A Drowned Rat

I woke up this morning to rain on the tent at about 5:30. Somehow I managed to go back to sleep just long enough for the rain to subside, and it held off long enough for me to have coffee, enjoy a few more breaths of high altitude air, and pack up camp.

I stopped off at the Chamber of Commerce in Cloudcroft to use their Internet, and I encountered another thing that I miss a lot about living in New Mexico:

Sure, we have them in Seattle, but not nearly as many, and they seem more active here. Maybe it's just more nostalgia on my part.

I left Cloudcroft to the east, and almost immediately hit rain. It wasn't much, so I kept pushing through it. By the time I reached Artesia I was ready for a break and some coffee to warm me up. I pulled into the 76 station got some coffee and got on the phone to try and find a meeting in Pecos, TX. While I was on the phone it started to rain harder, and within 5 minutes the streets were rivers:

They were full from curb to curb with 1 - 3 feet of water. If you have never seen this in the desert then it is hard to believe, but it happens. You see, in a place that doesn't get rain very often the city planners don't spend much time on water drainage. So when it does rain really hard the streets fill up. I wasn't going anywhere for a while, so I made some other phone calls, chatted with the attendants, and watched the rain come down.

After about an hour I decided I would just get a room in Artesia for the night and call it a day, but as I was riding out to go find a hotel the 'tide' started to go out and I saw clear sky toward Carlsbad. I decided to go for it, and to my surprise it was clear and sunny the whole way. I had gotten pretty wet leaving Artesia and as I looked down Highway 295 toward Pecos all I saw was black, so Carlsbad was as far as I was going. Good thing too, because as soon as I got my bags into the room and the bike parked it started to pour again. I had made the right choice.

I looked up a meeting in Carlsbad and found the Carlsbad Group. The trouble was that I didn't want to get back on the bike and get all wet again, so I called the hot-line a few times to see bout a ride, but no answer. So I stayed in, ordered a pizza with pepperoni and green chile (because you can do that here), and sat back to rest up for tomorrow.

Right around 8 o'clock I got a phone call from Jerry, one of the guys I had talked to about a meeting in Pecos. He just wanted to check in and see what had happened to me during the rest of the day. I can't think of any other organization on the planet where people wolf do something like that. Amazing!

We chatted for a bit about the trip and it turns out that he knows someone with contacts on the east coast! And this came up right after Jerry had told me that things always happen the way they're supposed to!! How does this always happen?! I am starting to understand now that this trip is totally out of my control. Thanks for being a great teacher Jerry.

To end the day I got to see this:

One great thing about storms like today is that they make the sunsets incredible!

P.S. Check out Jerry's Blog!