Coffee!

Short Version:
The Reaper harvests snow, a cold night and a colder morning. We find seriously good coffee and shitty decorative craft.

Long Version:
The snow that had been falling on us as we hiked up out of the Grand Canyon was unevil, mellow snowfall. It was kind of like being in one of those knick-knack snowstorm globe things after someone feeble has given it a gentle shake, and things are settling down agan after the mild turbulence. Up at the top it was a different story, and once we were a-Reapering at speed it was downright scary. Kind of neat though, especially the way the snow flew up past the windscreen without actually hitting it. It seemed very much like how hyperspace travel might manifest itself, should we ever crack that long-held dream tech, although the prospect of entering hyperspace in the Reaper is at least mildly bemusing.

It wasn't particularly warm, either.

We skipped the Visitor Centre and set off downhill, towards the I-40 and Flagstaff. The snow stopped as we dropped, and we had clear skies by the time we reached the fringes of the Kaibab National Forest, where we set up camp not next to the dead thing and slept the intermittent sleep of the not-warm-enough, waking to icy everything. Water bottles were frozen solid and shut, the tarp covering the bikes was a rigid sheet of white, and in the end it came down to a bladder-control contest to see who got fed breakfast in bed.

Once her ladyship had finished her repast and deigned to exit her down-filled coccoon into the chilly, sunny Thursday morning, we set off for Flagstaff, which appeared to be in the process of waking up. Counter-culture kids were everywhere, meandering about the place with hair of all colors and cuts and stages of mattedness. They seemed to be centred largely at a place called Macy's. It had wi-fi and a laundromat next door, so we decided to use our current bedraggledness to full advantage and infiltrate the joint.

Best coffee in North Amerika.

Better than the Back Porch Cafe in Bend. Better than... nope, there hasn't been anywhere else good. Seriously, coffee in Amerika is total pants. The stuff we make in our nifty stovetop espresso thing is umpteen times better than the filth that gets doled out at cafes and diners across the continent. It's so bad that Starbucks is actually not shit, comparatively speaking.

But not at Macy's, on Beaver St, in Flagstaff, Arizona, Amerika. The food was really good too: cheesy eggy goodness. The people-watching was excellent, interwebs were robust, and the only downside was the owner's or owner's spouse's or spawnlet's blithering shite arty photography plastered all over the walls. I will never regain the minutes I spent looking at the one in front of me while Nene booked us a Vegas hotel; they are lost forever, burned wastefully on a piece of pretentious craft masquerading as art. That last bit is a flaw with photography in general, not with Mr. Macy's stuff in particular. Mr. Macy just added a personal crime against discerning humanity by posing subjects abysmally, tritely, and phonily. Horrible.

60% of the Australo-British Grand Canyon band put in an appearance; they'd managed to espy a cougar in the snow as they left the Park the previous day. We were jealous. We weren't jealous of their next mission, though: a Greyhound bus trip. We went thrift-store shopping. All over town. Didn't buy much, though; everything was, again, just not-quite. Nene bought a hat. The beer and the food at the Flagstaff Brewing Co were excellent, and it was a happy pair who hooked off into the woods and camped up the road from the trailhead from which we were to ride the next morning, although the evening was ominously chilly...