On Friday, I rode my bike from Flagstaff to Sedona. It’s like a 25 to 30 mile ride. It only took about an hour and a half. I took 89, which means I was able to ride down the switchbacks 2k feet. It was SWEEEET. There is no bike lane, so a lot of people think it’s really dangerous, but to be honest, I felt safer on the switch backs then anywhere else. I was able to go just as fast, if not faster than the cars that have to slow to 15 mph on many of the turns.

What I never realized when I drove that stretch of highway in the past is how incredibly up and down 89 is from Flag to the top of the switchbacks. There isn’t much of a bike lane there either. I pretty much hugged the white line and, fortunately, the cars that passed gave me plenty of room. That was great. For some reason there was a lot of nats on the road; I’m not sure why there were so many, but they certainly didn’t taste very good. Though I had driven past it many times before, I pulled over to that scenic view just before the switchbacks for the first time. I got yelled at for riding my bike on the pedestrian paths that go from lookout to lookout. The view was incredible though.

A lot of the drivers going back up the switchbacks smiled at me because it had to be obvious that I was having a great time. It was pretty windy, but overall, I couldn’t have asked for better weather. The road from the bottom of the switchbacks into town was great as well. There weren’t many cars on the road and riding alongside Oak Creek was fantastic. It’s very green along the river right now. The deciduous trees down there have a head start on the ones here. It was also great to ride through the falling puffs of cottonwood seeds.

I met my family in town. My grandmother passed away earlier last week and the funeral was on the morning that I road down there. I was too busy to go to the funeral, but I road my bike to spend the rest of the day with the fam. I threw my bike in my brother’s rental car and he drove me back up that evening. So no…I’m not hardcore enough yet to ride up the switchbacks.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 6:55 pm and is filed under bikes!. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.