TOP: Tom at the Nogales border crossing into Mexico
2nd: Sunrise over Nogales. Note the mexicans sneaking in in the photo lower right. They're dressed as cactus
3rd: John "Marco Polo" Coble takes his first wrong turn. Clearly you can see why he thought this was a road...
4th: "The homeland security probe was this wide" yells Tom at the border as he tries to re-enter the US
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Friday morning arrived bright and early for the am crew. Tom, John, and Cliff were to head to Nogales from Phoenix for a sunrise start, while Jerry and I picked up Gill, Ben and Karen at the airport (why can Boston people never be on time?), and then drove to Mesa to pickup our rental RV. Then, we would rendezvous with the am crew sometime in the afternoon and switch teams. Or so we planned...
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We had concocted a plan to tell the 3 latecomers that Cliff had crossed the border to get a better picture, and that homeland security wouldn't let him back in without his passport...which was still in phoenix...so we would have to drive the 3 hours to the border to get it to him after we had done all our other chores and RV pickup. We went on and on about what a dope Cliff was, and amazingly enough, nobody argued the point. In fact, his loving little sister kept saying "just leave his sorry butt in mexico". Over and over...
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Anyhow, they at least had the common sense not to cross the border (EDITORS NOTE: remember this statement for the end of the story at the Canadian border if a few days...) and got a relatively early start. Leg one was Nogales to Tucson, a fairly minor up and down before the heat of the day. Uneventful, except for the fact that tom's bike blew up, and they lost about an hour trying to get it all fixed. For those who know tom, it is HIGHLY unusual for him not to have a mechanical device in tip-top condition at all times, so we were all stunned. At least he didn't need a key for the bike.
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Leg two was Tucson to Phoenix, and this was a different story. It topped 110 degrees pretty quickly, and within minutes of heading out of Tucson, John made a wrong turn. It's pretty easy to see why, since there was only two roads and one of them had a 50 FOOT TALL SIGN that said "PHOENIX --->". But, he missed it...probably thinking about his new mortgage payment or something.
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They found him a while later, somewhere around the New Mexico border, and reset. Then, he got lost again. At this point, they put cliff on the road, as they figured that he could at least find his way home to phoenix.
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Meanwhile, the other 5 of us headed over to Mesa to pickup the RV. We had a 2:00 appt to check-out, and, true to their word, by FOUR O'CLOCK they finally had our RV ready. It was not a pretty scene...I've never been sweared at that much in spanish before. So by the time we finally got to the am crew somewhere south of phoenix, it was about 5:00...and they had been on the road in 110 degree temps for something like 10 hours. They were, in the words of John "Boiled like a pot of lobsters". Add the fact that the threesome are the white boys of the trip, and that the term paleface no longer applied. Not enough sunblock in Arizona to save those 3 from burning.
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We swapped out teams, finished off the night with a big pasta dinner at Cliff's house, and I lulled myself to sleep on his couch. Tomorrow, we start the big climb from Phoenix (~ 1k') to Flagstaff (~7k')...should be a doozy.
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Par-boiled Lumpy out
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