Accidents Will Happen

I got up yesterday morning and decided that today would be a nice easy one.  I got everyone on the road and was planning to take a stroll around a major classic car show that had taken over the main street when the phone rang.  Someone had managed to fall off less than a mile from the hotel. By the time I got to him the road was closed by a fire engine, ambulance and police car and he was being given a thorough check with roadside ECG and the whole works.  Despite the strong recommendation from the experts that he go with them to the hospital for further checks he declined.  So began another day in paradise.  A 75 mile dash to deliver the downed rider to the next hotel then backtracking 45 miles to check on the rest of the group and shadow them to their hotel in El Centro.

We have now emerged from the SF to San Diego bubble of wealth and are back in grotty towns full of homeless people.  El Centro was a particularly fine example of the genre with a thriving community of vagrants infesting the shadier corners of the motel parking lot.  Our motel was clearly another with drugs being dealt out of the rooms and by dusk everyone was barricaded in with the lights out.  I have been hauling a cheap bike that the film crew occasionally used but that has now cut off the bike rack and, presumably, sold on a street corner for somebody's next fix.

On a cheerier note we travelled through some properly spectacular desert today.  It was a complex day due to Merica's inability to build towns the correct distance apart.  They rode 17 miles to their next hotel then kept on for a further 25 miles to a spot where we arranged to store their bikes.  We then bussed them back to the hotel and tomorrow we must return them to where they left off.  This all involved a version of the old 'get the fox, chicken and grain across the river' logic puzzle.  It turns out that the trick to solving the problem is to give a guy in a desert roadhouse $100 to store the chickens in his garage overnight.