I’m sitting here at the picnic table in our campsite in Kanab, Utah. The tent is setup. I can see other tents and RVs nearby. But something doesn’t seem right. Is it that the campground is near the center of town in Kanab? No, that’s not it. Is it that there’s a cemetary on the other side of the fence? Hmmm. A bit creepy, maybe, but that’s not it. Oh yes, now I know what it is. I’ve got my laptop out and I’m connected to the free wireless internet access provided by the campground.

Wow, camping has changed a lot since the days when my brother Jon and I used to head to Moab, Utah for the weekend to do some mountain biking with nothing more than our bicycles, a change of clothes, and a tent. And the tent was optional! We’d just pull off somewhere on the side of highway 128 and camp for the night and nobody would mind. I don’t think you can do that anymore — too many people have discovered Moab for the great recreational destination that it is.

Today’s ride was beautiful! Difficult, but beautiful. Weather forecasts were for warm temperatures (about 70 degrees) and south to southwest winds at 30-35 mph, gusting to 40. The route from Hurricane started out heading southeast for about 25 miles, then it slowly turned back to the northeast over the course of about 15 miles. So, 40 miles were very difficult due to the winds and a climb right out of Hurricane. The climb was about 2000 feet over 30 miles, but about half the climb was in the first 5 miles.

I arrived at the campground after about five hours of riding. Now that the tent is set up, the cookwear is out and ready for dinner in a couple hours, my final challenge of the day is to change the cartridge and infusion site on my insulin pump. When I was over at the showers earlier, it didn’t look like the kind of place I could (or even would want to) set out all the supplies for a site change. But, I’ve always needed running water for a site change. I’ve seen and heard about other people changing their infusion sites without much more than an alcohol swab to clean the new site, but I”ve always used soap and water AND alcohol swabs. I’m still debating how to best go about this site change. I’ll let you know how it goes.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 25th, 2006 at 4:18 pm and is filed under The Dream Tour, Diabetes, Bicycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.