05 April 2014
Del Rio to Montell, TX
77 miles (Total Miles = 1,350)

She’s running alongside us, tongue flapping in the breeze, eyes bright, tail up, clearly enjoying our company as we pedal out of Bracketville. Sadly, though, she is a resident of Bracketville – one that’s on the loose. Her name is Rya and instead of her escorting us out of town, we need to escort her back home, once we figure out where that is. Her collar address puts her about a quarter mile back, so we turn around, enjoy the tailwind for a change, and run her back home where her appreciative owner comes out to greet us. It’s a happy reunion and best of all, it completes the circle of our day, for of course her keeper works for (wait for it) Border Patrol. Of course he does.

Quite the dashing young man, we pepper him with Homeland Security questions before returning to the route, at which time we think of a hundred more questions we could have asked him that we really should have just gone ahead and stayed and asked because what’s the point of riding the next 45 miles into this brutal headwind when we could have shared a cup of coffee and border stories and then asked for a lift. Sometimes we make poor decisions.

Anyway, what we did learn?

• Rya is a rescue, found about 3 weeks ago along the Mexico border. Whether or not Mr. Border Patrol tracked her down based on paw prints in the sandy road, we don’t know.

• Rya can jump over their 6 foot high backyard fence. This skill probably explains her presence on the U.S. side of the border. As our fellow rider JB astutely pointed out, this also means that Mr. Border Patrol is harboring a fugitive.

• There are 21,000 Border Patrol agents employed by the U.S. Government. I believe we have seen about 12,000 of them.

• In Mr. Border Patrol’s zone, they typically pick up 30 “bodies” a day and by “bodies” he meant people that are alive but for some reason are referred to as “bodies” by Border Patrol. And actually that would be “30 bodies ma’am” because that’s how Mr. Border Patrol talked. His mama raised him well.