I’m in America, but it feels like Mexico. Laredo is unique among border towns because it has always had a majority Latino population. Biking into the city you pass rows and rows and rows of warehouses, distribution centers, and yards full of semi-truck trailers before you hit this horrible commercial strip crammed full of every road-side corporate brand imaginable—McDonald’s, Starbucks, Burger King, Walmart, IHOP, Applebee’s—on and on, mile after mile.

It’s an awful stretch of road to confront as a “cyclist,” as we like to call ourselves in the biz, since you’re squarely in the crosshairs of the I-35 corridor, one of the biggest, meanest trucking corridors in the country. According to my out-of-date 2012 Texas guidebook, the I-35 and the I-10, which crosses east to west along the southern tier, carried $87 billion worth of goods to Mexico in 2011. Three million trucks cross from Mexico into Texas every year, and most of them go through Laredo. At the last stoplights leading out of the city, trucks were stacked three across and nine deep waiting for the light to turn green.