Today was supposed to be an 80-mile ride to the Espanola, New Mexico area. Instead, we woke up to 2-3 inches of snow on the ground and on the roads. Snowplows have been passing by on highway 84 (our route to Espanola) all morning. The temperatures are in the mid-20’s and the forecast for today is for 20-25 mph winds from the west. The forecast for this afternoon is a little better — the snow is supposed to stop, it’s supposed to warm up to around 40 degrees, but it will stay windy.

We spent about two hours this morning trying to decide what to do. Do we stay another day and wait for better weather? The forecast for tomorrow is much better. Partly cloudy, highs around 60, and winds from the north. That would be a tailwind. Yes! Or do we simply delay our start today until this afternoon after the weather has improved?

As much as we need to make progress, we finally decided to stay here in Chama another day. It seemed like the safe thing to do, but we do have some anxiety about it because we can’t guarantee we won’t be delayed again somewhere else in the next twenty days. We’ll have to make up the mileage down the road because we still need to be in Bentonville, Arkansas on April 26, twenty days from now.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 6th, 2006 at 10:38 am and is filed under The Dream Tour, Bicycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.