I write these up the week after each big ride while I can still remember who did what. Mileage is from my odometer, from the meeting spot and back, so yours will be different depending on where you live. Anybody who thinks I got something wrong can write her own report and I'll post it. Nobody ever does.

We started in a bike shop's parking lot in Tempe at 9:00 and ran a loop out through Fountain Hills, up and around, and back down to a park in Scottsdale, with five card stops: a gas station, a café, a feed store (thank you to the owner, who stood out front in a cowboy hat and handed out cards like he'd been doing it all his life), a scenic pullout, and the park. Every stop had two Lilacs at a card table with a deck, a clipboard and a cooler of water.

Weather was perfect, 78 and clear, and the brittlebush was blooming yellow all along the roadsides. Yolanda made four crockpots of chili for the finish. They were empty by 2:00. The men who rode with us were lovely. One of them asked Sally which of us was "in charge," and Sally said "All of us," and went back to her chili.

Saturday morning out through Wickenburg and up US 93 to Kingman, lunch, and then the reason we came: the old road, the original Route 66, heading west out of Kingman toward the Colorado River. It's the stretch the interstate left behind, and it shows. The road climbs into the Black Mountains and over the pass in a set of hairpins with no shoulder, no guardrail in places, and a drop that Ronda Samora described, at the top, with a word I won't put on this page.

Take it slow. Really slow. First gear in a couple of the turns, and look where you want to go, not at the edge. Everybody made it over without a bobble, including Kim Black, who'd had her license for exactly eleven months and rode it like she'd been born on that Honda.

On the far side is the old gold mining town where the wild burros walk right down the middle of the street. They're descended from the miners' burros, and they've figured out that tourists mean carrots. One of them put its head in Lucy Moorhead's saddlebag looking for one and came out with her sunglasses. She got them back. The burro was not sorry.

Down to the river, back to Kingman for the night (two motel rooms of four and one of one, because Gloria Amundsen snores and knows it and pays for her own room, and we love her for it), and home Sunday by the same way we came. Ruth Fritts got sunburned through her jacket's vents in a stripe on each arm. She's calling them her racing stripes.

North on I-17, which is not interesting until it suddenly is, when you come over the top and drop down into the Verde Valley, and then off the interstate and up past Bell Rock into Sedona. I've been to Sedona twenty times and the red rocks still make me pull over and stare. Fourteen of us pulled over and stared.

Lunch in town (a little expensive, but everything in Sedona is a little expensive, including the air), and then up Oak Creek Canyon on 89A, which is one of the prettiest roads in the state: the creek on one side, red walls and then pines, and at the top a set of switchbacks that climb right up the canyon wall. Sunday traffic was heavy coming down and we took the climb in single file at a crawl. Nobody minded. That's the kind of road where a crawl is the point.

Back down the interstate from Flagstaff. It was 58 degrees at the top of the canyon and 96 when we got home. Christine McGann said she'd ridden through every season of the year in one afternoon. That's Arizona in May.

Our "get out of the oven" trip, every June. East on US 60, out past the mines, and then the Salt River Canyon, which if you haven't ridden it is the Grand Canyon's little brother: the road switchbacks down about two thousand feet to a bridge over the river, and then climbs right back up the other side. Stop at the bottom. Get off the bike. Look up. Then take the climb out in a low gear with plenty of room between you, because there are always trucks.

Then up onto the high country and into the ponderosa pines, and suddenly you need your jacket in June, which feels like a miracle. We stayed at a lodge with cabins and a big stone fireplace and sat around it all evening like a summer camp for grown women. At dusk there were elk in the meadow behind the cabins, eleven of them, which Nora Donald counted twice to be sure, because she's a retired bookkeeper and that's what she does.

Sunday morning it was 41 degrees when we got on the bikes. By the time we got back to the Valley it was 112. Angie Simmons rode the last forty miles with a wet bandana around her neck and her jacket unzipped, which is the right way to do it (see the heat section on the New Riders page). Everybody home by 4:00, everybody fine, everybody already asking about next June.

Our summer club rides, kickstands up at 6:00 a.m., home before the real heat. Temperatures are what Bobbi's little thermometer on her handlebar said when we left and when we got back.

Next up: the Carefree Highway breakfast ride on October 10, and then the big one, the fall color ride on October 17. Details on the calendar.