March 4, 2024
Day 13: Lordsburg to Thatcher
Man, it took a while to wake up this morning, but we were inspired to check out the sunrise outside our tent. Legs and body took a loooooong time to wake up and we could tell yesterday took its toll. But the wind was calm to start, the road was relatively flat and traffic was light, so we took our sweet time. I noticed my rear tire was very squishy this morning but we were out of fresh tubes and I didn’t want to risk patching one since I suspected that all our used tubes had multiple punctures from those darn wires. So I pumped up my rear tire and kept going, checking it at every break and pumping more air into it. It held! We stopped at Walmart near our hotel at the end of the day and got fresh tubes to put on.
Lunch was after a long downhill to Duncan, a classic old west town. We climbed 800 feet out of Duncan on a terrible shoulder because cars and trucks did not want to move over. We eventually reached a pass, traffic became light, and we pushed nicely into the wind on the downhill all the way to Thatcher. We still weren’t going that fast downhill due to the wind (16mph), but at least we were moving well and the wind wasn’t as loud as it was the last few days. We followed the Gila River Valley most of the day with a lot of irrigation canals. Mount Graham’s snow packed peaks followed us all day and gave us a dramatic backdrop. Jude felt like these were the views that he was hoping for on this portion of his trip.
As we approached our hotel, we stopped at Walmart for some necessities. A shower and a question about dinner were at hand, Jude already knew exactly where he wanted to go. Eagle’s Roost is a local place tucked back behind some houses with absolutely some of the best burgers we’ve ever tasted. We decided to get 3 burgers and 3 sides and cut them in half to share. That may have been the best meal of the whole trip, though it’s hard to beat beef stroganoff! A hotel, good dinner and the promise of hot breakfast in the morning had us in good spirits as we organized our belongings, planned our route for the next two days and called home. Today was a good day, tomorrow will be hard and involve a lot of climbing, but we’re excited to see some more of God’s beauty in these Southwest mountains.
Today's ride: 79 miles (127 km)
Total: 955 miles (1,537 km)
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