Jeremy's Bike Blog

I Started the  day with a lovely sunrise from my roadside perch.  The route into Flagstaff was only another 45 miles, but included a 2000 foot ascent over about 7 of those miles.  I could see the top of the climb from its outset, and it looked deceptively close.  When I got to it in a little over an hour, I spotted a motorcycle-rider-looking guy (tattoos, bandana, tank top, etc) holding up a sign.  He said he was protesting for the teamsters and asked if I wanted to accompany him to his little encampment in the woods for a coffee.  Sure, why not?  It was maybe 100 yards from the road up into some pine forest.  He had been camped there for a couple of weeks, and I was his first company, and this was pretty clear by how excited he seemed to be to have someone to talk to.  Over the coffee and the course of the next hour, I learned that he was, or at least claimed to be, among many, many things:
* A “roaming president” of a chapter of the Hells Angels
* An expert knife fighter with 3-black bar martial arts
* Speaker of French Basque, Hebrew, and one or two other relatively obscure languages.
* A veteran of 500 hand-to-hand combat fights, of which he had only lost 2
* The subject of ongoing monitoring and harassment by various law-enforcement agencies.
* An expert hunter/tracker
, and so on…

While he was making these claims, such as they are obviously things that should give one pause to hike, and remain, in the woods with him, he would also repeatedly claim that his trouble-making days were behind him and that he had turned a new leaf.  I sensed that he was not a threat to me….he wasn’t at all antagonistic or disagreeable in the way that people that are looking for an excuse to harass someone typically are.  I did start to wonder how credible his many claims were, but I also wasn’t that invested one way or the other in the truth behind them.  The conversation was pretty one-sided, and I felt I was mostly humoring him for it’s duration, but there was a few minutes when we were talking about relationships and interacting with women when we had a moment of relating to one another’s vulnerabilities in this regard.  That said, earlier in the conversation, he said that women lie whereas men do not, which to me is an absurd generalization, but which I just went along with, with an acknowledging grunt, as it was expressed emphatically enough that I though it would be imprudent to make it a point of contention that could escalate into fight number 501, new leaf notwithstanding.  After declining a refill on the coffee, I thanked him for the cup I had finished and said that I ought to push on.  He said I  knew where to find him if I wanted to return, and wished me well on my way.

As I descended into Flagstaff, I noticed there were a LOT of motels, and it occurred to me that this was the largest city I’d yet been to on this tour.  So, when I got to MIX Flagstaff, where I got a healthy and hearty salad, I looked up the rates and found one for $45 a night.  This seemed reasonable, and a shower and some hand-washing of my riding apparel would be welcome.  The manager of the motel I chose was a fairly young and friendly guy named Karthik from Hyderabad who was interested in hearing about my tour and my time in India, a welcome contrast to the guy in the woods (whose name I had noted, but am choosing to withhold).

The showering was excellent, after which I put on cloths more suitable for walking around the historic part of town, and did just that.  I happened upon the Grand Canyon hostel, which I had seen in the HostelWorld site/app, but was shown as fully booked.  I stopped in anyways just to ask about the rooms, facilities, and rates and learned that they had dorm beds available for half of what the motel cost, along with a kitchen and clientele that would also have been nice to have at my avail, but that they withheld from the HostelWorld system for technical reasons.  Rookie mistake on my part, I should have known better and checked before going with the motel.   Oh well.  It so happened that they had one bed available for the following night.  I was also IM-ing with a woman I connected with on Tinder who was free that following night and interested in getting together for a beer after her work, so after contemplating it a bit, I went back and reserved the room for following night.  A day off from biking would be good after two consecutive milage record-setting days.

I went back to the motel, watched a little HBO, and fell asleep.  The following morning, I was up early, partaking in the paltry, complimentary continental breakfast while chatting with Karthik,, then back in the room, re-organizing things and making tweaks and adjustments until checkout at noon.  After so much time outdoors in so much sun it felt good to stay indoors for the morning.

From the start of the tour up until the salad I had when I got into town, my diet had been dominated by calorie-dense foods; lots of trail mix, clif bars, peanut butter, etc.  I decided that I should go back to closer to how I’d been eating before leaving Seattle: focusing on high nutritional content foods.  Greens, raw veggies, beans and the like, and avoiding refined carbs and fats.  It’s a bit harder to get sizable quanities of high-nutrition calories, than it is to find simple-fat- or simple-carb-based calories, so I thought I’d find and spend part of the day at whatever all-you-can-eat salad bar I could find.  This turned out to be at a Sizzler’s, a chain I hadn’t patronized since I was a vegetarian teenager going on cross-country road trips with my then girlfriend.  It was passable, and I’d polished off 4 plates worth of food when the waitress stopped offering me fresh plates when, contrary to my resolution to eat nutritionally I sourced a bowl from the soup station and filled it with un-tiny samplings of 4 of the dessert offerings.

I waddled out of the place, got on my bike, checked into and dropped my bags off at the hostel, then went to a nearby city park to let my gut focus on the sizable task I had just assigned it while going some Spanish lessons on Duolingo.  I got through these, but just barely before dozing off.  I’d recently read that the so-called food-coma effect is in fact evidence of the deep interrelationship of the brain and the gut:  when the gut requires extraordinary energy levels to do it’s job, the brain obliges by slowing itself down which exhibits as drowsiness.  I guess everybody knows that, actually.  Anyways, I didn’t want to sleep in the park, or go back to the hostel, so I rallied and rode my bike up the hill atop which is the Lowell Observatory.  I got there just past 3pm, and paid the $12 admission which would definitely had been a losing proposition were it not for a tour that had just started and I was able to catch up with, which granted access to the main large telescope and the exhibition hall (which were otherwise closed to the public).  I’d say the place is not worth the price of admission if the timing doesn’t work out that you can take part in one of these tours of the grounds.

After the tour, I stopped by a solar telescope viewing being hosted by another member of the staff.  We chatted about her studies in chemistry and how it and so many other disciplines of research really boil down to just software development these days.  I told her about the astronomer that I had worked for as an undergrad that had me do a tiny bit of programming, and then tasked me with entering tables of numbers representing the spectra wavelengths of various stars.  When I completed the inane task by taking the table-containing journal to the computer science department and using their prototype scanner with optical character recognition, he excitedly complimented my efficiency, then handed me a large stack of volumes to do next, in response to which I left for the day and never came back.

After my tour of Lowell, I rode back down the hill and to the hostel.  There, I hung out in the lounge and was soon joined by some of the other people staying there, where I heard somewhat typical accounts of excessive drinking the night before.  The conversation didn’t dwell on this for too long.  One guy who is an electrical worker who travels on a per-diem and had just recently been turned on to the existence of hostels turned out to be a standard republican: pro-gun and anti-abortion.  Despite being a conservative traveling on business, he fit in to the scene as well as anyone else, but when he and a Danish guy began debating the intelligence of US gun policy, I had to bite my tongue and make my exit when I heard it claimed that there aren’t THAT many school shootings.  This would be the basis of one of the most gut-aching laughs I’ve had so far on this tour when the Dane and I reviewed the debate the following morning.

My exit was well timed to go meet my Tinder date up the road.  I’d not drank since the light drinking I shared with my Canyonlands cohorts.  We started with a beer each at Hops on Birch, then went to Historic Brewing and had a Cucumber beer each.  Then we went to a decent taco truck and had a couple of tacos.  We contemplating calling the evening at that point, the tacos having a dis-intoxicating effect, and in hindsight, this would have been the smarter choice.  But instead, we went to The Rendezvous and had a whiskey chai each.  It was delicious, but also that pivotal third drink after which more drinks seem to be a deceptively good idea.  We went to The Green Room, where we enjoyed the stylings of a garage-sound band called Sharks in the Deep End who played for us and maybe 6 other people in attendance.  Next, we went to Monte Vista Cocktail Lounge and scored a couple of stools at the very crowded bar, which we kept until it got to be the time where they stop serving, upon which we walked over to a stage where there was a group of maybe 20 people in their 20s singing karaoke.  In the middle of the back-and-forth portion of Bohemian Rhapsody three of them flew offstage and collapsed on the floor at our feet.  This struck us as hilarious at the moment, but in hindsight, and upon reviewing the video footage that I’d captured of the event, it was more sad and sympathy provoking that funny.

As people will when drinking, we decided it was too early to call it a night, so we headed back to her place and at least had the good sense to not get into her bottle of tequila which was the initial motivator for heading back there.  We played with her adorable but demanding dog, Baxter, for a bit, watched a little Rick and Morty, and then turned in, me on the couch, her in her room.  The reader may recall Day 1’s post, Tinder when travelling is, for me, about finding cute and hopefully interesting people to hang out with for a bit, not for one-night hook ups.

All the same, I felt a bit of shame the following morning when she gave me a lift back to my hostel and I walked back in wearing what I had gone out in the night before.  Of course the backpacking partying set saw it a bit differently, but I was quick to point out that I’d only crashed there and that there had been no hooking up.  The hostel host on duty recounted a motorcycle tourist that had had a long series of Tinder dates which he coined a “Tinder bender”, the latter word tweaked a bit to rhyme with the former.  The host was also a former bike tourer, along with another guest at the hostel, and I had a good time trading stories with each and getting some advice on the local routes.

I shoveled down 4 packets worth of instant oatmeal, 4 slices of toast with, ugh, margarine and jam, and several cups of coffee, and then showered off the shame, and started rehydrating.  I was out the door right at the 11am checkout, and on the road to Sedona.  There’s a brilliant urban trail system in Flagstaff, and I used this to get South of town, and then joined up with the 89A.  The route lived up to the praise that the hostel host had heaped upon it, and after reaching an information center and canyon overlook, I was sailing down an incredible, windy descent of thousands of feet into Oak Creek Canyon.  If there’s any truth to the energy vertexes of Sedona that can be felt by people (but apparently not by any scientific instruments), they may have exhibited for me in a slight dizziness that I felt as I took so many turns in such rapid succession and at such high speed.

Continuing along Oak Creek, I stopped at several swimming holes, including the infamous sliding rock.  One of these was also a fishing hole, and I chatted with a guy packing up his gear who turned out to be newly moved to the area from Ohio, and also newly employed and outfitted by the Department of Fish and Game.

I rode the rest of the way into town and then not having eaten anything since my somewhat regrettable breakfast, I went to the Wildflower Bread Company and had their Chicken Pomegranate salad.  I tooled around the shops in town for a bit, went for a latte and talked to the former owner and now part time employee of the place for a while, and then worked on this entry.  It was getting to be time to find somewhere to stay, and having spent (and in retrospect, wasted) as much money on accommodations as I had in Flagstaff, and it being relatively pricey for accommodation in Sedona, I didn’t consider paying for a bed to be an option.  Some of the staff at the info center at the top of the canyon volunteered some good options for dispersed camping, but all of these were at least an hour’s ride out of town.  I started for one of these, but then opted to take a “short cut” through one of the many mountain bike trails that surround town.  Riding my loaded bike on the trail wasn’t really an option, but as I confessed to a woman who was hiking out, and whose decision to double-back I helped rationalize with phone’s make, and who accounted for the sole car at the trailhead, I was very likely going to find some place to bed down along the trail, making every effort to be out of view of any of the houses tucked away at increasing distance from the trails in various bluffs, and to minimize damage to the delicate cryptobiotic crust.  At about a 2/3 a mile from the road, I found a small washout that fit the bill.  I ate a tub of spring greens, a green pepper, and a bag of baby carrots that I’d picked up at a Safeway on the way and read for a bit, and then watched some bats fly around, until the sun was completely set.  The moon, being half full, provided sufficient illumination to tidy up after dinner and lay out pad and bag.  For the second time this tour I opted to not bother with the bivvy, it being dry, warm, and bug-free enough for that to seem warranted.  There was one bird with a pretty simple and tedious song that would not shut the hell up, but others that would chime in with prettier sounds, including an owl.