95 miles, about 4000 feet of climbing. Entering the desert! Bad roads, nasty headwinds.
Today we climbed out of whatever valley it was we were in, and came out in Palmdale. Welcome to the Mojave desert! It's a bizzare scene--one minute you're in a desert no-man's-land, the next you're in heavily developed planned communities. It's like someone planted a suburbia seed in the sand and irrigated like crazy.
In Palmdale, we made a slight detour to see the Blackbird Airpark Museum. They've got two SR-71 Blackbirds on display, along with a U2 and a D-21 Mach-6 drone that they tried to launch off the back of an SR-71, although it never quite worked.
As soon as we left Palmdale, it was Joshua trees everywhere. They're not just an album by U2. Different kind of U2, BTW. turns out they were given that name by Mormon settlers who thought the trees' branches looked like a biblical story of Joshua raising his arms and looking Up. And that's about all that's interesting about them.
Today the riding wasn't too bad, until the last 30 miles, when we kept alternating between headwinds and tailwinds, and nice roads and really crappy roads.
GRIPE: we got these really nifty combination GPS/radio things, Garmin Rino's, just for this trip, so we could know where we were, where the other person is, and talk to each other, in case we got split up. Halfway through the first day the bracket on mine broke, and halfway through the second day the bracket on Nancy's broke. How lame! We're really quite peeved, because they're kind of expensive, and now they're pretty much useless to us. Grrr...
