Seems like forever since we talked. I'll just touch on a few of the highlights of the past few days:
- Timing is everything. We emerged from beneath the Tin Man corpus at Rambling Roads RV Resort to discover that Saturday mornings are all about the weekly communal breakfast. For $3.50 we gorged our physical selves but, more importantly, scratched the spiritual itch that can only be reached by bad coffee in styrofoam cups, an announcement of memorial services for Edgar, a $12.00 jackpot on a 50/50 raffle, and the soothing white noise of loose-dentures slipping over shrivelled gums.
- we spent the next night in Aguilla, Az. in a public park beside - yes, a theme is emerging - the fire station. Aguilla has a population of 767 humans and 2943 dogs. The dog figure may be low since most of them are the size of a tennis ball, a frantically loud, yapping tennis ball that looks like the one that's been sitting in the corner of your backyard for three years. As we lay thyroid-eyed in our tents, the tennis balls and coyotes went at it all night, triggering each other into greater and greater fits of lunatic yammering. The next morning as we rode out of town a dog started barking at us and - no joke - suddenly lost it's bark. A muted, strangled kind of woof came out, like a case of sudden-onset dog laryngitis. It made me very happy.
- the suburbs of Phoenix are haunted by end-of-movie Stepford trees: perfect orange trees painted insane-asylum white, branches immaculately trimmed in a Dumb and Dumber bowl cut, but with thousands of oranges scattered beneath - the jarring note of wrongness suggestive of imminent breakdown and total collapse. I'm telling you, it was discordant and weird.
- we cycled along the Arizona Canal Bike Trail System for 20 miles through Phoenix. Most of the time, the "canal" was a massive, 200 yard-wide spillway with a tiny, mocking trickle of water down the middle. End of Times thoughts come easily to a couple of sensitive Canadian flowers on bicycles, so if any of you reading this would care to invent cheap desalination, or at least publish a patented, peer-reviewed prescription for perpetual precipitation in a respected academic journal, we would both sleep better.
Finished the first map of the seven-map set published by the Adventure Cycling Association today. Yay! Off to Superior, Arizona tomorraaaaa......