31 July 2007
What a great day to be riding! At least, most of it... I enjoyed it all
the more because I expected it to be hot, and it wasn't (until later in
the day).
I toyed momentarily with stopping at the Four Corners
Monument -- I mean, I'm on a Four Corners Tour! But I didn't. I find it
too depressing these days. I seem to remember, the first time I stopped
there, it was just the monument, and there was no admission charge.
Now, there's admission charged, and all kinds of native Americans
selling whatever anybody will buy. (At least, I presume that's still
the case--I haven't visited it since a trip with Susan, quite a few
years ago now. Anyway, to make up for not stopping there, I stopped
alongside the road a couple of times and took pictures of some
interesting rocks:
Ute Mountain
and something called "Baby Rocks" (a
big ol' mesa sort of spilling out toward the road).
Back in 2005 when
I rode this route, I set waypoints at all the gas stations; I added a
few and deleted one I wasn't sure of this time. Like that trip, my
fillup in Cortez got me to Flagstaff (with maybe 10 miles to spare).
Horrible construction on I-40 made the transition to I-17/89A tougher
than it should have been.
And going down the switchbacks into Oak Creek
Canyon, I was stopped for road construction.
I didn't mind too much, it
was still fairly cool, and I was legitimately first in line, so once
the pilot car let me go, I had a pretty free run through the canyon. I
did finally catch up to some slower traffic toward the end, but all in
all, it wasn't bad. But Sedona is getting worse all the time; it keeps
growing, and is just full of tourists. And the Cottonwood / Clarkdale
strip seems more crowded than it used to be. But the ride up into
Jerome wasn't bad at all. There was nobody ahead of me when I started
up, and the truck that pulled out half a mile ahead of me was local,
knew the road, and didn't dawdle.
Coming out the other side, though, it
started to rain, and I was a bit tentative, so I didn't mind the couple
of cars ahead of me--they were moving fast enough for the conditions.
They've totally realigned 89A into Prescott--I thought perhaps 69 was
it renamed, but 69 appears in SA9, and old 89A just disappeared in
MapSource 7 & 8 (it's still there in 6).
As I rode down into
Peeples Valley, I could see massive rain ahead, so I made sure
everything was buttoned up tight and rode into Yarnell, where it
started pouring. Coming down the mountain, I didn't mind the 35 mph
speed limit; it was all I wanted to do in those conditions anyway.
After the heavy stuff tapered off, it continued to rain enough that I
kept my faceshield down, and even after the sun came out fiercely,
there was still rain falling.
Eventually, though, it stopped, and the
day heated up to uncomfortable. I sucked on the water, but didn't want
to stop for the wet towel. The rest of the ride was just toughing it
out to Blythe, where I stayed in a Budget Inn ($33) and got groceries at Albertson's ($10).
States:
Colorado, New Mexico (a mile!), Arizona, California.
515 GPS miles (11204 total), 58.3 moving average, 86.2 max.
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