Date Time Distance Avg. Speed R Aug 1 9:45 167 km 21.1 km/h F Aug 2 10:00 159 19.7 S Aug 3 9:30 136 16.5 U Aug 4 11:00 165 18.7 M Aug 5 7:15 90 16.1 T Aug 6 10:30 142 16.9 W Aug 7 10:00 151 19.7 R Aug 8 6:15 69 14.9 F Aug 9 10:00 130 17.2 S Aug 10 10:00 120 15.0 U Aug 11 11:15 116 15.7 M Aug 12 12:00 152 16.7 T Aug 13 8:15 76 14.6 W Aug 14 11:00 140 18.1 R Aug 15 8:15 102 15.4 F Aug 16 8:30 128 23.9 S Aug 17 6:45 117 23.4 average 9:30 127 18.2 total 160:15 2160Average speed is computed by the Avocet 40 only while the bike is in motion.
This is for you who are planning, doing, or remembering such a time in your own life. Reflect on that time as you read this. Don't read it through in a goal-oriented nonstop fashion, short though it may be. If an important thought strikes you, stop and dwell on it.
I refer to many fields in my writing. If you don't understand a particular remark, fear not; someone else will miss lines that you get.
David Benson and Bryan Krische, being interns, are less sucked than most into the Black Hole of Seattle (as they call Microsoft at Waterloo), so they give me a 2-bicycle escort the first few km. David Schilling's moving to a new apartment; between trips in the rented pickup he takes more photos of me leaving than I will on the whole journey. Lora brings a beautiful blossom from the rosebush in front of her house; Bryan manages to affix it to my handlebars with an elastic. "This way I go with you."
I head up 156th Ave. past Corporate Campus for the last time, bid farewell to Dave and Bryan, and continue down Northup Way to West Lake Sammamish Parkway. I'm alone now. This Is It. Not in a small orbit returning to the start of the trip in a few hours (or days, in extreme instances), it feels like I've been gathering momentum in circular trips, the last two years in Seattle. Now, escape velocity. Who knows where I'll be tonight, it's 11:00 already, no way will I reach Gingko. OK God, all systems go, I've planned and trained as best I can, it's in your hands now.
Barrelling down Northup, a squirrel dances madly back and forth in the oncoming lane 50 metres ahead. This survival tactic is more effective against conventional predators than Mercedes, we discover a few seconds later. A sobering thought. I'm equally fragile and vulnerable, reflexite and helmet and halogen headlamp or not.
Twenty minutes later a pickup pulls over behind me. "Is this yours?" the driver asks, holding the stuff-sack containing my sleeping pad. I mumble my gratitude -- 3 weeks sleeping on rocks and tree roots avoided! -- and examine the loose velcro that opened behind me, dumping it on the shoulder. Back to the real world, Camille. We're talking survival here. I rearrange my load and fasten the velcro extra-tight.
By the I-90 on-ramp in Issaquah I'm in much better spirits. The bike's heavy and twitchy with all this gear in the back, but I've got a 38x28 gear on a 20" rear wheel to handle it, the strongest hill-climbing legs I've ever had, two bottles of Exceed, one of Cytomax, three of water, a dozen Powerbars, a gorgeous sunny day, and (most important) a tailwind! The Thursday midday ride through North Bend and up Snoqualmie Pass is quiet, and I've got 3 meters of shoulder all to myself. The beauty God's given western Washington is in full regalia: towering peaks smothered in equally towering pine and fir, sparkling rivers, verdant valleys, circling eagles and friendly vacationers waving and tapping their horns. I wave back -- I'm not that alone after all.
Up and down long hills until North Bend, where I-90 becomes the only road leading through the Cascades. It's hot, hard work grinding up the pass in my lowest two granny gears. Lora's rose has as much endurance as I do, though. Despite 60 km/h downhill blasts and temperatures in the low thirties I'm still sticking my nose in it every so often as a respite from internal combustion byproducts, and it looks as sweet as it smells. At the 3300-foot summit I top off my bottles and leave the rose behind. (I measure everything except altitude and tire pressure in metric. Don't ask.)
The pass remains beautiful. I'm constantly thanking the civil engineers who carved these roads out of the mountainside and keep them in tiptop shape. They did much more work than I will do in the next three weeks.
As I leave King County the roads degrade somewhat. It's still faster than backpacking through dense forest, so I'm not upset even when a nail firmly embeds itself in my rear tire (though less firmly than being airtight). I pull off the shoulder and use my can of Exceed powder as a kickstand to protect the protuding bottle cage when I lean the bike on its side. I'll keep the can for this purpose long after it's empty. I remove the nail, patch the tube, install the "Mr. Tuffy" tube protector I didn't get around to mounting before leaving, laboriously inflate the tire back to 85 psi, grumble as I remember that it won't clear the shoes on my hydraulic brakes, deflate it, mount the rear wheel, and pump for another five minutes. An hour later I pull into the KOA campground in Ellensburg, anoint myself with bug repellent, cook a (typical) meal of pasta-and-tuna, set up the tent (discovering a surprise my roommate had hidden therein), and fall asleep.
When you look at a 100-meter interval contour map, the land beyond the pass seems flat, but from the seat of a loaded recumbent it's a different story. Two long steep hills in the morning, merciless sun blazing right in front of me. I've climbed another 1500 feet or so by noon. Yesterday's tailwind has shifted 180 degrees, which is almost a blessing while climbing. Slow climbing in a tailwind drowns a cyclist in his sweat as his airspeed becomes zero. Drinking water is scarce: the highway rest stops have none, and towns are at least 40 km apart. The sky is absolutely cloudless, and it would be forty in the shade if there was anything to cast a shadow.
I stop for lunch at Gingko Petrified Forest State Park on the Columbia River, which is mildly interesting. The Columbia gorge is much more so, for both aesthetic and athletic reasons. A few tourists feed me and tell me what kind of topography I can expect farther on. After climbing up the other side of the gorge I see the true SE Washington "Desert." It's deserted alright, but mostly irrigated from the river so vast fields of wheat and greenery alternate with the rye grass and tumbleweed. State Route 26 marches through Othello. By sunset I reach a rest area at Route 395; a few questions confirm my map's indication that nothing resembles a campsite for the next 100 km, so I bed down behind one of the buildings on the concrete sidewalk. It's either that, or the parking lot, or the green green grass made so by the powerful powerful sprinkler system. This is desert, remember. The sky is still cloudless and there's no room to pitch the tent anyway, so I don't bother.
Big mistake.
The sprinklers have generous overspray. The constant drenching bests even my Gore-tex sleeping bag, so I shuffle over two meters to a dry(er) spot. A few minutes later the deluge stops. And starts again, but with different sprinklers with different overspray patterns. I try to outguess the designer of this diabolical system and pick a spot which will stay dry for at least an hour or two. This goes on all night. Between this and other sudden changes in lifestyle I've mostly forgotten about God. Even with zero toys, the trip itself has become an all-day distraction. Of course I'm too busy to want to notice this.
After an hour, Hwy. 12 leads to Pomeroy "where agriculture is # 1", a sign proclaims. It's a pleasant, cheerful town. A steak house and a pub are still open; I choose the pub, construct a supper out of the few non-fried items available, and am warned by the barmaid to not go on to Clarkston tonight. All women older than me display strong maternal instincts regarding this trip (with one or two exceptions, you know who you are). It's kind of nice to be fretted over, though. I'd be worried if they all weren't. Does the universe have a law of conservation of worry that the physicists haven't yet discovered?
After three strenuous days, I'm developing tendonitis. On a recumbent it's tempting to mash the pedals at low revs, pushing against the back of my seat; I'm now discovering how hard this is on my legs.
Camping at the Pomeroy city park I encounter another cyclist. Craig's been on the road for 2 months, heading for Seattle. Last night he met an RV traveller from his tiny home town in Pennsylvania and thus spent the night much more luxuriously than usual. More about the RV chap later. Much more, in fact.
In Clarkston I raid a fruit stand (first since Bellevue!) for lunch. The fabled Route 12 in Idaho has very light traffic Sunday evening, so I press on an hour past sunset to the Lewis & Clark RV park past Kamiah. A kitten bats at the tie-downs on my rainfly as I'm dozing off, and ants find my banana and raisins-in-a-ziploc-baggie. Hmph, wildlife!
I quickly figure out that Craig of Pomeroy and the Craig Pete DiPietro is talking about are the same person. Pete and Edna are seeing the western states in their motorhome for a few months, .
It's taken me five days to notice, but I finally realize I probably won't reach Toronto. Such a pace leaves no time to think or pray or anything but camp, eat, and ride like a maniac.
Back near Palouse Falls, I played tag with sparrows along the road. As I silently approached and startled them they would flit a few fenceposts farther, repeating the scenario four or five times before flying in a different direction. Now along the Lochsa River I'm doing the same on a larger scale with an eagle. After 2 km of this it decides that I'm neither threat nor food and stays put on its perch across the river as I roll by.
The tendonitis is excruciating for the first half-hour of the morning, but I'm strongly favouring my left ankle and the rest of the day is bearable if slow. The sheer beauty of the river valley keeps my mind off the pain. I'll consider taping my ankle(s) if it gets worse, but aspirin is an absolute last resort. I don't want to be unaware of the pain. I call it quits at Wilderness Gateway Park, midway through a stretch of "No Services Next 125 Miles." I'm on my last pair of socks, so it's time to do laundry. As I hang everything on the bike to dry, a thunderstorm rolls in and I hastily bundle everything into a plastic bag. Things smell musty for a few days afterwards.
Leaving Missoula, a grizzled old mountain biker catches up to me on I-90 and we chat for a few minutes. I see him heading back home on the opposite shoulder a few minutes later. Such freedom, not being constrained to return from whence you came!
A large motorhome slowly passes, tapping its horn for 10 seconds. I wave cheerily at its rear-view mirror -- the most enthusiastic greeting I've gotten in a few days -- and it crests a hill and disappears. A minute later I climb the hill and see it stopped ahead, the driver outside with a large object on his shoulder. I realize it's a camcorder, and then recognize Pete DiPietro again! Apparently the small blue object with the bright red flag is unique in these parts. At highway rest stops in South Dakota people will ask me, "Didn't I pass you way back in Montana last week?"
I surf on a cold front all afternoon, feeling rather like a sailboat with oars as an afterthought. Lao Tsu was right: accepting Nature and playing along is much smoother than battling it with mere human power.
Late in the afternoon a stranded motorist needs some emery cloth to file down the points in his distributor. The sandpaper in my patch kit works fine. Funny, the chance to help someone else boosts my spirits greatly!
I reach Butte ("Is this really Butte, Montana / Or just existential blues?" has been the song in my head for the last 50 km) and head for the Greyhound bus terminal. After talking to several people I find a furniture store with a chesterfield box big enough to accomodate the bike without major disassembly. (I'd have nothing to carry my stuff in if I removed the trunk.) I check back at the terminal that I will in fact be able to get this box on the bus, and discover the following: (1) even disassembled completely, the boxed parts are too large; (2) the bus is very full when it pulls into Butte, and the drivers detest even conventional bike boxes; (3) the maximum value I can declare for the bike is about 12 percent of its actual cost. I can take a hint. The dispatcher snaps out of his sullen attitude long enough to tell me where the only truck stop in town is, where I head to get a lift.
I've hardly got both feet clicked into the pedals before a familiar voice shouts "Camille!" Pete's back again, sightseeing in the little car he tows behind the motorhome. It's wonderful to see a familiar face; the old question, coincidence or divine intervention?, comes to mind. He and Edna point out that modern motorhomes, albeit spacious inside, have doorways ill-suited to squeezing a recumbent through. There's no railroad through Butte, so I continue on to the truck stop, 5 km back on I-90.
Several interviews later I discover the following. (1) Nobody's allowed to ask for rides here, even in the parking lot. (2) The vast majority of truckers work for firms whose insurance forbids them to take hitch-hikers, and the cargo trucks often have the doors sealed anyway. The chances of me stopping a significantly eastbound independent friendly trucker not in a terrific rush with a non-sealed box trailer on the shoulder of a major interstate are ridiculous.
I refill my bottles, wash up, buy a few snacks (Fig Newtons and mixed nuts) for on the road, and head back to the bike. OK Lord, I'll play it your way. I got into this mess, and somehow I'll get out. Despite my protestations of impossibility, despite the fatigue permeating my whole body and spirit, despite the tendonitis somehow I'll make it over the Continental Divide tonight, two more 7,000-foot passes tomorrow, and get to Champaign by the twenty-first.
As I'm stretching my legs, a lady tanking her Ford Bronco starts into the Five Questions Leading To Enlightenment ("Where ya from? Where ya going? Isn't that uncomfortable? How much does that thing cost? How fast does it go?"). I forget what she asked, I forget exactly how I phrased my commitment to trust in God instead of in the Great American Transportation Network, but three minutes later her luggage is in the front seat, myself and her two sons are inside, the Presto's shoehorned in the back requiring only the removal of the nose fairing, and we're barrelling east at 75 MPH. Sometimes the Lord acts so quickly it makes my head spin. Michelle Stahl, her teenage boys and myself get along like old pals, giving me a perfect two-hour view of Montanans as they really are -- family-centered, car-centered (hey, things are far apart in this state), straightforward and simple. I much prefer this to the full-time job of keeping up with images and layers of urban sophistication. I hope they got as much from me as I did from them.
About 300 km later, I crawl into my sleeping bag in Laurel, just west of Billings. Montana has stunning sunsets every day.
Back on I-90 bright and early; the rest has worked wonders for me. It doesn't take long for a vicious southwest wind to spring up; all day it tries to blow me back to Missoula. Being overoptimistic about today's distance, I have "lunch" at a fast-food restaurant at 5 P.M., watching the spectacular cumulus that's been behind me. Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi comes to mind. But by sunset (as stunning as ever) I have no spirit left to continue 30 km to one person's claim of the existence of an abandoned campsite on this Indian reservation. So I stop at Crow Agency, choosing the Custer Memorial Motel/RV Park instead of the other one because it's on my side of the freeway. This is the most mosquito-infested camp yet. It's a third-world country. The water tastes a good deal worse than anything I've encountered yet. A large diseased dog shuffles around drooling on everybody trying to get some attention. I get really annoyed when it tries to lift a leg against my tent. The mosquitos drive me inside the tent to read and write in my journal; I skip supper and promise myself a big oatmeal breakfast tomorrow.
A few km before I rejoin the interstate I notice two bulls up ahead on the left staring intently at me. I'm unfamiliar with the psychology of cattle, so I pedal slowly and warily past as I do when encountering a strange dog. (Fortunately there's no dogs on the interstate; I haven't needed my cayenne spray yet. I also thank God that the two main menaces to cyclists, dogs and trucks, are both noisy in their approach. If cats liked to chase me, I probably wouldn't notice them until my ankles were bleeding.) I pass a clump of trees on the right, and behold a dozen more cattle. Evidently the first two have crossed the road; these are still pondering in bovine lethargy the pros and cons of such a course of action. At any rate the red flag snapping briskly in the headwind accelerates their synapses as dramatically as their bodies; they stampede at the strange intruder. Each one masses four or five times as much as me and my gear. Cayenne won't do much against this crowd, but adrenalin's more effective -- in moments I triple my previous speed, headwind or no. Only when I reach the on-ramp to I-90 do I return to a sane pace in the terrible heat.
The large breakfast is making its presence felt; my digestive system works less well when blood's diverted to my legs and I'm sitting down squashing my internal organs than when I'm lying asleep for 7 hours. Not only that, the on-ramp was a few km before Wyola and I'm running out of water. I finally give in to dehydration and lean the bike against a guardrail. Holding my empty bottles upside-down with the caps open gives no response from either trucks or vacationers. Is everybody in this society in such a rush? I try a different method: set the two bottles with a few ounces left beside the bike, and lie down in the substantial shadow of the trunk for ten minutes. I'm more rested, but the bottles just get blown over by the wind from passing trucks. This is getting nowhere. I get back on the bike, grumble at my bad planning, and hold out an upside-down bottle whenever I see a vehicle grinding up a hill slow enough that the driver might notice me. These 750-meter-wavelength hills are getting to me. A passenger in a huge Buick mockingly empties his beer can out the window. Oh well. I've still got enough water for another ten minutes of this. A few more RV's trundle by without so much as a wave or a chirp of the horn.
A motorcycle pulls over at the next summit, 100 meters ahead! I shift up a few gears and breathlessly catch up to him.
"I saw you holding out this plastic thing and wondered, what the hell is that? Finally it clued in that it was a water bottle! I suppose you want some?"
Whoops, I forgot a rule of mine: Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. Of the few drivers who saw me, most probably didn't have a clue that (a) I was holding out a bottle, (b) it was hot, and (c) I needed water. Of course, in this case the stupidity was equally my own.
"I got it from Yellowstone yesterday, so it might taste funny," he warns as he empties his canteen into two bottles. I don't notice anything except the joy of (cold!) fluid entering my system again. We exchange a few words on touring and survival, he agrees that water is much better than carbonated or sweetened drinks, I thank him kindly, and we continue our ways, me with a greater respect for motorcyclists. In appearance he was an unrespectable "biker" in every way: black leather, bandanna, sunglasses, unkempt beard; but by reason of intelligence, kindliness, or simple feeling of companionship with another solo tourer, he could do what hundreds of others couldn't.
Soon after I see some red fabric flapping in the right lane. It can't have been there more than a minute, otherwise it would have blown onto the shoulder. I stop and wait for a gap in the traffic to retrieve what appears to be a flannel shirt; far ahead I see a motorcycle pull over too. There's finally a gap, and I click-clack across in my cleats to the shirt and leather gloves. When I reach the stopped motorcycle, sure enough it's the same guy fishing through his saddlebags. I offer my find. "I didn't see anything else on the road." It's his turn to thank me: "They'd fine me pretty heavy for going the wrong way on the shoulder or taking the U-turns."
Finally I reach Ranchester. I buy some grapefruit juice and tablets to ease my tummy, and sit out the heat for an hour and a half writing postcards. When the sun's lower I continue to the KOA at Sheridan. A relaxing 10-minute soak in the hot tub counterpoints a stressful day.
I surf on a violent tailwind ahead of a thunderstorm into the Powder River canyon and back up the other side. I glance only briefly at the heavily eroded soil and sagebrush. All my concentration is on staying in control of the 65 km/h Prest(issim)o for several minutes in the middle of the single eastbound lane. Thankfully traffic is light in the construction zone where the shoulder is blocked off. (When the Presto hits even a small bump at speed, it throws its rider out of the seat. Having only hands and feet in contact with the bicycle is fine on a conventional steed, but a sudden inability to body-steer is very dangerous on a recumbent whizzing downhill. So I pick the smoothest path I possibly can down a hill and ignore everything else.)
Then the rain catches up with me, rather gentle actually. The lightning stays 15 seconds away so I don't bother taking down my flag. As the storm passes, an equally violent headwind tries its best to direct me back into the canyon. But the front fairing does its job well: I keep up a moderate pace although my flagpole approaches the horizontal at times. The last 40 km are the worst yet; in spitting rain, the wind changes station yet again, now coming from due south in great-grandmothers of gusts that I need the whole shoulder to deal with. Without the weight of my gear I'm positive the wind would render me airborne. The fairing's no help against this. I slow down to 10 km/h, hoping that I have enough water to make it to Mitchell in four hours instead of the two I had planned on.
An hour after sunset, lights ablaze, I trudge through the motel/restaurant strip to an eating establishment. I've no heart left to battle the storm setting up the stove and tent in a dark, desolate campsite. Mentally and physically drained as I am, it takes me several minutes to find even one reasonable item on the copious menu. Broiled fish, rice, baked potato on the side, green salad hold the dressing, extra veggies please, plenty of milk. The veggies are over-microwaved, the fish is soaked in butter, and the potato is tiny. Despite my best efforts I've still eaten too few complex carbohydrates and too much fat. Fatigue overwhelms my hunger, but I've got to fuel myself so I finish with a cheesecake-like confection of butter, sugar, eggs, and chocolate. I'm surprised to find I can only down half of it despite having burned 5 or 6 thousand calories today. My appetite for rich food has vanished after two weeks of pasta, oatmeal, tuna, fruits and vegetables. (In another month I'll end two years of waffling and go completely vegetarian. I've run out of excuses to eat wasteful food that I can live perfectly well without.)
The relaxed dinner does give me time to think instead of cook, and I discover a pattern in myself over the last dozen years. Based on very little real data I will optimistically construct an ideal scenario of what I will do in a new situation like work or school, and spend much energy and time planning and preparing for this fiction. I should instead do the planning while I'm there and have the data at hand. The balance between planning and doing is easy to topple.
I roll into a ground-floor room at a motel. The hallway is just wide enough to get the bike inside without disassembly. After all this camping, the comfortable room (shower! large bed! cable television! (I ignore that last one)) drains my motivation to hit the rigours of the road tomorrow. It's a distraction which I'm anxious to leave behind.
The cursed strong south wind drones on all day like a cloud of gnats that I'm powerless to repel. The ride out of Wyoming is singularly uneventful until I-90 bends north for 15 km in the evening. I'm tired again, "waking up" only by midafternoon despite the near-century ride. Half an hour after sunset the boredom ends: a small shard of metal punctures my rear tire. It's very dark when I'm rolling again on the debris-strewn shoulder. The final 8 km to the Spearfish KOA is very intense.
A little before eleven I'm back on I-90. For lunch I stop in Sturgis, a week too late to witness hundreds of thousands of motorcyclists at their annual rally here. I've been confused several times now by stores in tiny towns like Moorcroft and Beulah that advertise "Bike Parts For Sale" until my searching for Shimano and Oakley logos is met with a Harley-Davidson crest. I lean the bike (ahem) on an ancient oak in front of a school, closed for the summer, and digest several more pages of my journal. I still attract many stares from what few bikers (figure it out yourself) are still hanging around here. If they're not approving, they're at least baffled rather than hostile. A Parisian-looking girl in a Fiat convertible gives me a surprisingly long gaze. In her own way, she looks as out-of-place here as I do.
She's pushed out of my mind by the problems of approaching civilization. First the rear tire blows again -- the patch on the center ridge of the inner tube is slowly leaking. I'm on the service road parallel to I-90 by now, to avoid frequent single-lane construction areas and heavy rush-hour traffic. Unleashed dogs force me another km on the underinflated tire to a safer place. I discard the multiply-patched tube and badly worn tire, gaining reliability and losing a few hundred grams. The shoulder here is impossible: very dense gravel and debris, broken pavement, deep cracks every 3 seconds, and finally rumble strips. These are a close second to the cattle barriers of Montana: eight deep gouges running the full width of the shoulder, every 10 seconds when taken slow enough to avoid epilepsy. I take a long gravel sideroad to bypass a kilometer of this hell. Let the rough-and-tough mountain bikers tackle such terrain. They don't need to carry enough tools and parts to get a heavy, fragile machine back into shape for the next day's abuse.
A black sports car roars past me, not quite fast enough for me to overlook the impressive array of Campagnolo, Specialized, Oakley, and Trek decals on the rear window. Apparently not quite fast enough for him to overlook my impressive (albeit less decorated) vehicle as well. He pulls over in a cloud of dust and flags me down. James knows much more about bicycle technology than I do, and I launch into a delicious barrage of tech-talk, design tradeoffs and component choices to make up for the past fortnight of kind enough people who rank the Presto's double-crossing chain right up there with the Space Shuttle and anything designed by IBM as an engineering feat to be marvelled at instead of understood. (Somewhat like my sentences. I offer no apologies. I do offer a few short ones to keep the average length down.)
Anyway... James invites me to camp in his uncle's backyard as the campsites this close to Rapid City are full. After a quick hamburger we tour the city in the first car I've ever seen with a bottle cage beside the stickshift. He's chock full of character, with more experience in many spheres than most people three times his age. In stark contrast stands Rapid City itself. It's got even less character than the sterile apartment complexes back in Bellevue. It's only a service center for the surrounding area, a central place where sellers (of things that buyers don't need) accumulate because their market is large enough. Nobody calls it "home." Our last stop is a grocery store, where I buy enough pasta to finish off supper properly. Unexpected athletic company can hardly demand an appropriate supper waiting for it!
After half an hour I hit the road again despite a thunderstorm warning. It's still dry, but the first violent wind gust shows beyond debate that I have to not only stop now but also seek shelter, at the peril of having my material possessions distributed uniformly across the state. Praise the Lord, I'm on an overpass at the moment. The rain chimes in with a force to match the wind. I drag the bike around the buttress, through the weeds and mud (mud?! It's only been raining for a few seconds!) and high against the end of the bridge, as sheltered as possible from the wind, water and electrical discharges dancing wildly all around. Two trucks and a motorcycle also cower below on the road.
Things calm down in half an hour, and I'm treated to a virtuoso acrobatic performance by the dozens of swallows nesting under the main span of the bridge, to a backdrop of textbook sun-breaking-through-stormclouds-with-a-brilliant-rainbow. The clouds move so quickly that by the time I photograph this last beauty it has diminished to half its original brightness.
By now I know the pattern: 30 to 40 km/h tailwind, then the storm cell, then an equivalent headwind. So a while later when the headwind shifts 180 degrees, a massive adrenalin surge sprints me at 45 km/h over varying topography another 15 km to the next campsite, moments before the next cell catches up with me. Overpasses are few and far between, and it's well past sunset by now. Caught unprotected is not an adventure I want to face.
At highway rest stops I get more peace if I sit 20 metres away from the bike. The tedium of answering the Five Questions Leading To Enlightenment as a major form of human interaction gets to me. In small towns it's different; I can steer the conversation myself when I don't have to deal with a dozen tourists at once, and can learn a little about local thought and share some of my own.
Out here when I say "Seattle" everyone replies "Seattle, Washington?" as if there is a Seattle, South Dakota over in the next county. Also only since getting this far east have people challenged me, "Are you allowed on the highway with that thing? Don't you at least need a special licence?" "Don't the police bother you?" My assurances of legality in most western states, including every state I've encountered, don't convince anyone. I suppose they've never seen a cyclist on the shoulder (I've seen only three myself in about 1600 km) and from that have made up their mind what the law is. May God keep my mind open as I soon reach their stage of life!
Clouds and gentle rain keep it relatively cool, but the humidity is stifling. I take it easy today, only 100 km to Murdo. Between that and two catnaps I should feel much better tomorrow. It would be a real stretch to make Sioux Falls by the seventeenth, so Mitchell is my destination.
Using the Bartoses in Toronto as a message base, I learn that Mom, Dad and Marcel have made it past Chicago.
3 Quaker Instant Oatmeal packets, 2 bananas, half a pound of pasta, a sandwich and several doughnuts barely suffice to carry me 128 km. As someone has remarked, it's too bad that gasoline is too reactive to do my digestive system any good. In the big picture, it's probably even worse that our Volvo can't run on oatmeal and bananas.
Insects are to flowers are to plants as tourists are to billboards are to locals. Billboards, like flowers, are an "attractive" means of survival. I now accept them instead of cringing at their jarring effect in the wilderness.
I'm not sure how wide it was when they sang a hundred fifty years ago, "Away, we're bound to go / Across the wide Missouri," but it's spectacular to eyes accustomed to nothing but prairie. I stop at the KOA past Chamberlain. The climb out of the river valley is probably the last serious climb I'll do for two years.
Interstate is the fastest way to lay down the kilometers, but there's more to life. I nearly ended up the madly rushing automobile tourist I almost pitied two weeks ago. Next time the pace will be hard but possible. Maybe it'll be solo, maybe not. Either way God will be riding with me.