Return of the Interbiker: The last good breakfast

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
Sausage and cheese enchiladas
Sausage and cheese enchiladas at the Guadalupe Cafe in Santa Fe. The wait for a table was hitting 45 minutes when I got there, and worth every second.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Well, the last one that I didn’t have to cook, anyway.

I swung through Santa Fe post-Interbike and noshed at the Guadalupe Cafe, which frankly was batshit crazy at 11 a.m. Sunday, with the sort of line one associates with banks giving away free money.

And small wonder, because the food is always stellar.

I had my usual, the sausage and cheese enchiladas with a side of papas smothered in brick-red chile, and two cups of coffee.

As I ate, I thought briefly about putting a condo on the credit card and never going home. But then I realized that the cats would miss me terribly (yeah, right) and Herself would be eating out of cans while her kin hunted me with baseball bats, and I ain’t talkin’ catch-and-release here. Plus I’d already had a week of waking up without her around and that’s about six days too many.

So I gassed up and beat it for Bibleburg, arriving right around dinnertime.

To atone for my sins, per Herself’s request, I grilled a flatiron steak from Ranch Foods Direct and mashed up some spuds with heavy cream, butter, chives and parsley; she assembled a massive salad and we enjoyed a couple drams while I regaled her with tales from the bike show.

This morning it was what we call “smooshy eggs,” which is basically eggs boiled medium-hard, peeled and mashed with butter, salt and pepper, with spelt toast, java and juice on the side. Lunch was leftover dinner.

And tomorrow? Man. I’ll be lucky to slap together some toast and cold cereal. Someone around here needs to hit the grocery. Guess who? Home again, home again, dancing a jig.

Return of the Interbiker: Songs from Uranus

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
On the road again
Eastbound and down, loaded up an' truckin'.

LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Technology is not always our friend, and all too often the march of progress resembles the drunkard’s stumble that Tom Waits famously described in “Nighthawk Postcards (From Easy Street)” as “using parking meters as walking sticks.”

For example, we now enjoy “Italian” bikes wearing Asian components, “high-speed Internet” that is anything but, and “smart” phones that no longer need humans to place calls, choose music or launch apps.

The Italian-Asian hybrid you already know about. The Internet of the Living Dead was at the Fairfield, where I spent much of last night pushing one pixel at a time through a virtual soda straw.

And the “smart” phone? It was in one of the cargo pockets in my shorts when it decided Interbike was boring and needed a fresh soundtrack. Thus throughout the day my iPhone 3GS would randomly set Tom Waits, Gladys Knight and the Pips or Elvis Costello to singing, Ace Ventura-like, out of my butt, generally while I was trying to conduct a little business.

When that proved so 15 minutes ago it started ringing up people in my contacts list and launching apps at random. What’s next — texting my editors to ask them whether they’re wearing crotchless panties? Some of them probably are, and then where the hell will I be?

Oh, yeah — I’ll be on the road, that’s where. Show’s over, and I’m Colorado bound.

Return of the Interbiker: What, you again?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
The $799 Bianchi Campione is a steel gran-fondo bike that comes equipped with an eight-speed cogset, toeclips and straps — and downtube shifters.

LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Some things never change. I always think I’m going to have a ton of time to post fresh snark about this and that during Interbike, and then I find myself caught up in the flow, like medical waste in the California surf.

The Adventure Cyclist folks are a great bunch — we’ve spent some hours trolling for toys, drinking, eating and bullshitting, which beats the mortal nuts off being chained up in the Sands basement, cranking out word count for the Show Daily.

The crowd has gotten a tad weirder since I was last here. Fewer booth bimbos, but enough tattooed, shaven-headed, multiply pierced, fat honky bastards to outfit three Aryan Nations chapters and a pirate fleet, for starters.

But what the hell? If they’re all about the bikes, then I love them all like the ugly, surly ADHD children I never had, thank God.

I’ve stumbled across old friends and made a few new ones, drooled over some toys, and even rode a bike to the Sands once — a Bike Friday New World Tourist. That was educational. You want a rear-view mirror for that high-speed run along Sands Avenue to the expo. Maybe some body armor, too.

Return of the Interbiker: Surfing Sin City

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Flagstaff's Late for the Train
Late for the Train in Flagstaff. Grab a newspaper, a scone and a cuppa, then watch the daily parade of cyclists, regardless of weather conditions.

LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Apparently I just missed all the fun in Flagstaff. A hailstorm beat me to town — and also beat the mortal shit out of a whole bunch of stuff with giant ice bombs — and after I departed, the flooding commenced. Good times.

I did get a light paddling from Ma Nature, however. After enjoying the traditional java stop at Late for the Train, I  hauled ass westward into some of the wettest high-desert weather I’ve ever seen in many a hard road mile in service of the bicycle bidness.

The rain started bucketing down long before I hit Kingman and it didn’t stop until just short of Searchlight, Nevada.

Somewhere in between, outside of Laughlin around Christmas Tree Pass, I saw some poor desert rat tricked out like some sort of Blade Runner Bedouin, pushing a shopping cart full of Christ knows what eastward through the deluge. Welcome to Nevada.

Change in the weather
It wasn't the usual hotter-than-Hades trip across northern Arizona into southern Nevada this year.

Bugsy Siegal’s Fun House looks a little shabbier since I last visited in 2006. The unemployment rate in the Silver State is pushing 13 percent, and it’s even worse in Vegas; the class war’s body count was shambling zombie fashion along Flamingo and Paradise as I rolled into town.

And there’s not much hope for a speedy return to the good old days, according to Jennifer Robison of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, citing a Brookings Institution report.

She also spoke with a local economist who thinks the report overly pessimistic, but I note that he only expects the unemployment rate to dip once jobless construction workers find gigs elsewhere and flee Sin City like tapped-out gamblers skipping out on their hotel tabs.

BTI getting busy
The fine folks from Santa Fe's BTI uncrate the magic on the Sands floor Tuesday afternoon.

If that’s good economic news, you can have it.

Meanwhile, the Strip was hopping last night as the Adventure Cycling crew and I went out for dinner and drinks to get acquainted. The service-industry folks we encountered seemed to be weathering the economic storm with equanimity, but then they still have jobs.

Me too. And on Wednesday I have to get busy. It’s showtime.

Return of the Interbiker: Bibleburg to Flagstaff

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Bibleburg in the rear-view mirror
The obligatory shot of Bibleburg receding at speed in the rear-view mirror.

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Whenever I take one of these journalistic road trips I quickly come to wish I’d gone into another line of work. Like, say, the manufacture and distribution of orange traffic cones.

I don’t believe I’ve ever driven Interstate 40 when it wasn’t under construction, and today this record remains intact. If only I’d had the foresight to major in traffic cones instead of journalism! With double minors in orange barrels and orange signs, of course. I could buy the 2012 elections, and wouldn’t that be interesting. Maybe not.

Cerrillos in Santa Fe was a construction clusterfuck, too. It was something of a struggle to enjoy my evening ales at Second Street Brewery, my breakfast burrito at Tia Sophia and a leisurely soak at Ten Thousand Waves. But I got them all done, and in that precise order, because I know that you, Dear Readers, expect nothing less than perfection in recreation from Your Humble Narrator.

Now I’m at a Motel 6 in Flagstaff and wishing I’d fetched a piece along, as per my usual practice. The place has backslid along with the economy and I’m pretty sure there is at least one flatbacker working the joint alongside the usual collection of chain-smoking toothless weirdos, grinning ax murderers and illegals camping 12 to a room. But there is wifi, so we have that going for us. I can webcast a digital appeal for help as the serial killers dismember me in front of my own webcam.

Meanwhile, I ignored the national slobbering over the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I didn’t hear anyone mention their most chilling effect — turning us into a nation of cheapjack, chickenshit bullies who wiped our collective asses with our own Constitution and then set about roaming the globe, shoving that stained document into brown people’s faces.

Instead I listened to a nonstop collection of Tom Waits CDs: Real Gone, Blood Money, Mule Variations, Small Change and Alice. Now I have a party in my head and an idea for a fireworks display.

Tomorrow: Vegas. Pray for me.