Route 66 Trip, July 14
Another excellent day, albeit h-o-t, ending up 115 degrees F (46 Celsius).
All day through desert.
Interspersed with Route 66 memorabilia such as these models in a small town.
We stopped for fuel in McConnico -- our bikes might manage 200 miles but in the desert you can never be sure of distances between petrol stations (correction, the satnav will tell you but I suppose we have not been looking). This was the guy who served us.
As usual, we saw trains.
Western Arizona is very beautiful, if wild.
Here we are approaching Sitgreaves pass on the road between McConnico and Oatman
The sign shows a cactus of a kind (Saguaro Cactus) we have not been seeing in this desert, curiously; more typical of Southern Arizona.
We did see these types of vegetation as we began to climb Sitgreaves pass, though:
Sitgreaves pass is extremely winding and beautiful, excellent riding if sometimes tricky to get photos. To stop you need a place where other traffic can get past safely and a hard shoulder which is not a soft shoulder, i.e. one the bike's side-stand won't simply bury itself in.
Near the top this was the view looking back over Arizona:
and this to the front, more Arizona and (after the Colorado River), California.
This as we proceeded onwards.
Poor Pete got his jacket zip stuck. The temperature was over that of blood heat and his jacket is a heavy one. We all have quite hefty clothing. Here he is trying to get the jacket off.
Forunately Melissa has a knife with loads of attachments and used the pliers to pull the offending trapped lining out with no damage to the jacket but it was a sticky situation, literally.
After the pass we came down to Oatman, a town which is a little cameo of Western towns with wooden sidewalks and roaming feral jackasses said to have descended from the times they were used in mining. It trades very heavily on this Wild West image, unsurprisingly.
Here is Melissa with a couple of the jackasses.
We stopped for a drink. Everywhere we stopped we had to take in liquid (and usually let some out too).
See the signs behind the happy drinkers.
Looks as if Ringo is known here too:
We met the car party in Oatman.
Here's how Oatman got its name.
By the end of today, Melissa's sandals, which she had strapped to her bike, had melted. Tomorrow we plan to hit the road at 6am, but the hotel manageress says the temperature then will still be over 90 degrees F. (blood heat is 98.4)