Today was originally planned to be the second of three short days, Chambers-to-Holbrook, with a trip to the laundromat. Our ability to reach Holbrook yesterday shifted “laundry day” to Winslow. With the exception of our initial Chicago-to-St. Louis trip, when laundry was done at my house in Springfield, we’ve always had a day like this… except this day was much better riding than those others.
Last night, we made the decision to abandon the Adventure Cycling “alternate” (i.e., non-interstate) route from Holbrook to Winslow because it was apparently either poorly paved or not paved at all. In retrospect, I should’ve realized that if Adventure Cycling—which labors mightily to keep cyclists off of highways—deemed the interstate to be the preferred route, the alternate route must be seriously deficient.
So, we rode most of our miles on I-40 again. The shoulders continued to be wide and smooth, and while the semis and cars weren’t fewer, farther between, or slower on a Sunday morning, it was about as pleasant a ride as we could have wished for. The wind was behind us, the road sloped down, and we each cruised along in our highest gear for most of the trip. Even after arriving in Winslow and ambling along on city streets for 2-3 miles before getting to the hotel, I still showed an average moving speed of 15.8mph.
This was my second occasion to “stand on the corner.” (The first was back in the summer of 2001, when Ed Harris and I made our “John Ford/Geek Science Tour of the American Southwest.”) You gotta hand it to Winslow for taking a single reference in a pop song and milking it for all it’s worth. They’ve successfully merged Route 66 tourism with pop/country/70’s music tourism. No other Route 66 community we’ve been through has come close to this level of activity. When Jon and I were at “the corner,” the place was well-trafficked at 11:00 on a Sunday morning… and it seemed that most of the people were spending money in the vicinity, at one of a half-dozen little cafes or restaurants. (After doing our laundry, Jon and I rode back to one of those restaurants for a good lunch… and we’ll probably be returning to the same restaurant for dinner because it’s one of the few non-chain places that’s open on Sunday night.)
The title of today’s post is, of course, a slice of the lyrics from “Take It Easy,” but it also has relevance to another of today’s events. Between our photo on the corner and our visit to the Sunshine Laundromat, Jon and I rolled over the odometer: 1500 miles of cycling together. It began in 2022 when I joined him on the Illinois-to-Wisconsin segment of his US Tour; we started the first segment of Route 66 in Chicago the following year.
On our own, we’ve each spent a lot of time listening to the sound of our own wheels, and it hasn’t driven either of us crazy (yet). Time alone on my bike on a route has almost always been time well-spent for me. But there’s also something pretty damn special about sharing the road with a good friend, and hearing the sound of someone else’s wheels turning alongside yours.
Tomorrow, we’re aiming to bite off half the distance to Flagstaff: a little more than 30 miles to the Navajo Twin Arrows Casino. It will be only slightly longer than our first day of biking out of Albuquerque on Wednesday afternoon, and it will present us with the same challenges: a 1,000ft elevation increase… and wind. It will be a crosswind from the southwest, not a headwind, but the gusts are supposed to reach 30mph by afternoon, so we don’t have the luxury of taking our time getting out of Winslow. Our rides of peaceful, easy feelings are over.
Rideworthy 