Note: working on my couch surfing/tent-space/cheap accommodation project, sphyn.com, has quite slowed down the blogging activity and I’ll try to resume by posting several blogs a week, but don’t take my word for it 😉 Still 14 days left until 8th of December – the date of my return to Vancouver. In order to speed up the writing, I’ll try to focus on most important elements and pictures.
Leaving the motel, I rode toward Sabino Canyon. There were several interesting places in the region, but my schedule did not allow me too much tourism, so I decided to spend part of the morning at Sabino Canyon before riding the 400+ km to Yuma, my next stop.
Sabino Canyon is reached on the north side of Tucson, which is some 20km from the interstate. A 20-minute ride, more or less, without much transit. After passing the entrance guard and avoiding the park fee thanks to the my Natural Parks Pass, I parked the bike in the motorcycle area in a spot at the end of the parking lot. I was pretty happy to have a dedicated spot when many car drivers where trying to find parking throughout the lot. I left all my gear, including my heavy and warm leather jacket, locked onto the bike and took the direction of the visitor center.
Unfortunately, there is a road driving up/through the canyon, but it is limited to the park’s trains on wheels. Riding round-trip tickets are pretty accessible, if you don’t want to walk, and there are 9 stops along the road you can get on and off the train if you want. If you’re curious, there a site for the Canyon: http://www.sabinocanyon.com, which describes the various trails. The train ride (45 minutes, 3.8 miles) is guided and pretty interesting. I highly recommend taking it. You can always walk back to the entrance if you don’t mind a long walk.
Due to my limited time, I took the tour “train” at 10:32am and opted to go straight to the end of the Canyon, where a few hiking trails were going uphill. We reached at 10:55am. I then started hiking on the Telephone Line Trail, which led me to a magnificent view of the canyon, and then back to the road, which something around 3.5km, according to my tracker. It was quite enough, considering I was wearing my riding boots and the sun was quite intense that day. When I hit the road again, it was 12:20pm. Below is the trail path and the following pictures should tell you more than words…
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- Pictures from Sabino Canyon
Back from the tour that extended a bit beyond my schedule (I reached the parking lot at 1pm), I put my gear back on and started riding toward Yuma. I paused in Eloy for half an hour to fill my tank and have lunch at A&W, then missed the switch from the I-10 to the I-8 in Casa Grande, but got back to the right track after a little detour. Next fuel refill was in Dateland around 4:30pm to finally reach Yuma at 5:30pm.
I wasn’t sure what the plan for the day would be, since I had sent a few couchsurfing requests the night before and the only host who had answered said she had to check her schedule first, then no news anymore… Still waiting for an answer, I took the opportunity to do some Black Friday shopping at Best Buy (GPS tracker batteries, mostly) and Wal-mart (Schumacher RedFuel, a USB charger and bike/car jump starter I had read about in biker forums, best thing ever: you should get it! [see link below]). With still no news about my couchsurfing request, I finally opted to go to the usual Motel 6, reasonably affordable and clean compared to others… For the note, that’s when I started thinking couchsurfing.com was really doing a bad job helping travelers. The decision to build sphyn.com was made, even though the name was not decided yet… I went to a local pub in the historic (and quite dead) downtown, had some acceptable food with a beer, joked with the barman he looked Canadian with his beard, which he didn’t seem to appreciate so much for some reason, and went back to the motel for the night.
Oh, if you wonder, the host finally got back to me the next day, saying she was sorry, but she had gone to the desert… Yeah, whatever… 😀
