Given the long day yesterday, we took our time getting out of our hotel and didn’t get on the road until after 11. This was fine though because the temperatures have dropped significantly, with a high in the 70s it’s nice to be riding midday.
Last night we looked over our route and found a mistake in our plans – we were intending on staying the night in Winslow, AZ and cutting northwest to Cameron in a 80 mile day. But the recommended route on that 80 mile day included at least 40 miles of dirt road – something we had not noticed before. More often than not, riding on dirt roads with our heavily loaded bicycles is a challenge as the tires tend to sink into patches of soft dirt or gravel, causing a loss of traction and balance.
So we re-evaluated our route and grudgingly accepted the fact that there were no other paved roads in this part of the state besides I-40. Flagstaff is 90 miles from Holbrook but we found a casino and hotel only 65 miles out and set our sights on it.
Interstate riding is efficient but monotonous. The grades are so smooth that it’s hard to tell if you’re going up or down, and the curves are so wide that there’s never a sense of wonder of what’s around the next corner. At every onramp there’s a sign telling bicyclists to ride only in the shoulder, a kind reminder that it is allowed.
Two construction projects threw a wrench in our plans as we watched our precious 8 foot shoulder dwindle to nothingness. The only alternative was to ride in the construction zone, on the other side of the orange barrels and concrete dividers – a strategy that was blessed by the construction workers on-site. And for a brief mile we had an entire section of interstate to ourselves, removed from the roaring traffic that had been diverted to the other side of the median.
To quote myself from nine years ago and two hundred miles to the northeast, “Storm clouds glided across the sky, reaching down with tendrils of rain.” We managed to avoid most of the rain as we made our way across the flat desert landscape and the tall mountains near Flagstaff drew nearer. The headwinds of the morning turned into a brief hour of tailwinds before returning in full force as we slowly pushed through the last 20 miles to arrive at our destination for the night.
Only 10 more miles of interstate tomorrow before we can cut off and head north towards Utah.
Notes from Donald: “Riding on the interstate all day brought a new set of challenges but we were at least luckily able to thread the needle between rain clouds and only get a little drizzle.”
Today’s mileage: 71 miles
Total: 514 miles
