“I knew I shoulda taken that left turn in Albuquerque.” — Bugs Bunny
I probably heard Bugs say those words at least a dozen times long before I knew that Albuquerque was a city in New Mexico. As a kid, I generally had to be dynamited out of bed in the morning… except for Saturdays, when I got up early to watch “The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour” on CBS. Bugs would pop out of a hole in some strange place—the Black Forest, the surface of Mars—and utter those words.
When I googled the expression to make sure I was getting it right, I learned that it actually has a connection to Route 66; who knew? As Jon and I have discovered as we’ve made our way along the route, there have been multiple Route 66’s during its 100 years of existence, most of them cropping up (and dying off) in the first 50. Albuquerque was one of the places where the route changed on several occasions, and one of those changes—in 1937—was noteworthy because it apparently produced a significant number of disoriented motorists… who shoulda taken that left turn.
Today’s post takes its title from a song by Waxahatchee, but I could’ve just as easily chosen “Seems Like Old Times.” The first—entirely positive—throwback came when me, Jon, and our respective bikes all arrived ahead of schedule in Albuquerque. Knock on wood, because we have been extraordinarily fortunate throughout these rides with our flights being on-time. Today, I arrived almost an hour ahead of Jon, found a nice, out-of-the-way corner of the baggage claim area, and had my bike almost completely reassembled by the time Jon landed. We started riding at 12:32… and stopped at 12:33, when Jon discovered two screws that he’d forgotten to tighten, which caused the front wheel to turn independently of the handlebars, which is generally not a good thing. He got it fixed, and we had a nice easy descent down city streets (with a bike lane). Since neither of us had eaten and the pickins were slim, we opted for lunch at McD’s. That was Mile 4.
The following few miles were on a bike path along the Rio Grande, and then we got right back to it. The bike path and park had served as a bit of a windscreen, and it was flat. Once we left the path, our route would be due west, on a heavily trafficked boulevard, uphill, and into the teeth of 20-30 mph wind gusts. In other words, pretty much right where we left off in 2023.
Actually, while I remember that Texas panhandle wind being much worse, we weren’t climbing then. Today, it was a long, brutal ascent: over 1200ft of elevation for a full ten miles.
As we were climbing, off in the distance, I could see a large building with “The Hilltop” painted on the side of it. I had every right to believe that building sat on the crest. It did not. In fact it was at least a mile in front of the crest, and the hill after “The Hilltop” was steeper than the one before it.
Things got better from there, at least as far as the climbing went. The wind was still an issue, but we were riding on a smooth stretch of I-40 access road and traffic wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t even that bad when the smooth road turned left while our route continued straight onto what was probably an original Route 66 roadbed: rutted and rocky now. We then reached another crest and could see our destination, the Route 66 Casino Hotel, in the distance… at a considerably lower elevation. I said to Jon that it was “all downhill from here.” We enjoyed maybe two miles of descent, and then had to hit the brakes when the rocky pavement disappeared and left us biking on loose dirt and sand in powdery drifts that had us fishtailing. We took a small service tunnel to get to the feeder road on the north side of I-40, and finished the day’s efforts with a nice, easy mile to the hotel.
Not the day I was expecting after a promising start, but it was a good day nevertheless to be back on the route with a good friend… and feeling the wheels turn beneath me.
Tomorrow: Grants, our first stretch of riding on the Interstate, and my first 60-mile ride since September of 2024.
Rideworthy 