Travel – Telling History

The Beaches of Arizona (Part 1)

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Back in 2012, we decided to take the kids back to our home state of Arizona and then do a big loop out to California. The kids were eleven and eight, so there were old enough to remember the trip and at that great age when they loved doing things as a family. It seemed like a good time.

We were going in early June, so we knew that Phoenix would be in the low 110 degF range each day, but we were also planning to go to Northern Arizona, which would see temperatures in the 70’s, and also out to the beach in California which might be in the low 80’s. During the time in Phoenix we decided to stay at the Pointe Resort, which had added a small waterpark as part of the resort, so we figured we’d just hang out in the water a lot of the time.

So the plan was to fly into Phoenix, then go up to Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon for a couple of days, then drive through Lake Havasu City and Kingman, then out to LA and Anaheim, down to San Diego, then back to Phoenix. We got our digital camera, packed our suitcases, and jumped on the plane. In a few hours, we had landed at Sky Harbor Airport.

Phoenix

We got into Phoenix. As expected, the heat was oppressive, but nothing we weren’t expecting. We went to the Pointe, which was arranged in a set of smaller buildings with eight or so condo-like rooms in each building. When we got to our room, the kids got a drink of water from the tap.

“Dad, this water is terrible!” said my son.

My wife and kids quickly declared that the water was undrinkable. I remembered drinking water from the tap growing up and never really minded the heavily chlorinated taste. After living in places with good tap water, however, I had to admit that it did taste a bit off. I thought we could tolerate it for a few days, but after consultation with my wife, I headed off to the supermarket to buy a bottle of water.

I went to the Abco, which was actually the supermarket we used when I was growing up in Phoenix (it was a Lucky’s supermarket at the time). I’d been there probably more than one hundred times. I bought a gallon jug of water (I’ve never understood paying a quarter for a single-serving of water) and headed back to the room. I also bought some soda and snacks.

We spent the next couple of days at the resort. The water park was nice with one big pool with a few slides from an upper level down into it and then a lazy river that went around the area. We also saw a few friends while we were in town and had dinner with them. After that, we loaded up the car, including the bottle of water, minus a glass, and headed up I-17 to Flagstaff.

Jerome, Sedona, and Oak Creek Canyon

Once we got out of the Valley and up onto the Mongolian Rim we stopped at Sunset Point, my favorite rest stop. Shortly after that we left I-17 and started to take the backroads.

First, we drove through Cottonwood and over to the ghost town of Jerome Arizona. Jerome is an old copper mining town, once known as the “Wickedest Town in the West.” It reached a population of 15,000 in the 1920’s, but was abandoned after WWII and became a ghost town. Then it was resettled with 50-100 residents there today. They even had an influx of hippies during the 1980’s and this largely isolated town is full of artists today. Many make art from copper and silver, given the town’s history in mining these minerals.

The neatest part about the town is that it is on the side of a mountain with all of the houses built out over the slope. The highway up to the town is narrow and windy, so it had my wife grasping the dash board the whole way up. Once up at the town, we found a place to park and went to eat lunch at the restaurant. There are spectacular views of the whole area below. I remembered staying with my wife at the Ghost City Inn Bed and Breakfast several years ago and looking out the window there from our room over the expanse.

From Jerome we continued up the old highway through Oak Creek Canyon, which has some of the most beautiful scenery in Arizona. Along the way we stopped in Sedona and went shopping at a few of the shops. We remembered being at a bed and breakfast in Northern California a few years before and listening to a New Agey-couple talking about Sedona and how you could feel the vortexes rising up from the rocks. We didn’t see any vortexes, but did get some nice pictures of red rocks along the way.

After Sedona we continued up the road and up in elevation towards Flagstaff, AZ. we then reached a destination I was eager to share with my kids: Slide Rock. Slide Rock is a natural area where the creek flows through a series of rocks that have some algae growing on them. The result is a series of slides where the you can sit down and the water would push you downstream.

I was a little disappointed when we got there in that what had been just an open area that anyone could enjoy when I was growing up had become a park property with a $20 day use fee. Since it was around 5 PM by the time we got there, we would only have an hour or two to enjoy the area before sundown, so the $20 felt like a rip-off. Still, we had come all of that way and decided to go ahead and feel the pain to show the area to the kids.

The park service had added some nice amenities like a bath house, which allowed us to change out of our wet bathing suits at the end of the stop. (We were a little disappointed in that they were trying to close the bathrooms early, so we had to fight a bit to get time to change.) They also had constructed a homestead and some landscaping that would have been typical of houses in the area a hundred years before. If I were living in the wilderness, being in a place like Slide Rock would have been great.

During college, my wife and several of her friends had a different adventure at Slide Rock. She went with her female friends and couple of guys that they knew. While they were there, my wife (girlfriend at the time) looked over to see her friends sunbathing topless on a rock. She didn’t join them and was a bit shocked by the scene.

After the sun went down we headed on up Oak Creek Canyon and finally arrived in Flagstaff and went to our motel for the night. We went to Granny’s Closet for dinner (my wife went to college in Flagstaff, so we knew the area well). After dinner, I went to a local store Walgreen’s and bought some water bottles, since we were going to be hiking into the Grand Canyon the next day and had forgotten to bring any from home. I bought some really cheap ones, expecting to throw them away after the day, but somehow they made it into our suitcases and are in our cabinet today, never used since that trip.

The Grand Canyon

We got up early the next morning and headed north to the Canyon. The plan was to do a bit of easy hiking in the morning and then some site seeing along the rim during the afternoon. My wife had been to the Canyon several times, but had never been below the rim. I had been all the way to the river and back (in one day) during a high school Ranger team trip. Our children who were about 10 and 7 had never been to the Canyon.

We parked in one of the large parking lots and then proceeded to visit the gift shop. One of the books I leafed through was Death in the Canyon, which details the many deaths that have occurred at the Grand Canyon. Many were things like being swept away by the river or backing up too much when taking a picture, but there were some incidents like defiant children who simply ran over the edge when their parents told them to stay back. After reading up and my mind being filled with death and worry, we went to the trail.

I saw on a map the Ooh Aah point was about two miles down the South Kaibab trail, which seemed like a reasonable hike for us. We parked near the South Kaibab trailhead and headed down. Walking down was fairly easy, although my wife was a bit worried about losing her footing on the sloped trail. We made good progress, however, and after about an hour made it down to Ooh AAh point and took some pictures. I looked down at the trail below, and of course it was tempting to continue on since it seemed like it was just a little bit further, but we were sensible and started back up.

Photo by Produtora Midtrack on Pexels.com

Now, even though it wasn’t particularly hot (it was in the high 70s or 80s) since we were at high altitude on the rim of the Canyon, it was very dry and the sun was intense, making you dry out quickly. All of us were drinking water regularly, except my daughter who declared that she was not going to drink water. My son and I tried to explain that she needed to drink water to avoid dehydration, but she insisted that she wouldn’t. I started having pictures of her passing out on the way up and wondered if I’d be strong enough to carry her back up to the rim. Luckily, she changed her mind with a little prodding, drank some water, and was able to make it back up to the rim.

Heading back up, enjoying the limited shade, drinking water!

From there, we went in to the café to have lunch. Then, we went on a park bus out to Herman’s Rest. We saw that area, then went out to the second to the last bus stop, where we heard it was a great place to see the sunset. We sat there, looking out over the canyon as the sun set and the canyon came alive with colors. After it had sufficiently set, we got up and gathered with the crowd who were also there to wait for our bus.

That’s where we realized our mistake. Because the buses went out to the end of the line and loaded up before heading back, and because everyone who went out to see the sunset was heading back at the same time, we needed to wait for a few buses until there was enough space that we could get on one. One we did get on a bus, it was standing room only. So, we stood up for more than a half hour as the bus slowly made its way back to the visitor’s center and unloaded.

At that point is was absolutely pitch black. There were absolutely no street lamps in the parking lot and no ambient light at all. As we wandered the huge parking lot in total blackness except for the car lights as people drove away, I kept thinking that there was a canyon somewhere around there somewhere and wondered if I would be one of the deaths in the canyon, having wandered over the edge, looking for my car. Finally, we found the car and headed back to Flagstaff.

Kingman, Lake Havasu City, and the trip to LA

The next day, after having breakfast at the Little America coffee shop, we headed out towards Kingman, Arizona on Highway 66, then went Southwest to Lake Havasu City. I’d been to Lake Havasu about fifteen years before, having ridden my bike there from Phoenix. It is a pretty place right on the lake formed from the Colorado river but it is also really, really hot with temperatures routinely reaching 115 deg F or more each summer. It is frequently the hot spot for the country, swapping the title with Bull Head City several miles down the river.

This day was no different than normal. We drove through town from north to south, watching the wavering of the air that happens when really hot air rises off of the asphalt. There we turned into the parking lot for the London Bridge Village.

You’ll remember the nursery rhyme about London Bridge falling down. Apparently this was actually the case. Well, hearing that this was happening, the town of Lake Havasu decided to buy it. London bridge was transported from London, stone by stone, and reassembled over the lake at a fairly narrow spot. The rumor is that the town folk of Lake Havasu thought they were buying the Tower Bridge from London, an iconic structure, and were disappointed when the London Bridge showed up, much as it is. Still, the town made the best of it, set it up, and then created a little shopping area around it, complete with a little hedge maze. Luckily the maze isn’t too large as many would probably perish inside after getting lost in the 120 degree heat.

So, we walked across the bridge between Arizona and California, took a few pictures, then headed down a set of steps under the bridge to go into a few shops. We were absolutely the only people anywhere around, the temperature being in the high one-teens and it being very close to noon. Right then, a lady appeared from one of the doors and gave us a sales pitch for a timeshare in Lake Havasu City!

We were nice enough, but we were all thinking that right in the middle of summer, right in the middle of the day, right there on the hot sidewalk was not the time or place to be trying to convince people to come back every year. Perhaps if she had gone to a marina where people were coming back from a day on the lake or to one of the beaches around she would have found some interest, but I couldn’t imagine anyone seeing the place on that day and thinking, “Wow, I really want to get a timeshare here.” I’m sure that in January when it is 70 degrees and sunny there they get lots of interest, but not in the middle of summer.

On to Anaheim

From lake Havasu City we headed through Kingman AZ to Anaheim, CA. I’d driven across the Mojave desert many times as a young adult and rode across as a passenger in my parent’s car, but this time the distances and remoteness were intimidating. Often there were spans of 20 to 40 miles with absolutely nothing, only interrupted at the end by a small gas station with maybe a restaurant attached. I thought about what it would be like to break down out there and walk a day or more in the 110 degree heat to get to anything. Luckily this didn’t happen and we made it to LA and into Anaheim.

The next day we got up bright and early, trying to get to Disneyland when they opened. We had a hotel about five or six blocks away, so we were able to walk to the entrance. Of course, we had to walk all the way through the Disney Marketplace to get the the entrance. We stopped in the Disnew General Store where my wife found some potholders she liked, but figured she could buy them somewhere else in the park and didn’t want to carry them all day, so she left them there. Somewhere along the way my daughter got some $30 Mickey princess ears that she wore for the day.

We spent the day and evening in the park. For dinner we ate at some sort of Mickey Italian restaurant and I got a $15 plate of spaghetti. we then started looking for the potholders my wife liked, but couldn’t find them anywhere. Finally around midnight the park was closing, so we were heading back to the hotel. It was then that my wife discovered that the Disney Marketplace was open until 1 AM and that if we hurried, we could get back to the General Store and get the potholders. The store was, of course, all the way at the end of the marketplace.

We walked all the way down. Along the way we were seeing that a lot of the stores were closed. I was hoping that we’d missed the opportunity and could just go back to the hotel and save $30. No such luck. Some cast members indicated that the store was open. Sure enough, the General Store was about the only thing open at this time we finally made it down there. So we went in, shopped for what seemed an hour, and then left at about 1 AM with the pot holders. We then trudged all the way through the Disney market, back up the five or six blocks to our hotel, and got in around 1:30 AM.

Around 3 AM I woke up and emptied the contents of my stomach into the toilet. I was so sick. I thought maybe it was food poisoning from the Mickey spaghetti, but it may also have been dehydration and exhaustion. We ended up staying in the motel until about 10 AM when I finally felt better enough to drive.

To be continued….

A Night in Yosemite

by Joseph Sheeley

Back in the late 1990s I was a week away from moving out of California to a new job across the country. My wife and I had never been to Yosemite Park and decided now was the time while it was only four hours away. We would regularly camp in the Sierra Nevadas, so we decided to camp for this late September trip.

I called to reserve a campsite, but found all of those in the valley were taken. I found one at Toulumne Meadows, which is at more than 8500 feet elevation. It was a little distance from the valley, but I thought we could spend the day seeing the sights in the valley and then set up camp for the night.

That weekend we loaded up the car and drove out to Yosemite, arriving a little before lunch time. Unfortunately, it was wet and drizzly the whole day. There were low clouds, covering all of the rock features like Half Dome. We were able to see things like the river and one of the waterfalls coming off a ridge, but everything else was covered in clouds. We ate lunch at a dining area near the falls, tried to stop at the general store in the valley but found it was too crowded to park, so we drove out and up to Toulumne Meadows.

We got to the campsite about an hour before sundown and setup my old two-man tent. For dinner we planned to eat out, which ended up being going to a food trailer and buying some hotdogs. After selling us our food they were close for the season. We would have gone to bed hungry if we’d been a little later.

Speaking of food, we’d been warned about the bears before we got there. Because they’ve been fed for so long, the bears will actually break into your car if you leave any food, toothpaste, or anything else that has a scent. Mother bears actually teach their cubs how to break into cars, destroying the cars in minutes. Everything had to go into special bear boxes. They let us know that even if you don’t see them, the bears were always watching and waiting.

Photo by Photo Collections on Pexels.com

That night there was a ranger lead campfire program. Everything was wet and cold, so we weren’t starting a campfire, so we were glad to sit by one made with some dry wood the rangers had stored. There we met many of the campers, discovering that we were the only ones in a tent. Everyone else had a camper.

That night we discovered why. It was the first snow of the season. By 1 AM there were several inches on the top of our tent and I needed to knock it off the roof to remove the sag. My wife had taken my zero-degree Marmont Mountain down sleeping bag and I was using her cheap summer bag. As I listened to the generators of the campers around us, I wondered if I’d freeze that night.

The next morning, we awoke to a winter wonderland. Everything was covered in snow. The park ranger said that late September wasn’t unusual for the first snow even though it took us totally by surprise. The memories of the cold night before disappeared as I walked around the beautiful area, glad that I got to see the first snow of the 1999-2000 season in the high Sierras.

I’ve probably been camping over 100 times and spent 150 nights or so out in the backcountry. There were a lot of times when the weather was absolutely beautiful, but I don’t remember much from those trips. They all sort of blend together. The ones I remember most are the ones like the Yosemite trip when we got blanketed in snow. Another memory is when a severe thunderstorm rolled through on Good Friday that produced hail on us and a tornado about 50 miles away. Don’t let worries about the weather keep you home. Be ready for the weather, whatever it is, and go anyway. Some of the best memories come under dark skies.

Gearing up for camping

I thought I’d talk about some of the gear I use for camping. If you’re getting out of the RV, you’ll need the right gear to be comfortable. Here’s some of the stuff I use.

Marmont sleeping bags:

The down sleeping bag I have is from the 1980’s but still works great today. They cost a lot, but will also last your lifetime. They’ll also make you comfortable even when it drops below freezing outside of your tent.

Marmot Lithium

Wood burning stoves:

Most of the time I use a propane stove like the first one below or a liquid fuel stove, but the little wood burners like the second one shown are nice because you can fuel them with the little twigs you can find everywhere, even in the most picked-over campgrounds. My only dig is that they only burn for fifteen or twenty minutes, then you need to add wood and light them again (with a lot of blowing). They burn long enough to boil a couple of cups of water or cook a quick meal, but stop right about the time a larger pot of water is ready to boil.

MSR PocketRocket Ultralight Backpacking, Camping, and Travel Stove, PR 2: Ultra Compact Camping Stove Ohuhu Stainless Steel Backpacking Stove Portable Wood Burning Stoves for Picnic BBQ Camp Hiking with Grill Grid

Thermarest Ground Pads:

Whenever you’re camping in a tent, you need a ground pad. Not only does this little bit of air and material soften the ground a little, but it more importantly puts insulation between you and the ground. Without this you’ll be cold as the ground sucks out your heat. Thermarest is a great brand of ground pads.

Therm-a-Rest Trail Scout Self-Inflating Foam Camping Mat, WingLock Valve, Regular – 20 x 72 Inches

Kelty Tents:

A high-quality tent, if you dry it out when you get home and keep it clean, will last you for a decade or more. Spend a little more for a tent and it will last longer and be easier to use. Kelty makes great tents in the $150-$300 range. Always get a tent that is one person larger than the number of people you’ll have using it so that you’ll have a little room for gear. Note it will typically require one less people than the size of the tent to set up, so you’ll need at least three to setup a four-man tent, for example.

Kelty Late Start Backpacking Tent – 2 Person (2019 Model)

Practice, Practice, Practice. Playing at Carnegie Hall

by Joseph Sheeley

In high school I got a very unique opportunity. I was playing bass in the Phoenix Symphony Guild Youth Orchestra, a region-wide orchestra with members in 9-12th grade, and we were invited to play in Carnegie Hall in New York City. This is the story of the preparations and that trip.

The PSG Youth Orchestra was sponsored by the Phoenix Symphony. To be a member, you needed to audition and do well. Most of the members would also make the regional and all-state orchestras. It would practice weekly, then play performances around Phoenix. Some of the ones I most remember were an outdoor concert at a local wild west themed park, Rawhide, and the Musical Memories concerts, where we would play four concerts, one after another, in the Civic auditorium downtown for groups of school kids bussed in from all over the Phoenix area.

We even got to have the resident conductor for the Phoenix Symphony, Anthony Sedaris, as our conductor. He was fairly young at the time but just had the feel of “big city,” like Chicago or New York, about him. He was passionate and expected your best, but he was also funny and personable. We were very lucky to have him.

After he had been there a couple of years, he told us he had a big announcement: We had been chosen among a select group of youth orchestras to play at Carnegie Hall. He had applied for us and we had been chosen. We were going to be making the trip the next year.

Of course, once word got out, people from all over who had not been in youth orchestra suddenly wanted to join. Auditions the next year were tough and some people who had been in the orchestra the previous years didn’t make it. There was even a couple of teens who drove 100 miles from Payson, AZ down to Phoenix every week for rehearsals to join. I actually did fairly well, getting placed in second seat for the basses. The person who got first chair was a dark-haired girl I had never met before. The guy who had usually occupied that seat was in third seat. Apparently I’d had a good audition!

The next year we started working on music for the concert. One of the pieces I remember was Hoe Down from Rodeo by Aaron Copeland, which was a fun piece with a lot of musical gimmicks. Another was a piece that we had to rent. We couldn’t make copies of the rental piece and were warned that if anyone damaged, wrote on and couldn’t erase, or lost any of the music it would cost $20 per copy. We were worried. One night the librarian for the orchestra, who kept all of the sheet music, accidently drove off and left a box of extra parts on top of her car. Luckily someone from the orchestra saw this and got the box after it had fallen off. That could have been a disaster!

As we got close to the trip, a local news station came to film us during practice. Apparently they were going to report on us while we were in New York as well. During one of their newscasts they repeated an old joke our conductor had told us:

A young man was walking lost through New York carrying a violin. He asked a man he saw on the street, “Excuse me, sir, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The old man turned to him and said with a smile, ” Practice, practice, practice.”

We did a concert at the high school where we would practice that copied the program we were doing in New York City for our parents the week before we left. It went well.

New York Here We Come

We flew from Arizona to New York. We crammed instruments into every space in the plane. We were renting bases in New York because it was too much trouble to get hard cases and take them on the plane, so all we had was our music with us on the plane. I remember flying over the city and just seeing lights go forever. We flew into Newark, NJ.

It was a mad crush of people at the baggage claim. I put down the small bag I was using to carry my music on the plane while I looked for my bag. Later at the hotel I would realize that I never picked it up and had left my music at the airport. I called the airport to see if they had it somewhere, but no luck. Good thing I didn’t have the rental music in there.

This was 1988 when things were scary in NYC, and Newark made New York look tame. We boarded a bus from the airport in the darkness and silently rode into the city. When we got to our hotel, the New York Penta, not to be confused with the Plaza, we went up to our rooms, four to a room. The place was across the street from Madison Square Garden and wasn’t bad.

The first meal we had was across the street at a Sbarro. I had never heard of the restaurant chain at that point. I enjoyed a slice of pizza in this exotic place. It attached to the subway, as I learned when a man opened a door and walked out from the trains. Meals after that went downhill. We walked past Sbarro the next morning and went about a block away and upstairs into the deli. No one really liked the food, but then we found out that we had contracted with the deli to get most of our meals there. So, several times we had to walk past Sbarro,looking back longingly, and go to the deli. I think we got to eat at Sbarro one last time before we left.

The next evening we went to Carnegie Hall and watched a concert being performed by another high school group. They were pretty good. During the intermission I asked an usher if I should just give up my musical career, having done it all since I was going to play at Carnegie Hall. She said that I needed to come back solo.

Afterwards we started the walk back to our hotel, passing through Times Square on the way. Walking back it was me, two girls, and one of the moms who was chaperoning us. Along the street there was a mentally ill guy who grabbed a man in front of us who was wearing a huge, puffy jacket. The guy in the jacket just turned around and stared at his assailant who turned and continued on his way. The chaperone cowered behind me while all of this was happening for protection. It was strange for me as a 15 year-old to be seen as a protector for an adult who was normally the one looking out for us. Suddenly I’d gone from a high school kid to a guardian on the streets of New York. In a separate incident, a guy through a brick through the window of a car as we passed, then stared at us as if to say, “What are you going to do about it?” There was also a group of girls from another group who said they had been mugged outside of our hotel. I never felt in danger, but maybe I should have.

At Carnegie Hall

The second or third day we had a practice at Carnegie Hall. I remember going into the building and into what I remember as a basement with a big concrete floor below the stage. There we found our rental bases and tried them out. We then went up to the stage and had about an hour to rehearse.

Looking out is was really beautiful. There was a main floor, then a balcony that wrapped most of the way around with big pillars that ran from floor to ceiling. There were boxes that went right over the left and right sides of the stage. Everything was white and gold, very ornate. Our conductor commented that the acoustics were so good, someone could be whispering on stage and a person way out at the back of the auditorium could hear. The hall had the big ring-back after sudden stops in the music where the echo would come back to you a split second after you finished that great halls do. It was neat to get to play rehearsal there since you can’t hear the ring back once the audience is there to dampen the sounds.

Between getting the instruments and the rehearsal, we had a few minutes so a few of us went outside. I saw an older gentleman walking by, so I decided to walk up to him and ask, “Excuse me sir, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?” He was about ready to walk by and ignore me as I imagine most New Yorkers do, but then the absurdity of the question sank in and he couldn’t help but answer. “It’s right here!,” he said with a thick Brooklyn drawl.

The Concert

The concert was the next night. That morning, we had a rehearsal at the hotel that the news crew attended and filmed. Back at home in Phoenix, our families were able to see our progress on the news each night. That afternoon, we took a charter bus over to Carnegie hall in our black tuxedos with our instruments.

I remember a few years later, sitting at a doughnut shop in Tucson at about 2 AM, talking to a teacher from a master class in a bass symposium. He talked about how with music, it is all fleeting. You can play a great concert, but a day later, people would already be starting to forget. By a week later, they would probably just remember that it was good. After a year, it will have been forgotten.

Unfortunately that night was something like that. I remember it went really well. When we played Hoe Down, there was a lady in one of the boxes that laughed when we hit a funny portion and there was a break in the music. Also, while we were playing the rental piece, a couple of friends of mine who played cello dropped the music and it tore when they tried to pick it up. I also remember at the end we got a standing ovation that seemed to go on forever. The news reporter mentioned this as she did her report outside of the hall after the concert. It was magical.

That night we went on a cruise around the Statue of Liberty and had dancing and food. I met a girl from one of the other groups and we danced and hung out most of the night, but then just said goodbye at the end of the night. I probably got to bed around 1 or 2 AM.

After flying back to Phoenix, we all got a copy of a video with our concert from right before we left. It also contained the news broadcasts from the trip. We also each got a picture of the orchestra during the concert in Carnegie Hall, showing a person standing during the standing ovation. I had each member of the orchestra sign the back. To this day I still have the picture hanging in my bedroom.

The Phoenix Symphony Guild Youth Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, Spring of 1987

My sister saw the picture on the wall a few months later and asked about it. She was surprised when my parents told her it was me in Carnegie Hall since she didn’t know anything about the trip. Apparently we didn’t talk much as a family….

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Bike Rides

by Joseph Sheeley

From the time that I was in first grade, I would walk to school. Elementary school, which was grades 1-4, was about half a mile away, across a street and a parking lot, across a major street at a light, and then up a hill about a quarter mile to the school. Both of my parents worked, so I would get home about an hour before my mom and let myself in. For some reason rather than giving me a key, we had one hidden inside a bag of cat food just inside the back door that I could reach through the gate bars.

One I got to fifth grade, the middle school was about 2 miles away, so I started riding my bike. I would mainly ride on the sidewalk and lock up my bike in a fenced-in gravel lot under some grapefruit trees. Here I got used to riding a couple of miles each way per day. I also would ride to friends’ houses and just around the neighborhood.

One day a friend and I were at the school in the evening and discovered that we could get airborne on a berm between one part of the playground and a field. We took turns jumping the berm for the next hour or so, then I rode home. The next day, I was riding to school when the top bar on my bike snapped. I walked the bike home and got a ride to school.

We took the bike to the bike shop and explained that I was “just riding along” when the bar broke. They all laughed, then handed me a biking book that had a list of definitions. It had “just riding along,” or JRA, as a term used by those committing warranty fraud. Well, I was just riding along when the bar snapped….

We bought the first of several mountain bikes from them that day. The shop even had a trail ride they would lead. I went on this ride the next Saturday. They were much more advanced than I was so I only went on one or two rides with them after the first ride, but from the experience I learned where the local trails were and started mountain biking regularly. I even started racing in high school which lasted through early college.

One day I was out riding with a friend and we ended up going a few miles from my house. On the way back, he had us take the canal. It was then that I discovered that the canal was a great way to ride. In one five mile section there was a concrete path, but even where there was no path, the banks were flat, smooth dirt roads that didn’t have many ruts or rocks. These were perfect for a mountain bike or even a road bike with the right tires.

This is when I started doing longer rides, using the canal as a path since I could avoid most of the traffic, only needing to cross a road every half mile or so. From our house I could ride downstream about 15 miles to the end, way out near Sun City and the other retirement communities West of Phoenix.

The canal ended unceremoniously in a farmer’s field with an electric fence that gave me a shock a couple of times until I figured out what it was. The other way upstream would go about 40 miles all the way to Saguaro lake. I never made it that far although I tried a couple of times. The last 20 miles or so were out on the Indian reservation where there was nowhere to stop for water or anything.

The canal also allowed me to get to a lot of places in Phoenix. There was one place where a smaller canal, The Crosscut Canal, branched off. If you took that, then about a mile of road you could end up at the zoo. I did this several times one summer. I also figured out how to get to my grandmother’s house way out in Sun City. Going upstream would end up at a park way out in Scottsdale. You could get to the mall at Metrocenter going downstream just a half mile off of the canal. (Unfortunately, we usually ended up there early in the morning since we’d start riding around 6 AM to avoid the heat, so the stores were closed.)

Riding on the canal, I got used to doing longer rides of 30 to 40 miles. Once I was used to this, I started entering different chatity rides that would normally have rides of different lengths ranging from 25 to 100 miles with courses laid out around the city. There I learned the fun of riding in a pack where you could draft off others in the group and go faster than you could alone.

One weekend when I was about twelve I went with a friend from Phoenix to Wickenburg, a town about 50 miles out from Phoenix and probably 60 or 70 miles from our starting point. We went when it was fairly hot and I remember stopping along the way out for my friend to sit under a palo verde tree and cool off as he started to get heat exhaustion. We made it, however, stayed in a motel for the night, then rode back the next day. This trip made me realize I liked highway biking.

Shortly after that I signed up for the Best Dam Ride, which was a two-day charity ride for the Multiple Sclerosis Society that went from northwest Phoenix out to Parker Dam on the Arizona/California border with a brief trip into California in the end of the ride. It left from the Sun City area early in the morning and had lunch in Wickenburg, only about 35 miles out from where we started. It then went all the way out to Salome, AZ, for the night. I still remember that it was 85 miles that first day. This was a tiny town in the desert. We stayed at the high school, sleeping in the gym. The town was small enough to have pictures off all of the graduates for the last several years on the wall of the gym. Our sleeping bags and clothes were brought out separately in a truck.

That night we ate spaghetti and watched American Flyers in the gym. The high school cheerleaders even came out and did a cheer for us. It was really neat. We then settled down on the gym floor to sleep around 10 PM, the getting up and heading out around 7 AM after a quick breakfast.

The second day started with a long, slow hill climb and then a fast, 30 mph descent into a town of population 3. From there it was a long, flat ride until you descended down a long hill into Parker, AZ. I’ll always remember seeing Parker and the exhilliration of riding down that long hill. From there it was about 20 miles to the end of the ride at Parker Dam. We had the choice of being on the Arizona or California side, and went on the latter. It was neat to have ridden out of the state!

The day ended at a park at the dam. There was food and music to celebrate the end of the ride. From there our bikes were loaded up on trucks and we climbed into busses to be driven back to Phoenix.

I did that ride a couple more times, including with my high school bike club one year. I also started going out by myself when I was 14 and 15, this time extending the original ride to go into Kingman to Ash Fork, then through Prescott and back down to Phoenix. Those rides involved 100 mile plus days and climbs of 3000 feet or more. My longest day was Kingman to Ash Fork, leaving at 4AM and getting in at 6 PM, 110 miles away and 350o feet higher than where I started.

Looking back it was odd that my parents let me be way out there on my own, just calling them each day as I made it to the next town and new motel. Because I didn’t have a credit card my dad gave me a couple hundred dollars in traveller’s checks for food and prepaid for motels. To me the biggest danger was running out of water. I was able to go about 40 miles on the four bottles I carried, so I only needed to fill up a couple of times. Usually there was a town within 10 to 15 miles. An exception was between Parker and Lake Havasu City where the temperature could get up to 120 deg F and it was 37 miles of ups and downs throught the canyons around the Colorado River.

I rode less after learned to drive. I did rely on a bike during the first year of college in Tucson, including for 10 mile trips to the mall. I also did the Breakaway to the Border, a 2-day MS ride from Tucson to Douglas, AZ on the US-Mexico border.

I don’t ride too often and haven’t done more than 5 miles for several years. I do still have the mountain bike I had in high school, however, which is the one I put thousands of miles on back then. Looking back, biking has been a huge part of my life. Maybe it’s time to start again, now that the kids are grown.

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