Day 17 - Dateland to Gila Bend

-
There were quite a few large black beetles walking around the desert.



My bike before it got reloaded with all my panniers. We camped in Dateland.


Here I am standing tall at sunrise.


Made a call from a classic telephone booth.


Convinced the local pizza hut person to serve me a pizza in my own container rather than their disposable cardboard and plastic ones.


Yes it is an a plastic bag, but wow are these good dates!


Ken and me all loaded up and ready to ride.


It was a beautiful day to bike and we saw more wildflowers.


In Gila Bend we ate at the Space Age restaurant. Service was super slow (an hour+ to get our order) but the food was good.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Ride Around Finland

-
Image
Friday August 2, 2019, Biked 123 km. Warm and partly cloudy all day. Whoa, you probably thought this blog was just about my ride across the US. Well it is focused on that but this ride in Finland was very cool and was an interesting one to compare to my ride across the US, so I decided to make it one of my epilogue blog posts. TLDR: Finland has much better bicycling and transit facilities than any of the cities I visited in the US. On my walk from my hotel to the bike shop where I had a rental bike waiting, the sidewalks were designed for bicyclists and pedestrians.  The had little channels carved in them so the rain gutter water could tidily run into the street. I picked up a beautiful light carbon fiber road bike from Bicyclean Helsinki -- a wonderful and highly recommended bicycle rental shop in Helsinki. Super friendly staff and great bicycles from city bikes to performance mountain and road bikes. Off on the road it was a beautiful day with sun shining o...
Read more

Day 46 - Byrnes Mill to St Louis

-
Image
Today it was 60s and 70s all day. It also started with a killer hill with some 15-20% grades. Thankfully there were some 6% sections where I could recover a bit before the next really steep part. This is a photo looking down from the top. It doesn't show the steep parts. Wish I had some pictures of the steep parts but not possible to stop and restart on those sections -- would have had to walk them. Then I did some more reasonable climbing and eventually reached the top where there were water towers. The gradual downhill that followed a ridge was great! These nice homes on the ridge... ....had lots of trash on the other side of the road. :-( Also on the ridge was a large confluence of high voltage power lines. My leather biking gloves wore out with holes and lots of thin spots. Luckily this bike shop had new ones that fit me well. I encountered some excellent trail. And met Wade, a fellow bicyclist. The trail went along a r...
Read more

Day 97 - Lexington to Arlington and back - Final Riding Day

-
Image
Wednesday May 29, Biked 7 miles. Total mileage by end of day: 5004.  Cool and cloudy. Ok, now I'm finally wrapping up my last daily SOS ride post well after I finished my ride and I'm doing it from Finland. Right after my ride I was very busy attending my 35th college reunion then moving my son from UCLA to our house and then to Finland, which is why this post is happening from Helsinki. Tuesday May 28 was going to be my final presentation and final day of riding but as I mentioned in "yesterday's" post, I met a mom along the Minute Man bikeway who really wanted me to talk at her elementary school. When opportunity knocks, who am I to say no? So I said yes and she contacted her principal to set it up. When I started the ride I had about 50 talks set up in advance and it was a ton of work. Most of my talks (204 of them) happened as this one did. After chatting with locals, they invite me over or set something up on the fly :-) On my way to the school, my ...
Read more