Historical Post: 9907 XC bike tour, Vol 2

ABOVE: GILL

Saturday

Dateline: Yuma, AZ. F'n HOT!!!

We decide that Chris, Tom, Jerry and I will start out the morning. I leave fully light configured at 0400, pitch black except for the INS helicopter lights scanning to border. Look like damned UFO’s at this hour. Several times over the next couple of hours either aircraft of land vehicles come down to check us out, and I don’t think that they were looking at our butt’s either. I’m thinking this is how it will end – in an immigration prison with 100’s of Mexicans explaining the microeconomics of NAFTA.

Several good pulls by everyone and suddenly it is about 1000, also known as “The hour of heat death to bikers”. It quickly reaches 115+, and probably 125ish on the roadway. We are cooking big time – everyone’s unhappy, we are really struggling, and the irritations are many – cops stopping us for riding on the interstate, truckers who try to play “good touch – bad touch”, slithering little things jumping across the road, and of course, best of all, Cliff’s truck starting on fire.

Now, in case you were wondering, it really puts a damper on a sag wagon when it is flaming down the highway. Luckily, a trucker had a fire extinguisher, and AAA loves to tow from, oh say 80 miles in the desert back to town. We kiss the truck adios and plow forward. Cliff can drive back in 2 weeks and pickup whatever is left of it.

We’ve now named the RV ‘the big rig” and Gill, she drives the big rig best of all. I think that we will call her “Il rey de rig grande” – the Queen of the BigRig.

The day’s highlights all come early. First, we find the most wonderful breakfast bar, complete with nude waitresses (we’d already been in the desert 6 hours – trust me, they were nude to us).

Then, just as we were rolling out of town, we see a broken down biker on the side of the road. We stop to help, and it turns out he is a homeless person with a broken bike axle. He is towing a small trailer with all of his worldly possessions and only has a dollar to his name. And, best of all, (and I wear this is true), he tells us that he “Plays the piano for jesus”. I tell him that I won’t hold that against him. We take his wheel back into town, buy him a new axle (along with a tire, tube, and water of which he had none) and drive it back out. He’s now dancing on the street – great visual. He literally had no water, it was ~ 105 at that point, and when queried where he was headed, he said “Goin’ to Northern California but I have to stop somewhere first”. Now keep in kind that he’s headed EAST into the desert, has $1, NO WATER, a broken bike, and nothing even remotely approximating a CLUE. If only he had a piano….

We arrive in Tempe at nightfall. Everyone is miserable, dehydrated, tired, hungry, and generally broken. Even Cliff is out of energy. We have a quick cookout, lay in the pool to cool our cores, and literally die on the concrete deck for the evening.

Next up: SUN day!