Hi! We are updating from our awesome couch surfer, Gary’s house in Barstow after a good ride today. There were even parts of the ride that were downhill!

Today was the easiest ride so far because the vertical climb was much smaller than previous days. We have been in the “high desert” for a few days and that has yielded some fantastic scenery with great rock formations and wide expanses of desert pockmarked only by joshua trees and tumbleweeds.

Everywhere we have stopped people have reacted to us with everything from a “respect nod” to enthusiastic conversations. We had a great dinner at The Palms Mediterranean restaurant where the cooks, waiter, and even the guy in the next booth were all talking with us about our journey.

Drivers have also been more respectful around us loaded down with all our gear, giving us plenty of room and slowing down until they pass, which has been a tremendous help especially on roads with narrow shoulders like we were on today. Some of those roads were so torn up and pitted with potholes that it was pretty jarring and slow going.

Today we were mostly on the National Trails Highway and Route 66- we went around rock quarries, saw weird antique stores hawking everything from wagon wheels to tractor parts, front yards with all varieties of dogs running along the fences to greet us (and some not fenced in that we had to pedal away from), just the cabin shorn from a passenger jet.

We even walked around in a glass forest at the Bottle Tree Ranch in Oro Grande.

Anyway, our brains are pretty mushy at this point, and we are about to turn in so we can be ready to hit the road at sunrise again, so we will let the photos speak for themselves.

We will update soon with more detailed descriptions of our journey thus far.

Kelly and Milo.