Bicycle Journey Progress

The journey begins on July 29th and ends on September 11th, 2023

Ride Progress: ABOUT TO START!
Daily summaries:
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sexta-feira, 8 de junho de 2012

Day 54 – 05/26/2012 – Truxton, AZ

We started the day with the objective to reach Kingman, AZ. We left the hotel as early as we could, around 8:30am and rode towards a small food mart to get something to eat on the way. Upon entering the street to go the store we noticed something that was not in our plans: very low temperatures and very strong West winds (against us).

We didn’t really say anything to each other until we were on the store, but when the time to hit the road arrived we started talking about whether riding 60 miles with cold strong winds against us was a good idea.


A few people gave us advice and told us not to enter the interstate 40 towards Kingman but instead use the Old Highway 66 which had a less hilly terrain and was much more scenic. The only problem is that the total distance through Route 66 was twenty miles longer, and with strong winds like those we would not complete the path before dusk.

We were even considering staying in Seligman one more day. That’s when my uncle had a great idea: go through Route 66 but look for a hotel in the middle of the way, and then make it to Kingman in the next day. That’s what we did: we set out towards a small city called Peach Springs just 39 miles away where the GPS showed three hotels.

Route 66 was very scenic indeed. Once we got started we entered a very special area with opened fields of yellowish, almost white wheat surrounded by giant and deserted mountains. The whole area was so isolated and very peaceful that I wanted to buy a lot there and build a small house on top of one of those mountains.


The whole ride was very pleasant, except for the cold wind that insisted in blowing sideways. We had lunch on a place called Grand Canyon Caverns where they had a restaurant, a motel, an interesting store and guided tours to see the caverns which, judging by the pictures posted on the restaurant, looked more like abandoned mines than caverns.

Once we entered Peach Springs we noticed the city was in very bad state. The whole place was close to what a ghost city would look like: old houses with lots of trash on the yards, almost no people around and many abandoned buildings. The city is located on the Hualapai Indian Reserve. Unfortunately, like most Indian Reserves, this was a poor one.


We found the only market in town, so we stopped and got some groceries. Next we rode to the hotel which was across the street. To our surprise they had no available rooms! Also, they said there were no other hotels working on that city anymore and that the next hotel would be in Kingman, forty miles ahead. We were tired and ready to go rest and that was really bad news.


Fully loaded with our grocery bags we decided to keep riding forward and see what happens. The sun was setting and the temperatures started to drop even more. We rode seven miles and, just before the sky got completely dark, arrived in a small rural area called Truxton.

There we found a small motel, so we stopped by to get a room. Once more, to our surprise the lady there told us it was full as well! Thankfully she was nice and let us camp on her backyard for free.

We improvised a few sandwiches and chocolate milk and then pitched our tents. Unfortunately, there was no shower or us that day. That was not a good experience… we had to sleep with a lot of clothes due to the very low temperatures so showering before that would be really nice.

That was a tough night, but it could have been worst if we had no place to camp. In the end we were very thankful to the motel owner for letting us camp there and rested as much as we could before the next day would start.