Safety Third

The morning of day 3 came just as the morning of day 2 had: the same feeling in my gut and the same reluctance to continue with the tour. One plus, though, was that it was a pleasantly sunny morning, and at least we wouldn't have to ride in the rain again. At least, not all day. I had left my wet clothing out to dry overnight, and I found that it was still somewhat wet that morning. For breakfast, Michelle and I feasted on some of the leftover pizza from the night before. Now, I have a thing about eating solid food in the morning. For some reason if I try to choke down any non-liquids within an hour or so of waking up, I almost always end up feeling nauseous. It's weird and annoying, and it makes it so that the only things I can put down in the mornings are 1) Instant Breakfast, 2) Smoothies, 3) Soylent, and 4) Greasy Diner Food. It's a weird problem. It tastes kinda like gritty cake mix. I struggled through a piece of pizza anyway, somehow managing to not vomit all ...

The morning of day two came earlier than I hoped, and Michelle and I were greeted by a grey, drizzling rain which set the theme for the whole day. Again, I had the "I really don't want to do this" feeling, although somewhat less potent than the morning before, and since I had even fewer options for postponement than I had had on day 1, we slowly suited up to the white noise of the TV and left the room for the continental breakfast downstairs. Breakfast was in the room adjacent to the lobby, as per usual, but the room was not attached from the inside. This forced us outside into the drizzle to take almost 10 whole steps in my extremely inconvenient road bike shoes to get to food, and gave us a quick taste of the weather for the day. While we sat inside eating mediocre omelettes and drinking watery orange juice, we could watch the weather from the comfort and warmth of the indoors. At least, temporarily. The more we watched the weather, the harder it seemed to rain. Still...

I woke up Monday morning with the distinct feeling of "I really don't want to do this" in my gut. I stayed motionless under the covers, hoping that Michelle wasn't up, instead of getting out of bed and checking; as if lying in bed long enough would somehow negate the commitment we had both made to our ludicrous endeavor. This, however, was not the case, and less than 10 minutes later both of us were up and about in the condo, sluggishly preparing our bikes and ourselves while pointedly not wearing chamois, again in an effort to postpone the inevitable. My bike was loaded in a manner that could be generously described as "super-light," and non-generously called "not nearly enough." I had only the one seat bag, a bit of tent strapped to that, the sleeping bag lashed to the handlebars, a small pack on the top tube, and my medium sized backpack. Everything I could ever need? If I were going alone I wouldn't be too concerned, but I was also c...

Well it took 21 days, but we finally made it to what is more-or-less the halfway point on our tour! We covered 1,787.3 km (according to strava) and I had a moving time of 82h 2m, giving an average speed of ~21.5 kph. I'll admit: we cheated a bit by driving about 600 miles (~960 km) of the route, but I regret nothing. Seriously. If you saw how flat, straight, hot, and tedious those bits of road were, you would've skipped them too. Not only that, but driving some probably saved us a bit of cash that we'll need for the return trip (on which we'll be cheating even more). Since I didn't much update here during these past three weeks, I will be running a story time of sorts over the next few days. Basically, I will recount the trip in some serious detail and try to write it in a sort of story-type structure from my perspective.   So if you want in on that, stay tuned! lat5,

Man, things were really looking up after the rain cleared! But then my knee gave out, so... I guess we'll see how this goes. It hurts to pedal. Balls. Lat5,

Today I'm sitting here in a hotel in Sedro-Woolley, WA typing out this very blog post on Michelle's bluetooth keyboard. It's kinda untinutive, as there's a notable lag between my input on the keyboard and when I see the letter appear on the screen of my phone. This wouldn't be a huge problem, except that every so often, I get two of the same letter in a row but often don't notice until I'm on a different word. Groan. So here's how the first 2 days of this tour thing have gone, in brief terms because this keyboard is a bit of a pain. Day 1: We made it from Squamish, BC to a town called Mission, BC. Navigating through Vancouver on a bike is the worst thing I've ever done on a bike, and something I will never repeat ever again if possible. It was so frustrating that I'm still upset about it even now. Even more than the rain (more on that later). Because Vancouver made it so that covering 60 km took 5 hours, we were both emotionally and physically ...