Hey Dudes!

Today's ride was from Salome to Wickenburg, which calls itself "The Dude Ranch Capitol of the World." The downtown architecture celebrates the theme with a faux rendering of the west as it ought to have been. The ride was 57 miles with 1,120 feet of climb. The day started with a nearly flat road and then rose with a very shallow rise for the next 40-ish miles. (Average rise 2.8%.) The rise doesn't seem like much, but it was unrelenting. I've ridden two or three mile length grades and they are manageable, if not annoying, but mile after mile of up is not a lot of fun. A group of us stopped for lunch outside the Eagle Eye Mart in Aguila. We were greeted by a pair of young dogs nipping at our heels, but they stopped chasing and barking when we pulled into the Mart. As a group, we try to be respectful and buy something before asking to use the restroom, especially since we can overwhelm a clerk in a small place like this. Poor Chuck, who had a rear tire go flat yesterday, had a slow leak in his front tire today. It turned out to be the valve stem. Two flats in two days. Before we left a truck pulled up and handed Tom a 700cc inner tube. We were in the middle of nowhere and a guy who saw Chuck's plight was able to help with the right size inner tube.

The desert has changed. Since we were climbing over a thousand feet, the temperature was cooler, the desert was greener, flowers were appearing, and we were seeing large Saguaro cactuses. Dennis (one of the group leaders) said we should start seeing wildlife like roadrunners or even coyotes. All we saw today was one roadkill fox or coyote. We couldn't really tell, it smelled like it had been there a while. The best part of the ride was about a twelve mile descent into Wickenburg. It's a town of around 7,500 and easily the largest place we have been to all week. Tom and Chuck stopped in to an ice cream place and struck up a conversation with a guy wearing spurs. Turns out there was a big team roping competition in town. We could hear it from our campground.

This afternoon when I was talking with some of our group outside the laundry on a patio, a guy walking by asked me what "Broomstacking" was. I had on a Des Moines Curling Club t-shirt that said "Win or Loose, we are Broomstacking Later." He had never heard of curling and. I had to explain the game to him in order for him to understand the reference. Telling him that after the game, we stacked our curling brooms and drank beer seemed to make sense to him.

Camping space is tight and two tents had to pitch by the laundry facility. Tomorrow we ride to Mesa through Phoenix. It will be one of the longer rides of the journey at almost 90 miles. As I write this in my tent, it is raining and someone nearby is snoring. Last night I could hear two people snoring, a kind of call and response snorefest. We want to get an early start tomorrow. We'll make breakfast, pack up our probably very wet tents and head out around 7:00. Hee Haw!