GET Day 43: Tijeras

Daily Miles: 18

Total Miles: 763

Once we put our earplugs in we slept like babies, even with all the traffic commuting into ABQ in the morning. While the sky was heavy with thick grey clouds when we got up, it didn’t rain at all last night.

We had turned off our alarms last night, so we slept in a bit and started walking around 7:30am. When we woke up and talked about how far we were going to walk today, we decided to go ahead and finish the trail by tomorrow. Even though our reservations for motel and car are for the following day, we can just have a sight seeing day in ABQ.

We had the rest of the road walk to complete in the morning, which went by fine. We stopped into the fire department in Ponderosa for water, but other than that, we just kept walking.

Once we finished the road walking, we were quite happy. The trail we turned onto was obviously built for mountain bikers with lots of unnecessary twists and turns, but we didn’t mind because we were just happy to get off the road.

The weather even seemed to be looking up. The clouds had thinned and it seemed like the sun might come out. It was nice and cool as we walked, which felt really nice.

Sadly, the weather turned again and the dark clouds came back. We started to hear thunder and then the lightning came. We knew we were coming to a culvert and hoped to get there before the rain started so we could take cover. We didn’t make it and ended up putting in our ponchos as the rain and hail started to come down and the lightning continued.

After about 10 minutes we made it to a culvert and decided to wait out the rain. It stopped after only 15 minutes or so, but we also realized that we were in the wrong culvert. So, once we ventured out again, we got ourselves into and through the correct culvert and continued on.

We were headed to the tiny town of Tijeras, where our main focus was the Subway sandwich place. It started raining on us about five minutes before we got to Subway, so the ponchos went back on. Once we got to Subway, we got some food and tried to warm up.

We checked the weather forecast, and it didn’t look great for tonight or tomorrow. We didn’t really want to sleep out in the rain, so we started looking for lodging options. We found a hostel about 7 miles away and called them to see if they would pick us up and drop us off tomorrow morning. They said yes, so we packed up and waited for our ride.

It feels weird to be sleeping inside on our last night of the trip, but as we hear the rain come down outside, we are glad to be out of it and in a warm bed.

We don’t need to get an early start tomorrow, since we only have about 15 miles left and we learned today that the tram only operates from 5pm-8pm on Tuesdays (tomorrow). So, we’ll get a more relaxing morning and then finish up our final miles.