Silver City, New Mexico. We haven’t had too much chance to write lately, so I’m a bit tardy remembering our evening at the Silver City Brewery. I can’t even tell you what kind of beer we had, but it was quite drinkable. We sat outside on the streetside patio and one did feel in the heart of Silver City. What I do remember, however, is how friendly the people were. We started out talking to a guy who rode up on the other side of the patio fence from us. We discussed biking in the area and Surlys and trips that his friends had made before he rode off into the gathering night. The service was great; we ate bbq, drank and filled our growler with their Amber Ale.
On our way out a young couple stopped us, “We’re you those people on bikes?” they asked. Yes we were. "Oh, we passed you near Willow Creek." Turned out they were part of the horse trailer and four-wheeler group who had camped next to us at the Willow Creek campground days before (in fact, they were the only other people at the campground). We hadn’t talked to them in camp, but as we were headed out of the canyon, they passed us and stopped to asked us about the trip and the young guy was driving (Renee says he was the guy at the brewery, but I don't really remember that at all). The person I most remember was the old man in the backseat. He was from Glenwood and I told him we would see him in the bar. He said we had quite a climb ahead of us and that we were the toughest people in the world and then grinning they drove on around the bend.
It turned out that he was the girl’s grandfather and that they’d been out for the weekend. We all laughed at the coincidence and they told us that the grandfather had been commenting all day how tough we were, that in fact, we were about the toughest people he’d ever seen (good thing he didn’t meet Kevin and Adrian on the Wall Lake Road) to be riding our bicycles out there. I said I would have thought we were the craziest, but after crashing my bike, it was a great to hear.
On the way out, we ran into the guy with the bicycle who we had talked to at the beginning of the night. He was with a group and friends and we stopped and talked more and his friend told us we should hang around and go to a music festival near the Gila Cliff Dwellings coming up two weekends hence, and invitation we reluctantly passed on. But hopefully we'll make the next one!
Cheers Silver City!
