Day 13 (March 30): Kayenta, Utah to Bluff, Utah
Up until yesterday, I was looking forward to riding through Monument Valley. Probably the most breathtaking scenery we’ll encounter the entire trip. This morning, I was a tiny bit anxious about the 40 or so miles to Mexican Hat, Utah because while we were sightseeing yesterday, I discovered that the road has absolutely no shoulder. Combine breathtaking scenery, no shoulder, drivers who are doing more sightseeing than driving, and throw in a bicyclist - even when he’s doing his very best to stay ON the white line — and bad things can happen.
Except they didn’t. This seems to the offseason in the Monument Valley area plus we decided to get as early a start as possible, so what traffic we did see was for the most part very generous in sharing the road.
As I made my way through Monument Valley, there were a number of places for some scenic photography.
Eating right for the past two days has been an interesting experience. We had a total of five meals during our stay in Kayenta. For me, three of those meals came with french fries. At home, we have french fries maybe two or three times a year. I don’t know what I was thinking. Fry bread is a popular food item in this part of the country. We avoided it (read why here and here) successfully until dinner last night. Pat ordered a Navajo Taco that was big enough to need its own zip code. I got adventurous and tried the “Sheepherders Sandwich” which I found out was basically fry bread and beef topped with lettuce, tomatoes, and onions. And it came with, you guessed it, french fries!
So, last night after dinner, feeling especially plump from eating so well, Pat and I decided that we would try to do better diet-wise for the remainder of The Dream Tour. And that meant no more french fries. Like I mentioned earlier, at home we rarely have french fries so to have them three times in two days was soley due to convenience, I think.
Fortunately, my blood sugars did not get out of control. If it hadn’t been for the cycling, I’m sure they would have. Especially at night. I always struggle with fatty foods in the evening because I invariably have a normal BG at bedtime and I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, thirsty, needing to go to the bathroom, not sleeping well or some combination thereof and I’ll test my BG and it will have gone up into the high 200’s, sometimes even higher. That it didn’t do this when we stayed in Kayenta must have been due to the cycling.