The Trip Home
After our terrifying shuttle ride to El Paso, we checked into the hotel and almost immediately headed out to go grocery shopping as we didn't want to start eating all of our meals at restaurants for both health and cost reasons. Other than grocery shopping though, we didn't do anything other than relax and visit the hot tub.
On the following morning we visited a bike shop to get bike boxes. We had spoken with the shop almost a week earlier which really helped us secure the boxes. They've had many requests for boxes at a time when their sales were tapering off for the season (I assume, although winter might be a better time to ride in El Paso given how hot it is there). With fewer new bike sales there are fewer boxes available for people finishing bikepacking trips. Fortunately, we were able to get two boxes along with a pile of packing material.
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We spent most of the morning in our room disassembling and boxing up our bikes. I tackled using the smaller box, so I took the tires off the rims which was critical to making it all fit. The tires were dead anyway (>5000km on them which is pretty darned good).
Later we headed downtown on the free trolley. We walked around in a busy, touristy area right up against the border crossing. We found little Mexican place for dinner that Yelp had categorized as "Mexican" and "Dive Bar." It turned out to be just fine and we had a decent and economical meal and a beer each. As it was Sunday the city was very quiet when we left the restaurant around 7pm and the trolley wasn't running any more so we just walked the 30 minutes home which gave us more of sense of El Paso.
We had booked our flights using a conservative estimate of how long it would take us to finish the trail (in case of headwinds or other bad weather on the last few days) and for how long it might take to secure boxes and pack up our bikes. This meant the we had another full day to hang out in town. Unfortunately, some of the places we might have wanted to visit were closed on Mondays. We did walk around the nearby El Paso campus of the University of Texas. The campus was interesting and there was a nice garden of native plants and a small museum with some interesting displays about local indigenous cultures, animals, minerals, and geography. That still left us with quite a bit of time so we just chilled and did very little, which we didn't really feel too guilty about.
The hotel shuttle took us and our bike boxes to the airport and check-in was mostly painless. Unlike when we flew to Calgary we didn't have to unload and reload our bike boxes at security. Unfortunately that meant that the TSA did it themselves so when we got our boxes back it was clear that they had been opened and not repacked very well. Fortunately we seem to have escaped damage or lost parts, but only barely - Andrew's fork just about fell out of the box when we were loading it in the car at Vancouver Airport.
A friend of Andrew's very kindly picked us up and delivered us to Andrew's place. Even though I live in Victoria I booked the same flights for both of us to Vancouver as the cost to fly to Victoria was 3x flying to Vancouver. Andrew dropped me off at the ferry the following morning where I did have to lug the box with me as it was too heavy for BC Ferries' checked baggage service, but hey, I needed a workout after a few days of sitting around, and paying $19 to walk on to the ferry is a good deal compared to having flown there. If it weren't for having fully disassembled the bike and discarded the chain and tires I might have considered assembling at Andrew's and riding on to the ferry.
Once home I did a little unpacking and even went for a short ride on my single-speed bike. I was so used the heavy steering on the trip that I was oversteering on the single-speed in a pretty funny way. But of course it was only a few minutes of adjustment. Now I'll try to catch up on a bunch of tasks at home and work to make this new weight the new normal. I still hope to write a "good, bad, and ugly" summary post, but it might take a day or two to get to it.
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