Well, this was a challenging day! We started with a 2000 foot climb. About three miles of that was on the freeway (cyclists are permitted on the shoulder were there is no alternative route). Cycling along the freeway is generally pretty good. The pluses are that you have a wide shoulder with good pavement and more even grading - nothing as steep as a side road might be. There's also the rumble strip that is supposed to wake up dozing drivers. If you hear the rumble strip noise behind you, you know that you have approximately one second to live. The minus is that it's loud having trucks roar by a few feet away. We have more freeway travel tomorrow.

We turned off onto Highway 79. We stopped at a cafe so that Steve could take on some coffee. I wound up having a slice of cherry pie and Steve an order of biscuits and gravy to maintain our strength. The elevation was about 3000 feet. Snow covered much of the ground from there on. The snow sometimes filled the road shoulder, forcing us into the traffic lanes more than we liked. Where there wasn't snow, there was snowmelt running dwn the shoulder. My bike wheel would spray my feet with ice water whenever I pedalled through the snowmelt.

A Border Patrol car was parked at the top of the climb at Lagunas Summit. We coaxed the agent to get out of the car to take our photo.

Steve had trouble with his chain. He replaced two links in an effort to prevent the chain from jamming (chain-suck in bicycle-speak). We stopped at Guatay, which appears to consist of a hardware store and nothing else. The staff spent half an hour trying to help with the chain.

We flew down a thousand-foot descent and then began grinding back up the same thousand feet. I thought the hill was never going to end!

We hoped to reach Ocotillo today. That was too far. We stopped at Boulevard. We'll try to stretch our day tomorrow to reach Brawley. At least we made more mileage today than yesterday: 38 miles instead of 35.

I'll try to get more pictures up soon. Meanwhile, check out Steve's blog at velo mange.blogspot.com.