Broken Roads

Neil Diamond sings a song called "Brooklyn Roads." that has nothing to do with anything but when I wrote the title I thought of that. So back in Las Cruces talking with Dillon he mentioned his dad worked with Amtrak and that there is a train that goes from El Paso to east Texas. I mentioned the possibility of taking a train through the vacant space between east Texas and west Texas and Drover's eyes lit up. Apparently he has always wanted to take a long train ride. Actually I think he has always wanted to rob a long train ride, but since this is a close second he is willing to take it. And who knows, we might still be able to rob some people. Like how I was robbed when I saw the Rio Grande. The trickle of water called "big river" (I'm pretty sure that is the translation, but I don't speak Spanish) looks like something I could produce if given a few hours and a lot of water bottles. Also Pecos Bill loses all credibility. I could have dug that river and I ain't no "western superman." Also I have been able to pick up the local lingo quite well as I just demonstrated. I'm sure a bunch of you (if anyone even reads this) are saying that it is because they use the river for irrigation and it has been dammed, blah blah blah. So we went down to the train station that was built in 1903 and found out if we could get our bikes on there and we could only the train left that morning, Thursday, and the next one doesn't come until Saturday. So we bought tickets and set out to find someplace to spend two days. Not far from the station was a institute building and we asked the CES missionary if we could camp in his backyard. In addition to letting us stay in his backyard he gave us a tour of El Paso and showed us racetracks where he used to race and train horses. He had grown up in the area and had a ton of interesting stories of a time when the west was a little more wild. He even took us out to dinner. He walked into this little Mexican restaurant and told everyone to get to work grabbed us some menus and sat down. Drover leaned and asked "do you think he owns this place?" Turns out he did along with seventeen others throughout El Paso. He told us more stories of his youth and racing horses all over the west. We told him that our favorite town we have stopped on was Duncan. He got a wry smile and said "what did you boys find to like in Duncan?" He then went on to tell us that Duncan was one of his favorite towns and that everyone there for as long as he can remember has been very nice and the town was always pretty. So back to the title as we have ridden along the streets of El Paso we have concluded it is the least bike friendly town in which we have ever been. There is never a shoulder and if you ride along the side of the road people try to hit you. We thought the side walks would be better but it appears they have gone out of their way to make them worse. Trees were trimmed just to the right height to take our heads off, sidewalks were broken and jumbled, and the buttons for crosswalks were in the weirdest places. In one ten second section I nearly got run over by a bus and hit by two different women drivers. I'm not sure people here are familiar with bikes or if they even know what they are. I had to resort to yelling "BICYCLE BICYCLE BICYCLE!!!!"at every crosswalk and then eventual just dropped the crosswalk and yelled everywhere I went. One lady was going to hit me while she was backing up until I yelled at her to stop. It has been fun biking around here and I'm hoping the rest of the trip is not like this.
So anyway James, the guy who let us camp in his backyard, tool us back to his restaurant for breakfast where they have 2 eggs, 2 pancakes, and 2 bacon for $1.99. He told us they still make money on it and from how many people were in the store, I believe him. Anyone notice the pancakes? Still not sick of them.