Fri, 10/24/2025; 33 miles, 540 feet of climb
This was a hard day. Hard day of biking, and hard day of tech issues. But at least I ended up indoors for the Big Storm coming through tonight.
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I was up several times in the night to check on the progress of my iPhone transfer. Sometimes it stops at a prompt and you have to answer before it continues. As of 3 AM, I thought I was in pretty good shape.
But when I woke up at 6 am and clicked the final button to transfer my phone number, it DID NOT WORK. It said to call Verizon.
PANIC! There is only one Verizon store in town, and I found out they are closed today when I called them yesterday to see if they had an iPhone 16 case (since that second shipment hadn’t yet arrived from Amazon).
So my only choice was to wait until Verizon phone tech support opens at 8 am. After my last great hotel breakfast, I went back up to my room to start calling.
But the room phone didn’t work! I kept getting messages saying the call could not go through. I called the front desk, and they said it should be fine. But I’m guessing nobody has used that phone in years.
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I eventually went down to the front desk to ask Juliana if I could use her phone, after showing her the two iPhones I was trying to transfer. She handed me the receiver.
To make a long story short, I was on that phone for an hour and a half. Juliana even brought me a tall stool after my first half hour of standing.
During much of that time, I was playing other scenarios in my mind. Could I survive without cellular data? I can still use wifi, and all the files and photos were successfully transferred from my broken iPhone.
But that wouldn’t work when I sometimes go days without wifi. Plus, many sites now text your phone number for identification verification. It would be awful to not have a working phone number.
Plus, I often call ahead to campgrounds and motels and Warmshowers hosts to see if I can stay there. It would be unsettling to never know until I get to a town whether I can stop there or need to keep going.
The other thought that crossed my mind was switching to Cricket. There is a Cricket store nearby.
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But after 90 minutes of rebooting and typing in codes and reading back numbers, Kris at Verizon tech support finally got it working.
YAY!! For the first time in days, I now had a working iPhone that I could actually read! I wanted to hug Juliana and Rose, the general manager at La Quinta. They were rooting for me all along.
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Now I was in a race against increasing headwinds and impending storm. I dashed back up to my room (after a quick “second breakfast”) to finish packing, and rolled out my bike at 10:40, just 20 minutes before checkout. Yikes.
It felt good to be on my bike again riding over the open road. I rode through some light rain, but I actually found that more pleasant than hot sun.
The winds weren’t too bad yet. But US-90 turned more southeast about the same time the wind picked up to 17 mph. The last 20 miles was a tough grind at 7-9 mph.
I made it to Fort Clark in Bracketville less than an hour before the 5 PM office closing time. Char, the friend of Nate, was in meetings all day, and the two girls at the desk didn’t think they had any rooms for the night!
PANIC AGAIN. I probably should bring a blood pressure monitor on these trips.
I did a little combination of begging and name dropping, and they decided they could put me in room 7 of the Patton Inn.
These are old army barracks! They are not quite La Quinta, but they have the Basic Four (shower, bed, outlet, and AC).
(But no wifi, and no cell coverage here, so I will get another day behind in my blog after last night’s iPhone transfer debacle.)
Above all, they have shelter from the storm. If is going to be a doozy. I plan to go to bed very early to get ready for my 50-miler tomorrow with absolutely nothing between here and Camp Wood. I hope the rain stops by sunrise.
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TRANSLATIONS/BACKGROUND: “TEXBIRD” = Texas Bike Ride, my own nickname for the 800 miles in the middle of Southern Tier Bicycle Route, from El Paso to Austin, using maps from ACA (Adventure Cycling Association). This will complete my ride of the Southern Tier from the Pacific Ocean (San Diego) to the Atlantic Ocean (Jacksonville). (I biked the 1500 miles from Austin to Jacksonville in March 2024, and the 1000 miles from San Diego to El Paso in February 2025.)
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LINKS:
Old-fashioned BLOG if you have friends who don’t use Facebook:
“Old Scouter” Facebook page if you want to follow big adventures with more pictures and video clips (but not unrelated personal posts):
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100066334039590
“Old Scouter” YouTube page (when I get time to edit after the trip):