After a good night of quiet and peaceful rest in the middle of nowhere, I woke up relatively early and started the usual morning activities when camping – put my multiple layers of clothing on, pack things up, unmount the tent, warm up and eat some oatmeal, load the bike, check to ensure I’m not leaving anything behind, and finally leave. According to Raah.co‘s tracker, I must have left around 9:20am. For the note, I strongly advise using raah.co’s phone app (iPhone for sure, possibly Android) if you want a precise tracking of your trips (every 10s a GPS position is sent to their server or saved for later upload if no connection is available). There are many options, in particular regarding the splitting of your trip (by number of points, stops, daily, etc…), which allows you to set up the app the way you prefer. Try it, there’s a free version that works in most cases!
I crossed the Pecos River little after leaving the state park and wish I had stopped, but once you’re on the bridge there’s no way to stop (forbidden) and no parking after the bridge. I would have had to turn around and since I had quite some distance to go up to El Paso, “wasting” time was not so much of an option today, again. Google street will give you the view I should have shot with my camera instead.
I have some video from the GoPro passing the bridge, but since the GoPro was sitting on my front fender, it doesn’t show much and my helmet cam was not recording at that time – I had to alternate the cams since their batteries were usually dead after a couple hours recording.
I continued riding until Dryden, when I stopped on the side of the road, around 10:30am. I was wondering why my bike seemed underpowered to the point I could barely reach 70mph with the throttle apparently full down and I discovered the cable from my heated grips was preventing the throttle to go further. I adjusted it and got more power again, but it took me until the cold weather in North California, Oregon, and Washington, with the heated grips on to discover the real issue – the glue inside the heated grips was not working properly any longer, and the grips were just slipping again and again, causing the cable to always end preventing me from throttling up. (Feb.5th: I finally re-glued the grips properly on the throttle a few days ago, but I put too much glue and the throttle doesn’t come back to the resting position on its own so I may need to adjust again…). While I was adjusting the grips, a BMW came from the opposite direction, waved and passed me, but the rider came back again my way to check everything was alright. Although he didn’t stop and we just confirmed with thumbs everything was okay, I really appreciated the gesture, and all the more that I was really in the middle of some desert and would have definitely appreciated help if I needed it. Whoever you are, thanks for the support, fellow biker!
I stopped again at 10:50am, in a small town called Sanderson, to refill at a small “Alon” gas station that had only 86 octane-rated gasoline at the pump and also got my first coffee of the day, while chatting a bit with a few usual customers. 
I left the pump 15 minutes later, only to discover there was a major “Stripes” gas station at the other side of the town…
I then took the US-285 North toward Fort Stokton where I caught the I-10 and moved west at a higher speed since Texas allows to go as fast as 80mph on the interstate. Add a little error margin to that and you have me heading west around 85-88mph (140km/h)…
My next break was around 1pm, 170 km away, at a gas/food station close to Saragosa, TX. I refilled the tank and had a sandwich before leaving, half an hour later.
167km further west, at 1:54pm, I stopped again to refill, in a town called Sierra Blanca. For the note, my bike is not a rocket, and I didn’t ride 167km in 24 minutes 🙂 It just happened that I change time zones somewhere along the way. Also note that on highways my fuel consumption is quite higher than normal, but I also always tend to refill as soon as the reserve light shows up, especially in these areas where gas stations are not so frequent…
With no further stop for the day, I reached El Paso around 3pm, stopped in a parking lot, and looked for a motel to book. 12 minutes and 21km later, I was registering at a Motel 6 which had a Starbucks conveniently located on the other side of the street 🙂
Day ended with the usual latte/sandwich, a friendly chat with a Starbucks worker during his break, and transferring the videos (no photos today) to the backup disk. Total of the day: 631km (392 miles), not bad but not a very touristic day…
