October 11th - Silver City

I was ready to leave when the big dark clouds which were moving fast to the north, started to rumble so I got my computer back out of the car and helped myself to another coffee at the reception and decided to wait the thunderstorm out. In the morning the reception was staffed with an old Indian, in this case better a native American woman. The owner/ manager of this motel6 was like 80% of all motel manager Asian Indian and so was the cleaning personnel, a weird couple which worked to all hours, didn’t speak English and wore both a big red chalk dot on the forehead. But I chatted in the mornings that we stayed there with the night clerk about what to expect of the cliff dwellings, the weather, wind directions etc. and she had every morning the same middle aged man there with her. The motels in Arizona and New Mexico that we have been to so far cater much less to tourist than to workers who work in the area. I do understand this, if this is for construction workers but in the days inn in Globe stayed about ten Arizona correction officers There seems to be a prison in Globe but for what does Arizona need to spend the money on all this motel rooms and I am sure they get the worst rate as the government pays.

I swerved off my original thought: By now it poured and I decided to stay another night as I was not keen to cross the highest point of the route in eventual snow.
By noon it cleared a bit and I went on a tour up the street to Gila. Silver Springs is over 1800m (6000ft) high in elevation and I felt it at once, there was just not enough oxygen in the air to breathe normally, my butt still hurt like crazy and than my chain jumped off again. I had screwed the chain thrower position several times in several different position, but without a stand it’s kind of hard to verify, if it’s good now or not. So I had an excuse to return into town and to the bike shop. The guy there adjusted the gears etc. nicely while I went through town, where I bough a big roll of loosely packed Polyester yarn which had the form of a donut (to accommodate my cyst in the middle) and had a nice lunch in a hole in a wall eatery which pretended to be Greek. The daily special was never the less German Bratwurst with Sauerkraut. I returned to the motel and spend the afternoon reading. Justin must have caught some kind of bug and was vomiting the whole evening.