I (Sam) woke up at 5am, freezing. Water droplets were also clustered on the inside of my rain fly due condensation. I also hardly got any sleep because I accidentally laid my tent over a fallen cactus, which I did not see. This forced me to bunch myself into the corner of my tent all night. I needed to get to Santa Rosa, NM for an interview at 12pm, and I had about 5 hours of walking to do. Though I badly wanted to stay in my sleeping bag, I mustered up the courage to get up and open my tent. A frigid breeze entered, but I was already in too deep. It must have been 45 degrees. I exited my tent and immediately did 50 jumping jacks. This was a massive help, and I packed up my things before calling my mother. We spoke for about an hour while she was on her way to work. The sunrise was quite beautiful, and I was greeted by an escaped cow a few miles into the day. The walk went relatively smoothly, although I did decide to watch Fight Club for the last few hours. I am pretty ashamed that I took myself so far out of the moment by watching a film by walking, but I will avoid this in the future. When I arrived at the motel, I found James comfortably laying in bed. I sat down for a moment and then proceeded to clip my beard off with a buzzer for the interview. This was incredibly difficult, as I became attached to the hair on my chin that I had been growing for the last four months. I was about to begin shaving my mustache, but I simply couldn’t pull the trigger. I just couldn’t. The mustache stayed, and I put on my dollar tree shirt before interviewing for about an hour. James took a bath during this time and made sure to stay silent. Afterwards, we walked to Dollar General to stock up on food and then walked to a family owned Mexican restaurant about half a mile down the road. It had a pretty cozy atmosphere, and I ordered a burrito. It was pretty good, and we ended up staying there for about 3 hours. It is interesting how in our current lifestyle, sitting bored at a restaurant for 3 hours is something of a luxury. After leaving, we went to the gas station to buy some hats for the upcoming night and then did some night walking on the interstate. Once the service road came back, we realized that there was a barbed wire fence separating us. Sick of waking on the interstate though, we were determined to find a way over. We eventually find a safe way to climb over, and brought the strollers with us. James unfortunately picked up a flat tire in his front wheel. We walked for about another 6 miles before pitching our tents on the service road and calling it a night.
Our single biggest challenge today was climbing over the barbed wire fence. We were both pretty confident that we could jump over it, but we did not want to risk an injury because we knew that could mean the end of our trip. We really had to investigate our options, from putting our sleeping pads over the barbs, to using a rock to give ourselves leverage. We eventually found a way, and that speaks to this trips constant need of problem solving.
10/11/22
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