Seattle

It has been a while since I crossed the border, which was the last thing that I posted.  I will try to recap without writing a novel. 

The day that we crossed the border the temperature, which had been triple digits, finally broke.  Along with the cooler temps came the wind.  The ride to my stopping point just outside of Seattle ended up being a 60-mile grind fest, beautiful ride but head winds all day.

At the last minute, I changed the route due to some interest from the media in Missoula.  Instead of riding through Seattle to Tacoma and then down across Washington I stopped at intersection of state route 9 and state route 2.  I will be taking 2 across Stevens pass to Spokane and then across Idaho into Montana instead. 

We arrived at my Uncle’s to a bottle of Spanish Cava and sushi.  We will just say that it was a little better than the hot dogs and stuffing that had been a staple through Canada.

This has been the longest break that I have taken since I started riding and I have to be honest it has felt pretty good. 

I will say that there has been a bit of culture shock involved with coming out of the mountains and into a city the size of Seattle.  We took a trip down to Pikes Market and saw more people in five minutes than we had seen in the previous month.

Lots of rest and tons of great food, and several days on the river fishing.  All and all the best rest days to date. 

8-18

60.63 miles

14.4 mph average

33.6 mph max

4:12:08 ride time

Several people have asked what our total milage to this point so below are the trip stats from AK to WA

2,741.21 miles

42 riding days

10 rest days (4 due to weather or illness)

Back in the U.S. of A!!!!

There were times when it seemed like we would never get here.  However, to be honest it feels like the time is flying by, we crossed into the lower 48 today after 36 days in Canada.  Our time there was amazing, the weather was a serious challenge, at times more so than the terrain, but the good days were plentiful and the people and the places will be etched into our minds forever.  I have been through Canada several times, (actually traveling the very route I rode) but I this was the longest amount of time I have spent in the “North” as the locals refer to it.  You could spend a lifetime traveling through the Yukon and B.C. alone and still not see everything that there is to see.  Azure and I are already talking about the places we want to visit on our next trip.  (Which will probably be when we are 80, about the time we will have this trip paid off)

It feels good to be back in the states though.  It is kind of a bittersweet feeling; we will be in Seattle tomorrow and roughly half way done with the trip.  It is really hard for me to believe that I am almost half way there.  I know that in no time at all we will be in Key West, what then?  That is the real question, I would like to say that I had some huge epiphany while grinding it out through the mountains, but I didn’t.  At this point I am only hoping for a safe arrival and a successful fundraiser. 

Speaking of that I will be in Seattle tomorrow and taking a few rest days, but there will be a group ride in Tacoma on Saturday the 21^st.  I will post the specifics when we get into town, but if you are in Seattle/Tacoma come on out and join us it will be a pretty mellow ride, with all different paces of riders welcome.

 

8-17

80.35 miles

15 mph average

36.1 mph max

5:18:07 ride time

Fraser Canyon

Well the Fraser Canyon lived up to be everything I thought it would be.  It was another sweltering day, 39 degrees Celsius (102 Fahrenheit); the Fraser Canyon is regularly the hottest place in Canada. 

The ride itself was as scary as anticipated.  At one point I was riding on the white line, which passes for the “shoulder” on this section, with semi’s on my left and a coal train on my right.  The only thing separating the train and me was a small cement barrier.  I actually could have reached out and touched the train if I had tried.  Originally I was going to split the Canyon in two days but after only a few miles I decided that I didn’t want to be on this section of road any longer than necessary.  So I chose to power through and ride to the other end.  It wouldn’t have been all that bad if it weren’t for the heat, the sun was intense, and it took me about six hours to ride to Hope.

The bad part about the heat isn’t riding in it; it’s trying to get some sleep in it.  It takes quite awhile for the van to cool down at the end of the night.  So after three days of very little sleep and crazy heat, we decided to take another rest day when we arrived in Hope.  I know that I just took one but I was so dehydrated after the last few days that we decided I probably wouldn’t be a bad thing to rest a little and get some fluids in me.

We spent the day relaxing and swimming up at Sliver Lake, a spectacular spot just outside of Hope.  Days like this are what I envisioned this trip being.

(Azure said "well it isn't everyday you get to ride up a mountain named after you")

 

8-15

87.15 miles

14.2 mph average

42.5 mph max

6:04:34 ride time

Who said Canada was cold?

Two scorching days in a row, the temperature today hit 103 degrees.  The shame of it is that I was riding extremely fast today.  I had a slight tail wind and predominantly downhill or flat conditions, there were only a handful of climbs and none of them were very big.  I covered the nearly 70 miles in a little under 4 hours.  Yesterday, I spent about six hours out in the sun and heat.  So by the end of the ride I was extremely dehydrated, after that I didn’t want to push it today.  I could feel that I was not absorbing any of the fluid I was drinking so we stopped for the day.

Tomorrow is going to be another hot one so I have been drinking nonstop since we arrived.  In the last two days I have put down over six gallons of fluids and still I am dehydrated.  The heat doesn’t seem to be going anywhere so the only thing I can do is continue to pound the liquids. 

Today, I road into the Fraser Canyon and I have about 100 miles of it left.  I know from the drive up and from what I have heard from other cyclists that it will be one of the most dangerous sections of the trip, if not the most. Steep drop offs and sheer walls on either side extremely narrow sections of road, with about 7 tunnels, and a few pretty big climbs.  It will definitely prove to be pretty interesting.  Hopefully the wind will be with me tomorrow as well.

A few weeks back I had a really close call with a truck.  I didn’t write about it at the time because honestly, I was too shaken up by it to write about it.  I was on a rather narrow section of road with no shoulder, and a line of traffic was on coming.  I could hear the truck coming up behind me using his Jake brakes to slow down.  He must have known what was about to happen.  Lucky for me, he was being cautious and trying to slow down as much as possible.  Even still when he passed me there was a vortex of wind coming off the front of his truck and it hit me and sucked me in.  I really don’t know how I wasn’t sucked under the truck, had he been going faster I am sure that I would have been pulled under.  I am thankful that this guy was courteous enough to slow down, and that he was intelligent enough to know his load.  Countless trucks have passed me and this was the only time that this happed, so I am fairly confident that it was the type of load he was carrying.  Hopefully, I don’t have to relive that experience while I am in the canyon because it is very narrow, a two-lane highway through a canyon is not a good place to ride a bike.  I will be really relieved when I hit the other side of it.  

 Azure wanted me to post this next picture.  But first I will explain, yesterday a Badger ran out of the brush and stood up on two legs and made a pretty scary face at me.  Who knew Badgers had such big teeth!  Lucky for me, he charged back into the brush as quickly as he had run out.  Azure made me do an impression of the badger before she would give me my breakfast, this is what it looked like.

(If a badger was a huge sun burned guy wearing cycling cloths that are too tight.)

8-13

87.24 miles

14.5 mph average

50.9 mph max

5:59:12 ride time

8-14

67 miles

19.14 mph average

48.6 mph max

3:32:15 ride time

Williams Lake

I made it from Quesnel to Williams Lake, originally I had planned on trying to make it another 40 miles but after about a 20 mile climb, I was ok with stopping.  After running the numbers we figured out that I had gained much of the ground I had lost coming through Pine pass, so we decided to take a rest day. 

We couldn’t have had a better day.  It was beautiful, the sun was shining and temp was perfect, so after tooling around town a bit we headed out to the lake for a little R&R.

To be honest we really didn’t do anything today just hung out enjoyed the beautiful scenery and had a few “recovery soda’s” by the lake.  It was fantastic.

 (who needs a cooler?)

8-11

67 miles

14.3 mph average

39.6 mph max

4:39:55