Today started with another 150 miles of riding in the rain, though luckily it wasn’t raining as hard as it had been towards the end of the day yesterday. Just before Amarillo it finally stopped, so we stopped and shed our rain gear and took a short break.

Up until this point, the scenery had been very boring, with really nothing but empty landscapes, and then nothing but fields full of windmills, which isn’t exactly exciting. A little before the New Mexico border things started to change and the scenery started to get better as mesa’s started to appear in the distance.

In Tucumcari, New Mexico we stopped again to fuel up and have lunch. At that point we contemplated riding to Gallup, NM today, but our waitress at our lunch stop discouraged us from doing that and suggested that Albuquerque would be the better option, so we took her advice and booked a room in Albuquerque instead.

We stopped one more time before Albuquerque to get ice cream, and then rode the rest of the way. The closer we got to Albuquerque, the more the scenery changed, as well as the elevations. I wish there had been somewhere to pull off and take pictures, but there just wasn’t, so I really have nothing to share for today picture-wise.

After we got settled into the hotel and got cleaned up, we walked down to Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner and as we were coming back into the doors of our hotel, we ran right into two guys that I know from back home. It really is an incredibly small world. It turns out that out of all of the many hotels in Albuquerque, they were staying in the same one as us, two doors down from our room. Really, what are the odds?!

Our total mileage for today was 463. It has been crazy to me the last three days how much easier it is to do this kind of interstate mileage on the Tigers than it was on our Yamaha’s. I used to get really bad shoulder pain by the end of the day on my FZ6R, and I would be just exhausted, and would fall asleep super early every night, but so far I’ve been pain-free every day, and I’ve stayed up every night no problem, and have even had a little trouble going to sleep because I’m going to bed earlier than I am used to. I really just can’t say enough great things about this motorcycle, it is everything I had hoped that it would be and more.

Tomorrow we are hoping to see the Grand Canyon and a couple of other things, so I should have more to say and a lot of pictures to share.