Kitt Peak

Rode Kitt Peak today.... It was AWESOME!

Today we loaded up the car and headed out to Sassabee Road where we planned to leave the big white tird (aka our Dodge Caravan) and ride to Kitt Peak. Typically this ride is done from Tucson and clocks in around 200 plus km. With Dave still getting his cycling legs back and a five and a half hour ride scheduled for tomorrow, we opted to keep the ride to three hours. The Ajo hiway which is the road you take to Kitt Peak was a cultural experience. The shoulder disappears pretty quickly which left us sharing the road with numerous boarder patrol vehicles, the reservation's police vehicle and lots and lots of rubbish at the side of the road. I don't want to stereotype but given the number of road side memorials we passed and the number of beer bottles and cans we noted, I started to wonder if the latter lead to the former. An hour later we found ourselves at the base of Kitt Peak with 12 miles standing between us and the white dome at the top. The climb was phenomenal. My legs felt great given I haven't many outside/hilly rides in them this winter. We had a quick snack at the top then headed down. We ended up having to stop on five separate occasions to get the feeling back in our hands. It cooled off quite a bit towards the top so the ride down proved to be quite cold. The ride back the base to the car was a nice "false downhill". We passed through a boarder patrol but were just waved through... apparently they didn't think we were storing any illegal Mexicans in our spandex. We ended up back at the car 3.5 hours after we started. All in all a great day.

Today we were planning to head to Phoenix for some shopping, however, after determining that it would amount to 4 plus hours of driving, we opted to stay close to home and went to the local malls here in Tucson. We found a Nike Factory outlet which proved lethal to my visa. Such wicked deals compared to what we pay at home.

Tonight Dave and I are making dinner for Dave (of Dave and Pauline our gracious hosts), and then plan to hunker down and watch some CSI. Tomorrow is Mt. Lemmon and we are aiming to make it a 5 hour ride. I will be sure to bring my camera along for some good pics!