I woke up feeling crummy, I hadn't exercised much since the prior weekend's triple race agenda. We ordered breakfast to the room, closed the door between the living room and the bed, and did 3 hours of conference calls each, plus other random emailing, phone calling, and work.
We left the hotel to find out that our key fob for the rental car only opened the trunk, didn't notice when we picked up the car as the doors were unlocked. So we crawled in through the back, called the rental agency, and tried to get that dealt with before driving to St. George.
It felt nice to finally be on the road once a Mexican employee of the rental car agency, who I'd rank among their star employees after the pace of our pickup last night, assessed and fixed our problem without running us through the "system" for a car exchange. We took the scenic route along the north side of Lake Mead, and arrived in St. George several hours later than expected and feeling tired.
After sitting around and making small talk, we put together our bikes and Uncle Bob took us for a spin to some local trails. It took 3 minutes from the driveway to get off pavement onto very, very high quality trail systems. Awesome. We rode until sunset along some red rock mesa, on technical single track loops. To have that so close to home is a fantastic luxury. Once we were home, it was time to hit the backyard pool before dinner... speaking of which, dinner was a gourmet affair. I think there's a chance I might never leave their casita (little house room where a guest can come and go separate from the house, but it's attached to the house).
We went to bed early feeling good with the 2.5 hours of riding and feeling like we're almost on vacation.
Saturday we rode about 7 hours, including a 10 mile climb up a nearby mesa to a campground, very La Ruta-ish route. It was cold, they've got a freak cold spell this week the weatherman on TV says is from Canada. It hailed, it rained, and was about 10-15C depending on elevation. We had enough clothes to have a great day still.
St. George is an amazing city for mountain biking. There's 70,000 people here in an area that's completely surrounded my mountains, mesas, buttes, and all those other landscape terms of the southwest that are a little outside my vocabulary. It's all public land, and hiking and biking trails are everywhere. It's the equivalent of having a dozen Moose Mountain type areas surrounding town all within riding distance of home, if you're willing to do an hour commute on paths/roads each way. If you want to load up the car, double that amount.
Amazing!
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