At this point in real life, I'm in the van on the way home. So these posts will be based on what I remember, what pictures I've taken, and what other people have blogged about from these days. Forgive me if some of these posts lack detail.
As we left the dome, the morning had some fun climbs. At one point I took off on my own so I could climb at my own pace. When I got to the top of the most significant climb, I took a break expecting to be a good distance ahead of most everyone I left behind. After just a minute or two, Casey and Ellie came up the hill so I rode with them for a while. We stopped at a gas station about halfway to lunch to take a short break and refill gatorade and water. I had a slow leak in my tire, so I was filling it up just about every time I stopped. The ride was really pretty, we were surrounded by mountains, and everything was still very green. Lunch was at a pull out on the side of the road and didn't have a lot of shade, so we didn't stay for very long.
The next town was called Show Low. I asked a local where that name came from and he said that at one point, two landowners shared a water well, but there wasn't enough to support both of them, so they left it to a game of cards. Whoever showed the lowest card won the water. Apparently we passed a street also called deuce of clubs; that must have been the winning card. There was a state park there with a lake, so we stopped by there for a dip. It was really pretty, I guess a lot of people from Pheonix have vacation homes in the area, but it was late in the season, so not many people were there. The water was cold, so we didn't swim for very long, but we still relaxed and enjoyed the day.
After this stop, there was another big hill to climb. We took a break at the top and continued on looking forward to getting to second lunch. Chris passed us in the van at one point. We saw him pull into a side street at the bottom of a hill so we assumed that was the lunch stop. As we got a little closer, he backed out and continued further up the road. At that point I had assumed we were breaking for lunch, so the thought of climbing another hill was not pleasant. Eventually we reached Chris and he told us about a crawfish festival happening in the town we were staying. I only ate a couple snacks expecting to get food at the festival in a couple miles.
We got to the festival and of course none of us had money and the wait for crawfish was over an hour long. We wandered around for a while, tried DMing a couple things, but eventually got bored. One lady donated us a pie, so I took off for the host while balancing a pie on my handlebars. There were a couple instances where I almost lost it, making me wonder if something were to happen would I sacrifice the pie to save myself or sacrifice myself to save the pie. Eventually we got to the host and the school was all locked up and the host was unreachable. We waited for at least an hour if not 2 before almost anyone else showed up. Matt was riding sweep and he ran over a razor blade shredding his tire which delayed the trailer from getting to the host. I think the sun was setting by the time we got access to where we were staying and for the host to let us in. Turns out there was only one shower, so we set up shoes to mark our place in line; It was probably 10 or 11 by the time everyone got done showering. Someone managed to secure some crawfish which were great to munch on. We cooked our own dinner and had town hall. After dinner a couple of us walked back into town to get a drink and burger. We were pretty crammed into the room, but we were only there for a night, so it was not big deal .
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