Catholic Priest’s | Chasing Spring!!!

okay guys, i know we haven’t updated this blog in forevvvr. i know! please rest asssured that the reasons for our digital negligence has nothing whatsoever to do with (a) a lack of bloggable stories or (b) being dead. in fact, there is much to tell, and it is only now that we are in torrence california at dale’s grandad’s that we are finally experiencing the relative intransience necessary to complete what has become a more looming task with each sucessive procrastination. the good news for y’all is that, since there have been roughly three weeks since our last post, you’ll probably receive only the most poignant and hilarious events, and not so much of the routine day-to-day existence of the bike touring life.

after a few days recouperating from our first major excursion down to bisbee, a trip which in total encompassed over 250 miles, we finally said goodbye to our friends zach and adam, along with all the rest of the bicas friend crew, who are all awesome, seriously, go there, you’ll fall in love. on the road, we encountered some foul weather and nasty headwinds, as well as our first taste of travel on the open highway, which is scary but also very fast. after a few nights camped out on open blm land in the desert, surrounded by cacti, succulent plants, thorn bushes, and the tire tracks and spent shotgun cartgidges of so many crazy desert rednecks, we arrived in yuma, arizona, the last city before we crossed into that wonderous state about which more songs have been written than probably any other state, california. more precisely, yuma is more of a vast area of suburban sprawl than a city per se, and it took us the better part of an afternoon of asking everyone we could find before we finally found an area that could be considered ‘downtown’, a two-block stretch of admittedly cool old art-deco buildings which is beautiful but whise buisinesses have largly been driven out of busness by the surrounding automobile-friendly corporate hell, as is the fashion these days.

Plane GRAVEYARD!!! on the way out of tucson!! F! YEAH!!

On The Road To YUMA...

HUGH CORPORATE FARMS!

Desert Night!

Desert SERGE!

Desert Dale!

Dork!

SUPER COOOOOOL!

Lunch before a hugh climb and drop into Yuma...

anyway, we had some good times in yuma, but there is one disturbing story that really sticks out. our first night in town we stayed in an ostensibly haunted run-down hotel, but we couldn’t afford to stay there for the duration of our stay, and we were on the lookout for somewhere we could camp out or otherwise post up for free. across the river to california, we spotted a charming little spanish mission, and decided to investigate and snap some requisite touristic photos. on the way there, a boisstrous photographer told us, as if in foreboding, that we should ‘always keep one eye open’ around catholic priests. when we got to the mission, we were invited inside to look around by a man named rusty, who turned out to be the priest. rusty is an older guy, but he engaged us in conversation, relating to our adventurous spirits with his own stories of low-budget travel in europe following his stint in the seminary. he invited us to stay in the church that night, following that honorable civic tradition the church has of helping out vagrants. rusty seemed cool enough, and we did need a place to stay, so we reluctantly agreed. later that day we arrived at the church with our bikes and gear, and were invited into the rectory. rusty told us about his passion for extreme motorcycling, and showed us his bike, which he rides with a gang of united states marines and has apparently taken up to 197 mph. then he invited us to the grocery store to buy some dinner supplies, although we were not hungry, having just eaten large quantities of pie at our favorite local diner. at the store, rusty headed straight for the liquor section and selected a huge ‘handle’ bottle of bourbon and a roasted chicken. as soon as we returned to the rectory, rusty insisted that we ‘all take a shower’. thanks for the offer rusty, we said, but we had just taken showers that morning at the haunted hotel. ‘i don’t want to smell you all night’, he said. uh, ok. getting a little creepy. then rusty said, ‘ok, well, i’m going to take one’, and proceeded to rip off his shirt and strut around, showing off his gym body and tattoos from his old days in the service. at this point we were legitamitely concerned, having heard the rumors about the sexual agressions of ‘celibate’ priests, and when rusty went into the shower, dale and i went outside to disscuss the situation. we concluded that, while certainly unorthodox, rusty probably did not present a threat other than just making things uncomfortable with his sexual advances, and we didn’t have the heart to simply storm out… besides, maybe we had just been mistaken about rusty’s intents. so we sheepishly re-entered the rectory, drank a little bourbon, and then stated that we were going out to party with some friends we’d made, who were in town for an artist’s convention. rusty set out some cots for us in the back hall, a building completely seperate from the rectory, and told us we could get back whenever, that the gate would be unlocked. so, after a late night chatting around a bonfire with the artist crew, we returned to the mission, ready for bed. however, upon returning, we found that the gate was locked, and upon it was a hastily-scrawled note reading ‘if you want your bikes, come to the rectory’. uhh, what rusty? you said the gate would be unlocked. you want us to wake you up at nearly 4am? as we thought it over, we realized that, for rusty even to realize we were gone, he would have had to come across the courtyard in the middle of the night and enter our sleeping hall, hoping to catch us asleep there. for what reason, i don’t know, but it is possible that we dodged a bullet by avoiding that situation. finally we knocked on the door, and rusty came and opened it in his robe. he was very angry, and simply demanded that we ‘get our things and leave’. apparently our unwillingness to accommodate his wishes had enraged him. so, we left in a hurry, and, needless to say, didn’t get much sleep that night. overall, yuma left a bad taste in our mouths.

The Virgin at the mission in Yuma...before we met "rusty"

Welcome to Yuma...

Some of the nice people we met who were attending the Yuma Art Symposium.

Having FUN! in Yuma! Who Knew?!

after traversing the desert for a few more days, camping blissfully and playing the guitar and ukulele we’d aqcuired in tucson to entertain ourselves at night, we decided we would head off the highway, taking a detour to a crazy hippie hangout called slab city, which will be detailed in a later post. on the map, we noted an isolated town in the desert called ‘glamis’, which we figured on making by sunset. we were hoping there would be a little general store there at least, at which we could refill our water bottles and lay in a few supplies. however, instead of any kind of traditional town, what we found was a kind of resort, touted by a billboard as the ‘sand toy capital of the world’. what this means exactly is hard to explain without actually experiencing it, but basically glamis is a mecca for literally thousands of southern california ‘urban hicks’ (my term), who tavel there in gigantic rvs, trailering all manner of motorized sand vehicles; quads, dirt-bikes, rhinos (which are a kind of mini jeep-type-thing), and extreme dune-buggies souped up with 600 horsepower supercharged ten-cylinder engines. this was not exactly our scene, but what could we do? we began trekking across the dune fields into the vast camping area, while pickup trucks and buggies sped past us, throwing sand up into our faces and the gears of our bikes, and probably yelling ‘fags!’ over the roar of their engines. finally, and i have to say most unexpectedly, a pair of souped-up rhinos stopped and engaged us in conversation. i’m sure we were some of the first touring cyclists ever to attempt to camp at glamis, and apparently we’d piqued their interest, so they ended up inviting us to camp with them. when we got to their site, everyone was sitting around a roaring campfire, drinking beer and using cuss words injudicioussly in front of their young-uns. they were really friendly to us, though, and we ended up sharing more in common than we originally thought, such as a passion for camping (if you can call it that) and cheap cans of beer. after everyone was sufficiently lubricated, we all decided it was time for an excursion into the dunes in the sand rhinos. so we packed about 20 cans of beer and strapped ourselves in tightly with the car-racing harnesses they had installed. the father of one of the families sat in the driver’s seat, next to his 8 year old son, and dale and i sat in the rear. then began our dangerous and wildly exciting ride, blasting marilyn manson at max volume and literally flying through the air off the dunes, while quads and sand cars roared by us in the opposite direction, narrowly missing us, their drivers probably also drunk, flying and bouncing along. finally we arrived at an enormous sand dune, towering easily 200 feet above the desert floor, which people continually raced up on their modified, extremely loud quads. a bunch of dudes were standing around a gas fire drinking beers, and then someone used a can of gas to write a giant ‘420’ in the sand, which he then lit on fire. everyone cheered, and then someone poignantly shouted ‘yeeeeeeeeah! this is why we fight wars for oil, because we love to burn it in the desert!’ which honestly struck me as a piece of refreshingly brutal honesty. finally we rode back acrosss the dunes, bouncing insanely through the ‘whoops’ (the term for the large-type washboarding that is usually included as an element in motocross races), and settled in for the night. as we were going to bed, though, our new friends made sure we knew they had a 44 calibur pistol in the trailer with them, in case we were thinking of trying anything. uh, ok. thanks for the measure of trust. well, all in all people at glamis ended up being pretty alright, and we had a crazy, unexpected adventure there while experiencing a sector of society i honestly had no idea existed previously, which is really one of the great things about bike tour. biiiiike tourrrrrr!!!!!!