31st March
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Tahkone. It’s hard to find redeeming features in an otherwise featureless plain. Tahkone was a little more prosperous then even Plains Texas or Tatum further back on the 380 but the Main Street was dead and apart from NAPA auto parts there remained only a Stripes gas station, a Cost Saver supermarket and Family Dollar and Family Tree sharing the same building. The fire station and small hospital added real substance to the town, but like the rest of the High Street on Highway 380, maybe suffering from internet shopping, a migration of young people to the city but all of the towns I've ridden past in New Mexico are hambolic and untidy and just basically poor. Some places have a best time and most of what I see on this west/east highway are still in the queue for that to happen.
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Standing still on a side road a farm. Solitary house on the corner, post box, opposite a small fenced area for road construction machinery. CAT digger, scraper and one of those sand shifters with the upside down trapezoid cargo bay I had as a child.
It's a lovely warm wind and time to move on. In what takes a motorbike an hour it takes me a day to zone out on big flat fields. A hundred miles on and the view hasn't changed. My mind is getting agitated. I've decided to have an early finish today, prep well and then get out of here.
Prep up for three major mileage days. Went over to Dollar General behind Sonic in Post. My motel, the Budget Motel, is just across the road. The fields here are so big here it could take many days to cross them and I have to be in New York before 17th April for several reasons; other business, European leg must be completed on time, I'm tired and want to get home to see my wife.
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The fields are so big they seem endless. It had to be in Texas but I have not seen bigger fields anywhere else in the world, not even the collective farming co-operatives in Russia.
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Map of the Day
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