Williams to Flagstaff, AZ 04-18-2026 Day 8

I saw that the continental breakfast at our hotel was, as one of my Warm Showers hosts once said “Breakfast for people that don’t eat breakfast”. To give them credit, besides toast, butter, and jelly, they also had some decent cereal, milk, coffee, juice, AND a pancake machine. First time I had seen one of those. The pancakes were small, but not bad. I had taken a morning walk back through Williams to get a couple of hard boiled eggs and a banana to fill out my breakfast. It gave me a chance to see a lot more of the town in the daylight and appreciate some of the things we missed the night before. Like Seligman, they really play up their Route 66 heritage. As always you can click on any image to get a better look.

Leaving Williams, we rode uphill onto I-40. Did I mention it was also against the wind? It was going to be a relatively short ride to Flagstaff, almost all on the shoulder of I-40. We went up and down in elevation, but more up than down. The >12 mph wind was often in our face and sometimes just a cross wind. The big semi’s helped pull us along in their backdraft, but that was no match to the oncoming wind. We found a rest stop that was still under construction about 9 miles down the road, so we stopped and rested.

Though we didn’t have to do a lot of miles we had to earn them all. Once in a while we got to see more than just the cars and trucks. Besides the wind, the elevation might have played a role in our fatigue, but I think it was mostly the wind.

When we finally made it into Flagstaff, the first order of business was to get to a bike shop. We had stopped at 10 AM along I-40 so that Ron could make a call to the Single Track bike shop that Becky Andrade had found for us. Ron was able to get an appointment to have them try and fix the shifter that controlled his rear gearing.

Since it was going to take some time and I was dying for a second breakfast, the shop owner let us leave both our bikes and panniers. We changed shoes so we could walk to the Galaxy Diner. It was a cool throwback place that had many flavors of milk shakes, but we stuck to the breakfast fare. Ron had a an amazing hot chocolate, and I had a small omelette that came with some sides. 🙂

We took our time at the diner, since we knew we couldn’t check in to the hotel until 3 PM. We got the call that Ron’s bike was ready so we waddled back to the shop. They seemed to have done a good job and the price was great. They treated us very well. We swapped our shoes again, repacked the panniers and rode the final 5 miles to our hotel. The street, part of the original Route 66 had a good bike lane, but it soon disappeared. Luckily there was a nice bike path that paralleled the road.

Even though we were anxious to get to the hotel and were looking for it, we overshot our Days Inn and went to one 2 miles beyond ours. We had to double back, so the extra 4 miles do not show up on our ride statistics. It was a short but hard day. But we sure got some good eats, finishing with a walk this evening to Culvers for another ice cream fix. The details of the route and ride stats are here. The 3D route is here.

The Not So Lone Rider