Flagstaff, AZ

I'm so jealous of people who live in Flagstaff.  If Marc is still reading this blog, I hope he is pissed at me for not stopping to see him, because that means we are still friends.  Unless he is so pissed that we aren't anymore.  Anyway, I'll explain in an email, Marc.

We got lucky to ride here.  We were driving through at 4:50 pm on the way to the Grand Canyon and saw a bike shop on the main road with a closing of 5 pm.  We stopped in, got lots of great advice and a map, and I was able to do an hour-long ride on the Schultz Creek trail.  For future reference, we also got a map of Sedona, AZ trails.

Here's the difference between mountain biking in the mountains vs the midwest.  In the mountains you go up, up, up, up, up, up, etc, and then down, down down down down etc.  In the midwest you go up, down up down up down up down etc.   Both are fun.  But it's hard to beat the thrill of down down down down down down etc.   In the midwest though, the local clubs often put a lot of effort into making really nice trails with these things called burns or berns, I don't know how you spell it but it's curves that you make on hills so you can take them fast, and lots of up/down fast stuff.  So the midwest can still be very fun.

Anyway, back to this ride.  I stupidly didn't wear my elbow pads and then I was just sitting on my biking and fell over right on my left arm (where I broke my elbow 5 months previously).  oh man.  That was dumb.  My arm was a bit sore for a few days.  So I wore the elbow pads the rest of the trip.

The ride was fun!  I don't mind going up up up up up.  I just get in a groove.   It helps that I'm a crazy health food nut so I have seemingly infinite aerobic capacity.   The rocks were a challenge, especially as I was spooked after falling on my arm.   But the down down down down etc made me forget everything but how much fun I was having.