Waiting for rain around here is like waiting for a Republican to grow a pair.
It huffs, and it puffs, aaaaaaaand … that’s about it.
Nevertheless, the clouds have helped keep us delightfully cool. Unlike the Tour de France, which so far seems to be a searing symphony of skidmarks and blood trails, scored for ambulance sirens.
Some pundits have been calling for a return to an “opening prologue” to mellow everyone out in the early going of Le Tour. Which might be smart, if we overlook that “opening” nonsense. A prologue is a preface, an introduction, a preceding event or development.
Have you ever seen a prologue three stages in? You have not.
Anyway, prologues are far from foolproof. Chris Boardman crashed in the 1995 prologue. Stuey O’Grady did likewise in 2007, as did Alejandro Valverde in 2017.
But it’s true that the carnage tends to be retail rather than wholesale in an “opening prologue.” A racer gets taken out by a tight corner, a slick descent, or a roadside eejit, and a writer gets taken out by the copy desk. Le Tour goes on.
Yes, yes, yes, it’s that time of year again, and Charles Pelkey and I are … still not doing our famous Live Update Guy thing.
I always feel a twinge of guilt and sorrow over having turned my back on the one what brung me to the freelancers’ dance — bicycle racing, and specifically Le Tour — but I sure do enjoy having my mornings free for bicycling instead of blathering.
Charles, of course, wouldn’t know what a free morning was if it bit him in his billable hours, which it would. He’s lawyerin’ away like crazy up there in Wyoming, and confesses via email that, like me, he doesn’t have any idea who the top men in the Tour are anymore.
But all that NRRBBB®* sure was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it?
* That’s Non-Race-Related Blah-Blah-Blah to you, sonny.
Americans are hewing to the Gospel of Willie Nelson:
On the road again
Goin’ places that I’ve never been
Seein’ things that I may never see again
And I can’t wait to get on the road again
The New York Times says tracking indicates that mountain-resort bookings are off the charts, well ahead of even last year’s record-shattering level.
Hotel rooms cost more, and so does go-juice for the family tank. Planning to camp? Do you have a reservation, m’sieur? Non? Please ’ave a seat in your Buick and I’ll see if we can pencil you in for, oh, let’s say … October. October 2022. Your bicycle should be available by then as well.
On the edge, back in the early Oughts. Photo: Merrill Oliver
I’m not immune to this sort of questing, especially since I’ve been up on blocks in Bernalillo County since fall 2019.
A couple old comrades recently invited me to join them for a spot of biking and hiking around Truckee, Calif., as in days of yore, but I couldn’t warm up (ho ho ho) to the idea of driving a thousand miles each way in a 17-year-old Subie through a series of forest fires. Visit colorful Flaming Rock! Retardant drops every hour on the hour!
So I scoped out a few getaways a little closer to home, quiet locales without zip lines, mountain coasters, or via ferratas, and ho-ly shit, no thank you, please.
Your modern highwayman is not an armed robber ahorseback bellowing “Stand and deliver!” but rather an innkeeper telling you your pitiful pile of Hilton points won’t make the nut here, Sonny Jim. You think Arizona was smokin’? Wait ’til you see what we do to your Visa card.
Samey same at campsites at any location with an elevation where daytime highs stall out in the double digits. Wanna pitch a tent? Thumb up some porn on your smartphone, Johnny Muir, our dirt is all spoken for. And you couldn’t afford it anyway.
The amusing part of the NYT piece is about how all these destinations hope to teach tourists how to eschew outlandish dickishness, which is a primary characteristic of the meandering jagoff. Pivoting from tourism promotion to tourism management, as The Colorado Sun puts it.
Hee, and also haw. You won’t have to drive to Tombstone to see the O.K. Corral, podnah. The same salt-of-the-earth types who were doing it hand to hand in the Dollar Store over the last jumbo pack of Charmin will be drawing down on each other — and the hired hands — at overloaded campsite pit toilets, chairlifts, and undistinguished chain eateries from coast to coast.
Being up on blocks in Bernalillo County suddenly doesn’t sound all that bad.
Imagine my surprise. The douchenozzle suspected of driving his Ford pick-’em-up into the masters race at Bike the Bluff in Arizona apparently has a history of overly happy motoring, among other things, reports The Associated Press.
Courtesy Arizona Department of Corrections.
Shawn Michael Chock, 35, has quite the rap sheet, according to Maricopa County’s online records. Some gentle soul matching his name and age has been fucking up like a champ since 2007: Aggravated assault, disorderly conduct with a weapon, three DUI-related charges, shoplifting, and violating parole, before finally doing a year and a half in the stripey hole beginning in May 2013.
Maybe he wanted to go back? Some people like it in the joint, I hear. I didn’t care for my one overnight stay in Denver City-County, but there’s no accounting for taste. Could be he’s the Aryan Brotherhood’s version of the Brown Truck Dude and got the word that his kindred needed a buttload of one thing or another.
“Just get your ass in here, Shawn, we don’t care how. Earl needs a cellphone.”
Perhaps he wanted to appeal his case to St. Peter? Didn’t quite make it to the Pearly Gates, did he? But then that Ford of his was full of bike parts and bullet holes and neither it nor Shawn was rolling all that well there at the end.
Meanwhile, we have a half-dozen cyclists in various hospitals around the Southwest who probably would like to know why the hell this had to happen to them. We’ll all know more than we care to before long, I expect.
Keep on (not) truckin’. Photo courtesy Groendyke Transport
Here’s a fun story. My man Hal was homeward bound after a track meet in Lakewood and lo and behold, there was no gasoline to be found in either Florence or Weirdcliffe.
There’s no shortage of gasoline. But there is a shortage of tank-truck drivers, thanks in part to The Bug® and decisions made around same. And we two old newspapermen, to our everlasting shame, had to get the deets from (choke) the TV stations’ websites.
KRDO had the best piece, quoting spokespeople from AAA, the National Tank Truck Carriers, and Groendyke Transport.
Something like a quarter of tank trucks were parked in April due to a lack of qualified drivers, sez the NTTC. Older drivers decided to retire, sez Groendyke. And driver schools shut down, which kept new drivers from getting certified.
And if Circle K can’t fill its tanks, well … neither can you, Skeezix.
AAA Colorado is urging motorists not to panic-buy gasoline the way they did toilet paper. Yeah, good luck with that. They’ll be panic-buying both because right now they’re out of gas and shitting themselves.
Mad Blog Media 