19 mph?!

(This post is anachronistic, but I gotta do it. I keep forgetting until we're riding; after setting up the tent, dinner, hanging the food, etc. ... Plus it kind of cracks me up, because every time I remember, 30 min into the next day's ride, I yell, in my head, "19 mph!" - like that scene in "The Lost People of Mountain Village" - "19 bathrooms!")

There we were, biking along the suburbs of Phoenix (I think?!) and I look down, in the nice clean, concrete curb (after hundreds of miles of "fog line, and broken pavement edge"), and there's a little lizard, racing us, like he's a dog or somethin'. That cat was movin'! So I looked at my speedometer and it said 19.5 mph; so I figured that he was goin' just a tiny bit slower than us, and I gave him credit for 19 mph. Not bad for a little lizard (maybe 6 inch body, 5 inch tail?)

But the really impressive thing was when he did a u-turn, in that tiny space, and was immediately goin' full throttle the other way! What an athlete!

And, as of this morning, the dogs are chasing us. I swear I just about got a chomp on my right calve when we stopped on the sidewalk, here in Hatch, NM. The dog snuck up on me, out of the shadows, and was focused on my leg like "a laser". Luckily, a dude I took as the owner yelled at him just as he was about 1 meter (that's 39 inches for the Americans, Sri Lankans, and...[what's that 3rd country still not using metric?] in the audience) away from his second breakfast. Man, I wasn't lookin' forward to this aspect of the trip, yet. I thought it wouldn't get bad till Tex Ass. Guess I was wrong!