Figure 8 On A Bike

The long story short is that I had some medical things I thought were being managed okay, or maybe I was just in a little bit of denial, but hiking 80-ish miles through the desert made me feel like I really ought to see a doctor before spending days at a time in any more wilderness. So a quick bus from Lordsburg brought us to Phoenix , and then a direct flight put us in Omaha that night, where Susan's dad scooped us up and took us home. I enjoyed a great amount of care and support from a great number of family and friends while paying a few visits to the doctor. And... Everything pretty much checked out. Some of my symptoms persisted, but otherwise all the tests cleared without abnormalities. Equipped with some adjustments to medication, a meditation & stress reduction program, and a fancy spreadsheet to help with planning, we decided to get back on the trail in Cuba, NM. 9 days of hiking in the New Mexico mountains will bring us across the Colorado border to Chama. Omaha sky...

Susan in the hospital :( Susan said her back felt better in the morning, so we took both our empty backpacks and a bunch of grocery bags and walked down the hill towards the main road, ready to haul back a big load of supplies. It was too early for us to have breakfast at the guesthouse, but we figured it should be easy enough to find some coffee and food in the city, and caffeine headaches usually don't set in until the afternoon anyway. We weren't sure how we'd pay for the bus with no bus card (maybe our credit card would work?), but that was a future problem. It became a farther future problem when, still walking out of camp, saw the one morning bus cruise down the road beneath us - looks like we're taking the 2 mile to the next bus stop in Akdamlar. We got to the stop and waited around for maybe 40 minutes, unsure if a bus would actually come, when to our relief the TK-21 came rumbling by, did a u-turn, and picked us up, and our Mastercards even worked to pay t...