Heaps of pictures...

I originally started this blog entry when there was a turkey cooking in the oven causing Britt's parents' place in Snohomish to smell like heaven. My attempt to maintain a clear mind and stick to the task at hand was useless, and I ended up retreating to the kitchen rather quickly to eat pie and drink coffee on that late afternoon while basking in the luscious smell of that big turkey... So, now I come back to this blog entry: my attempt to catch up on photos and stories from our cycle tour from San Francisco to Vancouver. I believe I left off (regarding photos) at Norma's house in Mendocino, California. Goodness, that was ages ago! That was certainly the best and warmest unplanned adventure on our entire trip. Norma kicked our butts at Boggle. She's feisty and quite a smarty-pants Boggle player for being in her mid eighties. She told us her competitive side goes a bit far sometimes; she beats her seven-year-old grandson at the game and tells him the severe loss will make him stronger. Leaving Norma's place was difficult, especially with the weather forecast indicating a storm was coming down from Alaska and expected to hit us that afternoon. Well, the skies stayed clear that day, but the northerly winds picked up a notch or six, and blasted us backwards (almost). Just as I was about to give up for the day, the highway duck into the mountains and the wind disappeared and we rode up the biggest hill of our entire trip north (we could call it a mountain, as it has an altitude of 2700 feet). We camped overnight and the following day would prove to be our second biggest cycling distance day: nearly 83 miles from Legget to Ferndale. The last twelve miles were the worst with steep hills opening out to vast and flat farmland accommodating a pelting headwind. After arriving in the small, very touristy and character-ey (I know this isn't really a word) town, we ate at the local kids pizza joint while trying to find our supposed Warm Showers host - who ended up being a dud. I was so cold and tired and kah-putzed that Brian got us a room in a motel next to the pizza joint and we showered off the sweat and proverbial tears from the day and watched movies on television while laying in bed eating chocolate (that should be the definition of luxurious). Ferndale, you are not so bad: Instead of carrying around highway maps of California, Oregon, and Washington, we bought a cycle touring book which covered the route from Vancouver to Mexico (in that direction, which appears to be the desirable direction of travel). When touring, you want to keep everything as light as possible, unless something is a real treat and is considered exempt from the weight rule (for example, the big jar of strawberry freezer jam Susan gave us in Snohomish). So, when half of the touring book is not part of the route, it gets tossed. Do you know how much fun it is to tear pages out of a perfectly good, and relatively new, book? It's a pretty good time, and we adopted this habit every time we finished a section in the book, so page-by-page, the book disappeared and got lighter and lighter. It was cleansing and perhaps a bit too much fun. Don't worry, I don't plan on getting banned from public libraries anytime in the near future. The next day, we rode to a little university town called Arcata. There was a big party and market going on in the town centre for the weekend, which we opted out of in order to do much needed laundry and get some items for our bikes at the bike shop. We did, however, go to the market-mecca town square for coffee in the morning and were startled when we heard some loud cursing behind us and as I turned around to look what was going on, I saw a big garbage can full of brown beans spill off a trolley onto the pavement. Of course, I said, "Who spilled the beans?"; Brian grunted with disbelief more so at my cheeseball comment than at the loss of some darned good beans meant to be part of burritos for the market. Arcata was cool for two reasons. First, we met Jason, a Warm Shower host and GIS student, who plans to help us start a bike shop/coffee shop/gallery/yoga studio. The second reason belongs to the fact that the town has the most beautiful garbage cans I've ever seen: If you ever wonder what it's like to ride for five or six hours every day and don't want to try it out yourself, I'll give you an excerpt from one of the days we rode. At the beginning of the day, the butt feels pretty good, the legs may feel like lead but quickly change to the powerful and steady appendages you can depend on to get you from Point A to Point B. Usually, the mind is calm and meditative, especially in the morning, and then every once in a while attention is brought back to the present moment by a sore bum, dodging potholes, hunger in the tummy, or words from your touring buddy. After an hour or two, the mind wanders and goes from topics or thoughts of food to friends and family, experiences, comforting places, ideas of attractive things to do in the future, food, being in a car, the best way to design a new bike seat using pressure sensors and cycle ergometers and shaving off bits of foam, food, pets from the past, daydreams of impossible scenes, the best way to design numbness-free handle bars where pressure is equally displaced through molded gloves/handles allowing for finger sensitive shifting and where cold temperature is never an issue, and eventually, the mind always leads once more to food. But really, the time just seems to fly by as quickly as the scenery around us. Six hours and sixty miles will come and go and it feels like we've only been on the bikes for an hour. It's really great. We're in northern California at this point in the photo show. I can't remember the name of the park where the next few pictures are taken, and I tore out that page in the touring book a long time ago, so I can't look it up. Crap. It's nice to see people's adoration for each other displayed on fences. Brian and I thought it was likely too much effort: Upon arrival at the Elk Prairie Campground, Brian stretched and drank water while I sat at the picnic table drinking beer and eating cheese. The next morning we were treated to a foggy, but beautiful scene. Sheeeyah! We hit the Oregon border after eleven days of riding. I was appreciating the upgrades we did to my bike: a new, softer, less blister-inducing bike seat. And handle bar ends which were an attempt to prevent my hands from going numb all the time by allowing for multiple hand positions while riding. It kind of worked, but, especially in the hot shower at the end of the day, my elbows feel funny and my pinkie fingers and one half of both ring fingers go entirely numb. Just across the Oregon border, we stayed with Warm Showers hosts, Ed and Bobbie. They were fantastic, interesting and very outgoing! They also had a beautiful house with a big kitchen window overlooking a bird house with a microphone attached to the bottom leading to a speaker on the counter in the kitchen. How cool is that? In the dining area, they had two big maps on the wall with highlighted lines describing cycle trips Ed had done. We plan to post a big map on our kitchen wall - what a great way to get interesting conversation and wacky stories at the dinner table. The best part about Ed and Bobbie's place were the murals on the wall that a neighbor's daughter had painted for them. I want one of these for our house too. Within twenty minutes of leaving Ed's place, Brian and I spotted our first real Dairy Queen restaurant. It was 10:30 AM. It was open. Yes. Blizzards before lunch? You betcha. Leaving the town of Brookings with a sugar rush, we cycled under incredibly clear skies, but were pushed back incredibly hard with a severe head wind. At one point, I looked at my cycle computer as I was trying to cycle downhill and I was only going 3.5 mph. Ugh!! What a way to drop the fun out of cycling. But, we enjoyed a nice lunch hunched behind a road barrier at a pull-out and got to see this while we ate: Not too much further up the road from lunch, we opted to stop riding and find a place to stay for the night. Gold Beach is a small town on the water and had a Dairy Queen (good), and a cheap motel/cabin for $35 a night (damn good). The sunset that evening was a great addition to a crummy day of riding: We enjoyed the setting sun for a while on the expansive beach and decided to stay in Gold Beach one more day to rest and relax. Our day off included eating an entire package of bacon and two Dairy Queen Blizzards, watching movies and Corner Gas on television, and taking a few naps. It was bliss. The next day of riding, the wind settled down quite a bit and we saw the most beautiful coast line towards Port Orford most of the morning. That day, we pulled into Bandon, Oregon and found that free internet cafe. Sweet times. The next day, we rode through Charleston, famous for its clam diggers - not so famous for its population of apparent trailer trash who didn't appreciate cyclists and yelled at us "Get on the sidewalk!", AND, where the town has a big bridge a few kilometres long where cyclists are not allowed to ride. It was "against the law to mount bicycles on bridge". Later that day, the feeling was no better, even though we landed a good place to camp, because two old folks started preaching Jesus to us with his first sentence being, "I'm not religious, but..." and ended up trying to convince us that some story in the bible is correlated to Pythagoras's Rule which makes that bible story "prove itself!" And so, "The Creator is the only absolute." After the Jesus-totin' pair left to catch the five o'clock news on television, I farted and Brian sniffed and said, "That's the only absolute." Day 16 of our trip brought us through Florence, and to a bike shop to replace my chain and a small problem with my rear hub. While the bike was in the shop, we went out for lunch at a great little pub where I ordered a bottle of old fashioned root beer. I love root beer. The bad things we ingested that day: root beer (which isn't all that bad, right?), burgers and fries, Pumpkin Spiced Lattes at Starbucks (damn), a long john (ha!), and that's it. And nearing the end of our day, we bumped into two folks at the end of their hike, and they gave us a bag full of chantrell mushrooms to add to our dinner. Sweet! Then came the day from the bottom of the sewer.... It rained, and I mean it rained HARD all day long. The only saving grace of the day is that we had a sweet tailwind accompanying the storm which propelled us further than we anticipated, but not that far because of a number of flat tires. All the dirt, glass, staples, and other garbage was being washed to the sides of the highway, where we ride, and in the rain, within a time span of two hours, we had to fix flats on all three of Brian's tires and one of mine (the only tire that didn't flat out that day happened to flat out the next day). We blame Oregon's lack of street cleaning for the extensive flat tire saga. Goodness, it was wet. Once we finally arrived in Lincoln City, we stopped into a State Park and decided putting up the tent in a big puddle wasn't an option, so we stayed in one of the yurts! The next day we rode 77 miles into Manzanita, Oregon -- and there was little rain, thank gosh. But, the day was a bit longer than expected, and the ground was still pretty wet from the day before and the yurts were all full, so we spent a night in a cheesey hotel and watched movies all night. From Manzanita, we booked it to Cannon Beach in an hour to meet up with John, a friend of Brian's from Thorsby, AB and his family. We ate two meals at Mo's, the greasy restaurant next door to the hotel whose specialty was clam chowder. I admit, the chowder was pretty good. The hotel was sweet - and not that expensive; actually cheaper than the crummy place we stayed at in Manzanita. I love how we totally take over a hotel room - bikes, clothes hanging, sleeping bags drying, and us, usually in the bed watching movies on television. From Cannon Beach, we rode 73 miles into Washington and to South Bend (not a very nice place), but the motel we stayed at (yes, I know, another motel, but I had cramps and the weather was disastrous and the ride was hard, so we rewarded ourselves with another bed and - get this! - a Lazy-Boy! I slouched in the comfy chair consoling my uterus while watching Celebrity Poker Showdown on T.V. After a hard day of riding, we arrived at another Warm Showers place where the hosts, Alan and Donna, immediately told us we were to have burgers with them for dinner. Yum. The other great part about that place was the three eyeball headgear halloween costumes they had in our room. Below, I'm showing off the pencil in the eyeball. They also had a razor blade and a screw impaling the big eyeballs. Great stuff! The family ran a 10-km race with these 'helmets' on and landed their photo on the cover of a local paper. Our biggest day of riding was on Day 22, where we rode from Shelton to Snohomish, a mere 88.63 miles for that fancy turkey and the opportunity to hang out with super fun folks -- The Vegsunds. At the ferry in Kingston, I checked my trip odometer, and we'd ridden just over 1000 miles since San Francisco. A congratulatory pretzel was in order of our achievement up to this point... After falling off my bike (more from general stupor from extensive day of riding than anything else), we arrived at Susan and Erling's place just as darkness was surrounding us. Yay! We arrived for the weekend of fun... Hi Britt. Hi Kip... More photos to come, but I have to go eat ice cream cake with my brother now.