Day 2: Joshua Tree to Peoria, AZ (275 miles)
I woke up to a beautiful sunrise in Joshua Tree and made a quick breakfast of eggs, bacon, and coffee amidst the breathtaking desert backdrop.
From there, we set our sights on Sedona, so we packed up and hit the road. We had a blast riding east on California 62, a two-lane, mostly straight stretch of highway with visibility as far as the eye can see. We pulled over for a quick stop somewhere around Rice, CA, to see the shoe fence , a weird collective art piece composed of thousands of shoes and other articles of clothing left by travelers.
At this point, our bellies were starting to rumble, so we hopped back on our bikes, with only about 35 miles left before our planned lunch spot, Tierra Caliente Meat Market , just across the border in Parker, AZ. But fate had other plans. A few miles later, I heard a snapping sound and started feeling a strange vibration in the rear end of my bike, so I pulled over at the next gas station to take a look.
As it turned out, the tire on the replacement wheel didn’t have quite as much life left in it as I had thought. We took off our helmets, grabbed some gas station coffee, and I started making phone calls, looking for a nearby motorcycle shop with a 180/55/R17 tire in stock. After exhausting all the shops in nearby Parker and Lake Havasu, I finally found a Cycle Gear in Goodyear, AZ — 140 miles away — that had a tire, was able to mount it, and would still be open by the time I arrived.
Clo rode on ahead to Parker to grab some tacos at Tierra Caliente while I waited for AAA. After my bike was loaded on the flatbed, I rode along with the driver to Cycle Gear. We swung by Tierra Caliente on the way, where Clo ran out to the truck with a couple of tacos (which were amazing, by the way!) and I scarfed them down while the driver regaled me with his life story over the next two hours, starting from when he moved to Arizona with his girlfriend, through their tumltuous breakup which ended with him in jail and his now-ex ransacking their apartment, all the way to a few nights before, when he had gone to Vegas for a friend’s wedding, made a bet with the other groomsmen over who would sleep with a bridesmaid first, and handily won the bet by bedding all four of them. It was nothing if not an entertaining drive!
I got to Cycle Gear around 5:00, about an hour before closing. The guys there were amazing. While I had all the special tools I needed to remove the rear wheel, I didn’t have a breaker bar, and when I asked if they had one I could borrow, the store manager, Shawn, offered to run out to Harbor Freight to buy one. He wouldn’t even let me pay for it — “We could use one for the shop,” he said. He donned his helmet, hopped on his Kawasaki, and rode off to Harbor Freight.
Once he arrived back with the breaker bar, I pulled off the old wheel, handed it to Shawn, who got to work mounting the new tire, and Clo and I picked up some much-needed ice cream next door.
By the time we finished our ice cream, Shawn had finished mounting and balancing the tire, and I reinstalled the rear wheel complete with fresh rubber.
By this point, it was getting dark, we were still 126 miles from Sedona, and we were both pretty beat after the day’s misadventures (stacked on top of 4 hours of sleep the night before), so we booked a hotel in nearby Peoria, AZ, where we checked in, ordered a couple of cheesesteaks from DoorDash, and crashed — hard.