Mountains, Desert And Wind

Day 9, Mile 438

Leaving Seattle Airport

We woke up this morning warm and clean in Brian’s sister Kim’s apartment. We rode 91 miles yesterday to get to her house in Phoenix by nightfall (NOT a normal day with fully loaded touring bicycles!)  But we slightly miscalculated because at 7:30 pm, after riding an hour in darkness in the city with almost dead headlamps, we realized it was still at least 15 more miles to her house. Luckily a phone call later Kim was on her way to pick us up. We didn’t mean to cheat ourselves out of any riding, but there really isn’t any place to camp in the city (and we had been traversing the urban streets and sprawl for 50 miles). This morning, on our walk back from the grocery store, there was still frozen puddles on the sidewalks – this is Phoenix! Where’s the heat? The last few nights it has been in the 20’s and we have been riding in our jackets through the desert for most of the daylight hours.

From our start at the San Diego airport we rode through that lovely city into the mountains, down into the desert where we passed things we never knew existed. For instance: did you know that hundreds of people buy huge expensive dune buggies and the trucks and trailers to pull them and take them out the middle of the desert and ride them around all together in the Sand Dune Recreation Area in southern California? OR that there are entire towns made up of only RV campgrounds and one under-stocked store in the middle of the Arizona scrub desert with hundreds upon hundreds of parked RV-ers? OR that the largest flea market in the U.S. operates from January to April in the rock-hounding mecca of Quartzite Arizona (another temporary RV town)? We learned all of this while slowly pedaling our way through the beautiful, stark desert landscape under clear blue skies. We have had wind enough to chap our cheeks and noses, coming from every direction, but the day into Phoenix it was such a fabulous tail wind that our normal 8-10mph pace went up to a steady 22mph.

After a week of cheese and cracker lunches and camping dinners Brian got us a large Dominoes pizza to reward ourselves for our 91 mile day (for $5.99 how could we pass it up?). We have camped in the wild desert every night, once in a little scrubby town park, and now our cozy bed, out of the wind, at Kim’s is a real treat.

We’re happy, we’re moving at our own pace of about 50 miles a day, and we’re seeing the country just like we wanted to.  Hopefully we’ll continue to see things that we never new existed.