a cause for sleepy monday

sunday morning i woke up early and headed out to moriarty for a bike ride to estancia and then little get together birthday party for me. it's glorious having a big family. yes a 5 person family is considered big. no one has three kids anymore. there must have been several famous and repugnantly adored 2 kid families in the 80s. moving on.
moriarty to estancia is a twenty mile ride.
20 milesssssssssssss!
we decided to start at the feed store down the street instead of my parents' house. we all biked except my dad. he's got back nerve damage so he was the pit crew and met us with the truck and a cooler full of gatorade every 5 miles. it was quite nice. i put 2 layers of 50 spf sunscreen on my legs and just 1 layer on the rest of me. plus i wore jack's soccer shorts, my dad's button up shirt and my mom's gardening hat. i should have worn a butt pad. i have two purple bruises on my ass now.
it was a very straight flat road for about half of the trip. the initial 7 miles were quite hilly and i got that heartbeat behind my eyeballs thing just getting up the hills so sorry man, no pictures, i was preoccupied with breathing regularly. the last stretch almost felt downhill but rye said that the whole course was a steady incline. WHY DIDN'T WE RIDE FROM ESTANCIA TO MORIARTY INSTEAD THEN?!

whatever. my calves look good enough to eat now.
finally we got to ESTANCIA. the FINISH LINEEEEEE.
i have no recollection of how my floppy straw hat turned into a lobos baseball cap so i guess i was pretty fucked up somewhere in that semi mojave desert in between moriarty and estancia. also that water bottle attached to my bike is in no way functional about seven years ago i opened it up and a spider came out with a load of babies so i will never use it. my dad duct taped a gatorade bottle to my bike and believe it or not it was slightly impossible to untape it while pedaling up the hills.
so it was incredibly difficult to get through. previously, i hadn't ridden my bike farther than two miles at once so to make my next step up twenty miles is just amazing to me. adrenaline high forever. plus plus i started off at lightning speed and basically almost got a heart attack on the first 7 miles but then paced myself in the next ten miles and finally sped up in the last stretch. i still wasn't nearly as fast as Rye though. also my mom put ice cubes in my hat and my dad kept telling us how fast we were so that really helped out.

originally we meant to go biking in the early early morning so as to not bake in the hundred degree weather but our plans are always late. also, i rode on a mountain bike through the whole trip and kinda wished i had that skinny wheel bike but it worked out anyhow since the streets were pretty fucked with potholes and roadkill. i'm not lying i rode over two birds, a rabbit and a rattlesnake. the birds and rabbits made me cry a little but the rattlesnake gave me goosebumps and i pedaled like i was being chased by death.
and then the birthday party. my parents' cracked me up by putting old dusty hallway candles on a plate for the make a wish blow out candles.
believe me i'm sitting on a donut in this photo and i'm incredibly proud of myself for biking that far and that fast (at times). it's been forever since i've gotten the 'i can't do it. i can't do it. ok i'll try' feeling and it made it worth it.
i've got more pics. i'll put them up later.