Three Weeks and a Day

The greater Phoenix area is huge! I rode out from the middle of the city and for the next 50 miles I was riding through downtown Phoenix, the outskirts of Phoenix, and then into Tempe, and miles and miles of suburban strip malls, business parks, gated communities, even an urban horse farm. Easily the most urban miles I've ridden since I left The City, but surprisingly carefree: drivers were careful to give me a wide berth, lots of the streets were designed for bike riders with either designated bike paths or really wide shoulders, all the way out to Apache Junction.

Still no camping, the winds were really kicking up hard about ten miles from AJ. The weather forecasters had been predicting the local version of a whiteout: the wind was whipping across the desert floor so hard that it was lifting the sand into the atmosphere. The sky for miles around was a dense white; it was like driving through a fog bank with the exception that this fog was hard, gritty and dry. The Superstition mountains are just outside of Apache Junction, but I could barely make out more than a faint outline; I decided to stop rather than disappear into the sand mist. A positive weather note (I think?): it's thirty degrees cooler at 8:00 p.m. than it was at 4:00 p.m., when it was 99 degrees. The forecast high for tomorrow is 85 degrees, practically an ice age in Arizona. I can't wait.

So I'm three weeks and a day into my trip, and I've ridden 1,031 miles from San Francisco to Apache Junction (with a shuttle ride from Wickenberg to Phoenix thrown in, it's fun to mix things up, hey?) If all goes well, I should only have about 3 or 4 more days to go before I hit New Mexico. In spite of the flats, and the heat I'm still having fun, meeting great people, learning about the land and myself. I'm ready for what tomorrow may bring.