October 19
48mi/77km
+1600ft/480m
It’s hard to say much about today. A wind picked up in the night. It was noisy. It blew a stake out twice. It wasn’t the best night of sleep.
The wind continued all day today. Steady, hard, and unrelenting. A perfect headwind, like we were riding in a wind tunnel. What would have been a really nice ride turned into a slog.
Traffic, fortunately, was very light on the road, though each passing vehicle meant we were in a dust cloud for a few moments. To top it all off, I started seeing the distinctive visual aura of a migraine. At least having an aura gives me time to react and I took 600mg ibuprofen. I spent most of the day with my head down. Fortunately I didn’t have the most debilitating side effects but it was still a struggle. I didn’t take a single photo. At least Paul took a few.
We had hoped to get to Tonopah tonight, but at 5pm we still had 17mi/27km and our pace was averaging about 7mph/11kph in the wind. We knew we wouldn’t make it before dark, and we were both quite tired, so we found a spot out of sight and slightly sheltered, and set up camp. We didn’t even cook dinner. Just ate some snacks and crashed.
