While it was toasty warm in our sleeping bags, when the need did arise to leave the sleeping bag in the middle of the night in search of the little boys room it was into a night that was colder than any experienced on this trip to date. The little boys room was too far to walk in such extreme conditions, so with so many trees about… well, you get the idea.
The alarm when off at 6 am, then again at 6:10 am, 6:20 am and 6:30 am. As we had planned well, to get dressed for the day only required the removal of a few layers of clothing, so we were wearing lovely warm clothes when the freezing air hit us when we eventually built up the courage to open the tent zip. There was still a gloomy early morning feel to the woods as the sun had yet to make an appearance, but as we had a long uphill cycle we didn’t have the luxury of waiting until our world warmed a little.
My first camp packing task is to take the cover off the bikes, unlock them and wheel them over to open ground to make it easier to load them up. My front wheel was locked solid. Initially, I guessed the brakes were frozen on, but that was ruled out when I released the brakes, as I would do remove the wheel, only to find it didn’t help. Upon closer inspection, it was the hub itself that wasn’t spinning. To add to the great start to the day, in trying to turn the wheel I had inadvertently ripped out the dynamo connectors. Most likely moisture had entered the hub and the three days of sub-zero temperatures had sealed its fate.
At this point, I couldn’t feel my fingers due to the cold, so there was no way that I was going to be able to take the hub apart without the risk of doing more damage to it, so I put it back on the bike and went for a slow ride around the campground. Within a few minutes, it was back spinning just fine, but clearly something isn’t as it should be. My plan is now to ignore the problem until the bike is safely back in Scotland.
Deborah had been packing up camp while I had been messing about, so all that was left was for me to load the camp into my panniers, load my panniers on to my bike and then head off. Today was never going to be an interesting one as we basically cycle out of the campground, turn left on to Highway 64, follow the Highway 64 for 58 miles, then turn left into the motel car park. The road was relatively quiet, with a few ups and a few downs, ending the day at approximately the same height above sea level, 6,800ft (2,100m).
We first cycled through Tusayan, on the doorstep of the Grand Canyon National Park, full of cheaper hotels than the park and where you board your Grand Canyon helicopter ride if you have a spare $175 or so. We stopped to take a layer of clothes off and watched a couple of helicopters take off, but our own helicopter trip will have to wait until another day. Slowly the day was starting to warm up.
The only other stop of the day was at a service station about halfway between the park and Williams in search of a hot chocolate. The day had warmed up to about 16oC, but it still felt a little chilly with the windchill. I went in to complete the initial reconnaissance while Deborah stayed on bike guard duty. The shop was more of a souvenir shop than a specialist hot chocolate outlet, so deciding that $2.50 (plus tax) was too much to part with for a sachet of powder and warm water out of the flask, the warm beverage would need to wait until we were in Williams. By the time I returned with my reconnaissance intelligence Deborah was busy chatting up a guy that was on a Grand Canyon tour from his holiday hotel in Las Vegas. As is the case with most of Deborah’s ‘chat ups’ when I turned up he made a sharp exit, back on to his pink stretched Jeep Wrangler.
The road to Williams must have been a good one as we pulled into town just after 3 pm.
We checked into the cheapest motel in town, the Travel Lodge. We then headed to the cheapest restaurant in town with the biggest selection of veggie food, Safeway’s. The main street of Williams is clearly designed to capture both the Grand Canyon and Route 66 visitors, so it seemed to suffer from an identity crisis, with tourist tat bearing the names of both sitting on the same gift shop shelves. That said, out of the main tourist season the town had a strange quaint feel about it, but I can imagine it being a place to avoid during the holiday season.
Loaded down with groceries we headed back to our hotel room to slob out and watch TV.
With a relatively short day tomorrow, the alarm was set for the middle of the day (7 am) and we opted for an early night over putting our smelly cycling clothes back on and heading out to join the masses trick or treating.