Daylight roused me.  I remember hearing some birds twittering in the distance, and after finishing the last of my food, I rolled up the sleeping bag and loaded the bike. I headed west a few miles to 60th West and then turned north for the long straight flat ride across Antelope Valley.  The ride up the slight slope after Willow Springs seemed really easy.  Thinking back on it, maybe it was due to some recent long distance cycling over extended mountains that improved my cycling ability.  

I cycled past the place I liked to hunt petrified wood, only slightly tempted to take a quick look, but not enough to provoke more than a glance now and then as I rode up the winding slight incline.  I passed the place where a Mojave High School teacher lived, but his car was gone, so I did not stop to say hi.  Circling around Mt Soledad, I turned onto Holt Ave and headed up the dirt road, as usual taking care to avoid a few goathead plants and some sandy spots that tended to throw me.  Then it was nice pavement the rest of the way into Western Village, where we lived. I slowly pedaled through the twisting streets, past the little church around a few turns and was finally home.  I always wondered why they had to make the streets wind around instead of going straight east and west, but I guess that was to make the little housing tract more aesthetically interesting.  

Hopping off the bike, I parked it with the wheels set into the grooves I had dug in hardpan  and snapped the kickstand down with my foot onto a flat rock that I had planted just for that purpose.  The bike frame was too tall for that kickstand without the grooves.  I walked through the back door and into the kitchen just in time for a second breakfast of hot oatmeal greeted by my mom, dad and brothers and sisters.  Home again.I found out that my dad had been at AV college taking a required continuing education course when I camped, less than a half mile away, and I could have easily gotten a ride home with him!  It is just as well, or maybe better I didn’t so that I could say I had ridden my old bike all the way from Mojave to Ventura and back! It was years later that I learned from siblings that the morning that I left on the ride, our parents had a big argument about who “let” me go on a crazy bike ride all alone!

Being summer in southern CA, it never occurred to me that I might need to carry a tent or even a tarp as a shelter in case of rain.  Happily, with the normal weather I was fine.  I was a desert rat, after all, and (stealing a line from an old song) “...It never rains in California…”  especially in July.  Camping without a shelter?  It would not happen today!  Riding without a pump and patch kit would also never happen.  Or helmet, footwear or safety glasses.