There is not much to say about yesterday, our last day at the lake. The biggest happening was that as Susan started her ride to the restroom, she discovered she had a flat tire.
Susan did a fine job with minimal help from me, and if I have a flat tire, she will be the one that must repair it! I will be her assistant, but am useless with these tires.
Being the bike guru that she is, Susan helped Penelope become more familiar with her new Brompton bike — as in pumping her tires to a better pressure. 18 psi was a little low! 52 much better.
Weather has definitely taken a change: 65F this morning, total cloud cover, lots of wind, some rain. Good time to be moving on.
Penelope had done some research ahead of time and got tickets for us to tour the Kartchner Carverns State Park on the way to our next campground.
I have toured at least three other caverns in my life, and this one was quite new as it opened in 1999, after being discovered by to young men when spelunking in 1978. We could not take phones or cameras, or anything else, into the cavern with us so I have taken a couple of the photos from their website: kartchner caverns state park.
Our tour, which started at 2:45, was an hour and a half long and we had an hour and a half drive to Catalina State Park, our camp for the next two nights. Soon after we pulled into camp and were setting up, the sky lit up for us.
Susan’s knee is not getting better, she is having a very difficult time walking (for example, I pushed her in a wheel chair for the cavern tour; my back responded to Extra Strength Tylenol that evening, and I am fine this morning), so we stopped at a CVS pharmacy and bought a knee scooter. She can at least get around better as using trekking poles seemed of little help. With all the pain she has been having, Susan has finally agreed to all my nagging about making an appointment to be seen, and possibly get X-rays of her knee after we get home. So there is that to happen.
Penelope was keen to go on a ride this morning and as I was getting my bike and gear ready to go, she feared she would miss her chance and came running with her helmet in hand. I told her she had plenty of time, and to not rush. I always love it when someone wants to ride with me and would wait even if I was ready first!
We have some mountains around us. Little to no traffic on the roads within the state park. Nice riding conditions.
I missed the turn to the exit where we needed to go for our registration tags for our site, but that was a fortuitous miss as it brought us to a few other things of interest.
At the end of the road was a trail shop where Penelope could get her map.
We made a stop to chat with the delightful artist who is quite talented.
We did make it to the ranger station for our tags, and this is where we met Jax.
A very friendly donkey/burro whose owner/rider came out from the ranger station to chat. We didn’t learn her name but she is Canadian and staying here for a while. Penelope’s “QUEBEC” tee shirt gained her attention as she was born in Quebec and her home is in Canada but she has been traveling.
While I seem to have enough WiFi signal at the moment, I will post this now without doing much proofreading. I can do that and make corrections later.
Adventures with Nancy 