Declan's Blog

We started at the Colorado River at the border of AZ and CA by Yuma. Everyone had to put their back wheel in the water:

As you can see, I’m well carbed up for the ride. If you are mean, you are making bosoms jokes about my picture right now. I know I would be. It was the light. Or maybe 40 years of Oreos. Thankfully, we were equipped with BMD (Bosom Masking Devices) to spare people looking at pictures on the web:

There was one celebrity there to see us off, Starsky from TV’s “Starsky & Hutch:”

Here’s the obligatory colorful-riders-all-in-a-row picture. I photoshopped in an attack helicopter and Starsk’s departure to make it more interesting:

Actually, the helicopter was real. I guess it’s pretty boring out in the desert, so if you have a helicopter it’s fun to buzz 150 bike riders (kids and adults).

And we’re OFF!

Actually, that’s not me and Erin. I’ve got some quality control issues with our photographer, but I’ll take it out of her bonus.

What followed was about 25 miles of this:

The first 2.5 miles were on soft sand. I was very happy to be on my wide tires and not the road bike. There are a few riders with road bikes, but they had done the ride before and knew to just carry the bike on this stretch. Even with the wide tires, we had to work hard to get through, and were glad to see pavement. One highlight of this section was pushing the leader of the chase vehicles, Gary (in the vest):

and his cool Tacoma out of the sand. You can tell when people didn’t grow up getting cars out of snowdrifts… 🙂

Our support team went on ahead and set up camp:

Three hours later, we came to the turn off for Gold Rock Ranch, our first stop. Of course, it’s a mile off the road, on another stretch of sand. Just the thing to get us hungry for the spaghetti dinner at the other end. In Illinois, someone would have put down a layer of oil and made a proper surface with the road, but the desert is run by hippies who wouldn’t think that was cool. Of course, these hippies all have dune buggies and dirt bikes, so I think they have a hidden agenda.

After dinner I grabbed a shower for a dollar – had to have quarters… Thanks to the support team I was set. Luckily I took one early, because someone flushed a towel down a toilet and the whole plumbing system went nuts and they had to shut down the bathrooms. That left 200 people with one bathroom in the main office building. Camping is fun!

Next, there was a campfire where we burned the slowest child on the ride and his spirit was released to the heavens:

Seemed a little harsh to me, but hey, it’s the desert, man. Things are tough out here.

I had fun with the campfire light:

Then we raved til dawn. It’s pretty much the same as Burning Man.

Click here for more pictures from Day 1.

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