown with that dry itchy desert grass that somehow gets everywhere, sticking to pants and socks and making its way inside shoes, that I turned around and headed back. From there it was another couple miles into the tiny town of San Antonio.

Pete had told me that San Antonio was the birthplace of Conrad Hilton, founder of Hilton hotels. At one point, Texas wanted to give him some sort of award, thinking he was from San Antonio, TX, and when they found out he was from San Antonio, NM, they made him an honorary Texan anyway.

Pete and Allison had told me to stop for a green chile burger at Buckhorn, which came in at number 7 on GQ's list of the 20 best burgers in the country, so I did so. As I waited in an absurd line of about 50 people, I likened San Antonio to the plain younger sister of the school prom queen, so upstaged by the glorious mountain backdrop that it gave up trying to compete long ago.

I waited for an hour and the line barely seemed to move. At that point I recalled reading about a common fallacy of human judgment that causes people to stay in a negative situation only because they have invested a lot of time and effort when it would be wiser to cut their losses, since nothing can ever recoup the lost resources. Besides, on a more practical level, I still had about an hour's ride into Socorro left after lunch, and it was already 3:30. By the time I got inside (IF I ever got inside) ate, and got back on the road, I'd be running out of daylight.

So I bolted and went to the Owl down the street and ate a perfectly acceptable burger there before continuing on to Socorro.

The ride up the tiny State Route 1, parallel to I-25, was pleasant and easy ride to end the day. On this road lined by trailers and other modest dwellings with dirt yards, occasionally containing a goat or a few chickens, a bicyclist passed me. I'm not sure why I so desperately wished he'd stopped to talk instead of just giving me a polite hello as he cruised on past. I have not seen other cyclists on the road in a very long time, probably not since I crossed the Mississippi, and I guess I craved the solidarity and camaraderie of talking to someone else on a bike. Not just any cyclist, but someone out experiencing the same stretch of road at the same moment as I. "Oh, you spandex-clad racer types," I thought ungenerously, "Always in such a hurry."

Speaking of which, let me take a moment to say that I am absolutely hooked on bike touring. (I know I've been complaining a lot recently, but haven't you ever been madly in love with something, and thoroughly sick of it at the same time? A couple ex-boyfriends come to mind. . .) There is something exhilirating about carrying all your stuff with you, living on the precarious edge between safety and vulnerability, relying on yourself more than ever while also totally depending on the kindness of strangers. I found myself telling someone the other day that this is simultaneously the most empowering and the most humbling thing I've ever done. I make plans all the time, and when things don't go the way I expect, as they rarely do, I see just how little control I have over anything. At the same time, how I react to and deal with external circumstances has shown me just how strong, resourceful, and resilient I can be.

M Mountain, a knobby peak that dominates the landscape west of Socorro, rose up larger and larger as I approached town. I felt both excited and daunted as I thought about heading into those mountains. I'd been looking at the weather forecasts for the towns up there: highs in the low 40s, lows around 10, not including the wind chill.

But for the moment I was happy to meet up with Christina, my CouchSurfing host in Socorro, a student of volcanoes at the school of mines. Her parents were in town for Thanksgiving and she invited me to go soak in the hot tub at their hotel, which I happily accepted. If only there were a way to store up body heat for future use. . .