The very latest in Road Trip Breakfast Technology (circa 2005): a cup of Starbucks and a 12-inch G4 PowerBook.

Comfort zone: A cage just big enough so that when you sit at its center, strangers can’t poke you through the bars with sharp sticks.

Like many of you, I’m a creature of habit. For instance, I must have powerful coffee immediately upon arising in the morning or someone will suffer. I used to haul a small espresso machine around, but in the age of a Starbucks on every street corner this has become unnecessary.

Or so I thought.

This morning I ambled into the motel’s breakfast nook and poured myself a cup of what appeared to be used chain degreaser, only not as tasty. Down the loo it went and out the door I went, cursing and spitting, in search of the velvety black jumper cables of life.

I prefer to deal with locally owned java shops when traveling but there was no time to waste on scientific experimentation. And besides, my motel is near the airport and nothing else. You’d think that where there are travelers there would be grog shops, taverns, alehouses, pubs, cafés, cantinas and yes, coffee shops, but not in South Tucson. Bubba. You want hot asphalt, fast food and faster cars, you’re in the right place. Everything else must be found elsewhere.

Incredibly, the nearest Starbucks was five miles away. A 10-minute drive! And I had to make it without coffee! Oh, the humanity. But I scored — a tall Americano, plus a bagel with cream cheese and a pint of Naked orange juice to stave off the scurvy (yeah, I checked out the motel’s “breakfast” before leaving, too).

Editor’s note: No motel staffers were harmed in the making of this blog post.

El Minuto — a Tucson fixture since 1939 and a fave of mine since 1980.

My combo-plate tour of the Southwest continues with a visit to El Minuto in Tucson. I first ate there back in 1980, and whenever I’m back in town it’s the first place I stop.

The food isn’t like the fiery grub you get in northern New Mexico — it’s more like the Tex-Mex that hooked me as a kid in San Antone. The mild red sauce has a tomato tang, I’m pretty sure the tacos have some potato in ’em (I always gobble them down too quickly to be sure), and the beans are refried instead of whole. Good stuff all around, and smack dab between La Choza and El Sombrero in terms of price point.

The drive west was uneventful. Giant vehicles remain all the rage in this part of the nation, whether people need them or not, and Texicans with regard for neither law nor order owned the left lane from Las Cruces all the way to Tucson, roaring past the rest of us like Soviet apparatchiks passing proles in the Moscow Zil lanes. They gave no quarter, and even Californicators moved over to let them pass.

While dodging the sons of the Lone Star State I enjoyed periodic bursts of philosophy from the New Mexico Department of Transportation: “Dust storms may exist.” Ah, but then again they may not. And they didn’t.

The Suburu’s thermometer flirted with 60 but never quite closed the deal until I crossed into Arizona around 1. It’s 69 and sunny now, and doesn’t that feel good to this ghostly pale gabacho. I won’t be wearing three jerseys while riding around these parts. But I will be wearing a shitload of sunscreen.

• Late update: After getting settled at the hotel I thought about driving back into Tucson proper for a pint or two at Gentle Ben’s Brewing Company, but I wasn’t in the mood to deal with the traffic, which is slightly insane. Instead I picked up a sixer of another local microbrew, the IPA from Nimbus Brewing Company. Drinkable, but not spectacular; last night’s pints at High Desert were much livelier. In other news, tomorrow morning’s update may be the last on this site for a couple of days — I don’t believe I’ll have wi-fi again until Tombstone. So keep an eye on maddogmedia.wordpress.com for the latest in vertical gain and pain management.

• Later update: How could I forget? Today is not only Herself’s birthday, it’s Jack Kerouac’s birthday. An auspicious day to be on the road. Herself was treated to a pleasant dinner at The Blue Star by our mutual friends Steve and Doris, but Jack got jack shit ’cause he’s all like dead and stuff.

An iPhone shot of soggy downtown Santa Fe, just off the Plaza.

Yuk. Santa Fe was a gray, soggy, gloomy mess when I arose this morning for the traditional breakfast burrito at Tia Sophia. I thought briefly about having a soak at Ten Thousand Waves, but the frosty clouds shrouding the mountains sent me packing. I’m on the road to escape that sort of thing, not wallow in it.

Stopped in sunny Socorro for the combo plate at Frank and Lupe’s El Sombrero, a place I haven’t visited in a few years. It was everything La Choza was not — prompt, attentive service, delicious food and reasonably priced at $9.57, or less than half what I paid for an uninteresting dinner in Santa Fe. The chiles they use in the green are obtained locally, too.

Now I’m in Las Cruces, planning a visit to the High Desert Brewing Company, whose motto is, “None of our beers suck.” Not strictly grammatical, but true as of my last visit, circa 2007 or thereabouts.

I’m extrapolating, of course. Not even I can drink every beer in a brewpub. But don’t think I haven’t tried.

New Mexico via the iPhone through the windshield.

Whaddaya know — I found a weather window and drove right through it. Raton Pass was dry as the proverbial popcorn fart and the snow didn’t start falling until just outside Santa Fe, when the fuel light blinked on a few miles earlier than usual thanks to a stiff headwind.

The food and service at La Choza was undistinguished once again, which is a shame. It used to be the cheaper, easier little sister of The Shed, but I’m afraid I’m gonna have to start cuddling up to the higher-priced spread on the Plaza.

Happily, the IPA at Second Street Brewing was excellent as always, as was the cream stout. It was open mic’ night, and there was a kid’s birthday party going on right next to me, but the right beer takes the edge off that sort of thing.

It was interesting to watch as nearly everyone who walked into the brewpub instantly checked their smartphones to see if they’d missed anything in the handful of minutes they’d been untethered from the Giant Electronic Titty (this from a guy who just sent an iPhone pic to his PowerBook).

There won’t be any riding here tomorrow. The place has mud season and snow season going on simultaneously, and I didn’t bring a power washer with me. Maybe I’ll just grab a breakfast burrito at Tia Sophia, enjoy a leisurely soak at Ten Thousand Waves and then beat it for sunnier country — either Las Cruces or all the way to Tucson. I want tan lines, not brown stripes.

Left behind: The Turk', as captured through the glass of the front storm door.

Upon finally getting out of Dodge I usually snap a shot of Bibleburg receding in the rear view mirror, but this time I thought I’d take a pic of Turkish wondering why I get to be outside and he doesn’t.

The Turk’ is fond of me in a benevolently rapacious fashion, but what he really loves is to be outside on a sunny day, rolling around in the driveway, thunking his shovel-shaped skull against the concrete with each ecstatic flip.

Turk’ can’t follow my peregrinations online, lacking the requisite interest, computer skills and thumbs, but you can continue to catch my little act here and/or at my backup blog, maddogmedia.wordpress.com. That rascal has up-to-date software and can be managed from the iPhone.

And should you pop round on Friday, be sure to wish Herself a happy birthday. No matter how many laps she jogs around the sun, she retains her ageless beauty. Maybe she’s running backward.

I do have a substantial cushion — I don’t really need to be in Tucson until Saturday afternoon. But I like to take my time on road trips, savoring this, that and the other, and this friggin’ storm may cost me some much-anticipated eating, drinking and soaking time in Santa Fe.

At moments like this I can understand why some people fly. Buy the ticket, check your luggage, fork over $175 each way to take a bike along, sample any number of airborne viruses while strapped down in your pressurized aluminum tube, reassemble the bike at your destination — assuming that (a) it and your toolkit get there, and (b) none of your stuff is destroyed — do your ride, then repeat the whole process in reverse, only this time with a severe upper-respiratory infection and an $8,000 bike with a dent in the down tube and an inexplicable stain on the saddle.

Y’know, come to think of it, driving a Subaru Forester packed to the gunwales with bike crap, journalism tools and camping gear through blizzard conditions seems kind of pleasurable by comparison.

As a consequence, I didn’t bother to ride. I figure I have plenty of that sort of thing coming up soon, and in a more hospitable climate, too. Instead, I visited my chiropractor, started packing and scored the fixings for a big pot of chicken noodle soup, which is simmering as we speak.

Soup sounded good, and more important, there will be leftovers, which will come in handy during my absence. Herself will cook an egg, or a holiday feast, but leaves the shopping and three-squares-a-day stuff to me. If you like to eat, you want a great fat bastard running the kitchen, not some 95-pound sprite whose capacity is about equal to that of a baby robin. I’ll cook up a couple more items tomorrow and freeze ’em so she’ll have heat-it-and-eat-its while I’m pushing envelopes down in cactus country.

The fun part of all this is the packing. Ordinarily when vacationing in Arizona I park myself in McDowell Mountain Regional Park outside Fountain Hills, so any forgetfulness on my part is easily remedied. But bike shops, REIs and other dispensaries will be few and far between south of Tucson, so I have to try to transcend my brain damage and take everything I might possibly need, including a bigger vehicle to carry it all.

George Washington Hayduke got along fine with his own two legs, plus 60 pounds of gear in a backpack, but I’m going to need something with more carrying capacity. Maybe a Peterbilt, or a CH-47F Chinook helicopter.

Text updates work OK, kinda, sorta — I have to type in the HTML window instead of the Visual window — but pix are a no-go on the Flash-impaired iPhone when using Safari. I tried an end-around using TwitPic, but no joy. Anyone out there with a little more experience? I’m running an old version of self-hosted WordPress (2.6), which may be the source of my troubles. There’s a WordPress app for iPhone, but it requires WordPress 2.7.

Of course, “courage” is hardly the word to use here. Dubbed “The Underperformer” by Time magazine in a 2006 article discussing America’s five worst senators, Bunning wouldn’t have dared take such a stand were he not retiring from the Senate. To do so would’ve have taken actual balls instead of the substitutes he played with while pitching baseball instead of fits.

One thing I don’t understand: Why has nobody asked whether Bunning was such a deficit hawk when the Daffy-Fudd cabal was running two unfunded wars? Probably because the press knows it won’t have him to kick around much longer. Lazy pricks.

The old beast gets a new crank.

You can quit searching the taverns, flophouses and obits — I’m still very much alive, despite the feddle gummint’s insistence on tinkering with The World’s Best Health Care System®. I just haven’t had much to say. Too busy riding the bike.

I actually managed to log 150 miles last week despite the weather, and I’m finally starting to feel vaguely like a cyclist again. On Wednesday, the DBR went to Old Town for more surgery — this time a Ritchey crankset with 172.5mm arms and 50/34 chainrings — and on Saturday I took it out for three hours and climbed every damn’ hill in town, some of ’em twice.

Weird how the little things can make a difference. I had always ridden 172.5mm cranks until I took up mountain biking. Longer levers were the fashion off road, so I stepped up to 175mm cranks on the MTB and stuck with them when I started racing cyclo-cross. Finally I went to 175s on the road bike, too, thinking, what the hell, I ride ’em on everything else.

But when I got the Jamis Supernova, it showed up sporting a compact crankset with 172.5mm arms. And y’know what? I kinda liked the feel. I’m not grinding along the single-track this time of year — I’m mostly riding the road, or some bike path, and it’s a whole lot easier to spin shorter cranks and smaller rings with bum knees and a big ass.

So chalk up another convert to the Church of the Compact Crank. Now if I could just find a shop that sold legs and lungs. …