Day 6
Brawley to somewhere near Arizona
It’s Saturday morning, I was too tired to write about the day, possibly because I did not drink any lemonade all day. What I DID drink was 5 liters of water as I rode thru the Imperial Valley, the desert and mountains beyond, including some spectacular dunes. The center of the dunes recreation area is Glamis, CA. Our Trail Boss made sure the nice lady running the store stayed open for us. This is not the dunes high season. That comes a bit later in the year when the weather cools off a bit. On the subject of weather, we encountered temps well below the seasonal average, but it was still very hot. Thankfully not 110. It can reach that temp this time of year I was told. The lady at the store was very sweet. I purchased a bottle of water for $2 and after I handed her the cash. She told me, “darling, take that bottle back to the case and get the big size.” What a sweetheart.
One of my riding companions gave me a frozen bottle of Gatorade as we were leaving in the morning (or Gatorade, not sure which it is). I drank it in one go on the summit outside Glamis. I’ve never drank that much in one go before. It was marvelous. It had melted completely but it was still cold, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Last night I rolled into our camp site, a church in Brawley, and noticed that both screws were gone from the rack stays that attach the rack to the seat post. I’m not sure why the rack was not dragging on the ground at that point. I was a bit discouraged, because I didn’t have time to pack an extra set of screws before leaving on the tour. I need to hit a bike shop and “pick up” some spare screws and some Loktite. I fixed the rack by removing one of my three bottle cages and using the screws from that to re-attach the rack stays.
I got a bit of a scare late in the day. Most of the day’s riding was on roads with less than a foot of shoulder to the right of the white line. In one of those tight places I noticed a car passing a truck ahead of me. It was clear the driver was not going to make it around the truck before passing me. I came to a complete stop just before the car and truck, side-by-side, passed by me at full speed. People in this part of the country don’t fiddle around on 2-lane state roads, they are moving. There was no time to pull off the road, but coming to a stop is the next best thing. You don’t want to swerve and get in the way of that shit.
Miles: 70
