From Peddling to Pedaling

Mark has started calling Denisa a tomato peddler, because she is offering free tomatoes to everyone she meets.  But she found a bicycle trail that parallels the Rio Grande that we went on today.  So she went from peddling to pedaling for the day.

This is a new cement path that is amazingly flat, and it was a beautiful morning to be on a bicycle.  This picture was taken at the southern end of the trail when we are fresh and cool.

Since we were riding along the Rio Grande River, we were looking forward to the water views and birds along our trip.  But this is the view of the mighty Rio Grande.

We talked to a local that rides this trail regularly, and he said they rarely have water in the river bed.  So the river looks a little different than it does further south where we were kayaking on it a couple weeks ago!  Denisa had thought about contacting some river outfitters to see about kayaking here, but I guess that was a silly idea. 

Instead of seeing ducks and geese we saw more land-lover birds.  We saw a hawk fly off with a rodent in his talons.  We scared up a covey of quail, lots of dove and our favorite--the road runner.  We saw 7 different road runners while we rode today.  Those of you that are missing Mark and his sense of humor should know that Mark questioned Denisa's bird identification skills.  When she pointed out another road runner, he pointed out that the bird was not on the road and was not running.  He determined that it must be a "field jogger" instead.

We rode until the very end of the trail and dismounted for some rest time.  Here we are cooling off in the "river."

We really didn't know how long the total length of trail was, and we knew we had to ride it all the way back.  So Mark set his trax app on his phone to check the length as we headed back to the car.  It is a  nice ride when you see the mountains around you, but don't have to ride up and down those mountain slopes!

We were getting surprisingly tired on the return ride, and we were looking anxiously for the turn off to the car.  Wouldn't you know that we missed it, and added another two miles to our ride by the time we figured that out?  We were even more tired when we finally got to the car and checked the mileage app to see how far we had ridden.  We were both surprised when it turned out we had gone 25 miles today!

Denisa had also planned a hike in the Franklin Mountains State Park, but we decided that we had enough hard-core exercise for the day!  So we opted instead for a stroll around the campus of the University of Texas-El Paso.  This is the home of the Sun Bowl Stadium, literally chiseled into the Mountains of El Paso.

We ended up getting some hard core exercise as we walked around the rolling hills of this campus.  There are some interesting buildings, as they must straddle the valleys and the mountains of this area of the city.  But one of the main reasons we came to campus was to walk through the Chihuahuan Desert Gardens behind the museum.  We were hoping that things would be labeled well, so we could put names to all the flora we had been seeing on our hikes in the desert.  The gardens needed a little TLC, but we found a few labels that will help us.  We also found this blooming cactus that matched Denisa's outfit today.

The UTEP campus is undergoing some major remodeling right now, so it was hard to find our way around the day we were there.  Once it is finished, this rolling hills campus will be really pretty!