Day 1: A pleasant sendoff: Warm thoughts and gifts from friends, Neil’s going away kick off the night before the departure and then the Holdhusen-Neff omelet breakfast for the morning of the ride. Thanks everyone for your love and support! Tying up loose ends for a 6 week vacation was challenging. Thanks Merrie and Arrol for scrambling to get us a Kindle in the mail!
Well the first 35 miles the conditions could not be better, the next 55 very wet and a bit cold. We were never so happy to see a Sandpoint. Thanks Dean and Ann for so generously offering us a warm shower, delicious meal, a place to lay our head and excellent company for our first night on the road.
Dear Cross Country Chroniclers,
ReplyDeleteUnbelievable! Were we even on the same bike adventure on the day you left Spokane on your cross-country adventure? I thought both Ed McCarron and I escorted you all the way to Sandpoint but obviously in reading your account we were on a different ride. Allow me the privilege of telling your multitude of readers what really occurred.
The weather was miserable. We braved a deluge that easily dropped more rain than a South Asian typhoon. We nearly lost John to, in his own words, “Noah-like conditions.” In fact he was ever so nearly swept to sea when he challenged the strong currents of the mighty Pend Oreille River. Next, seeing we could not advance beyond the flooded, angry river on flat land, we had no choice but to scale shear cliffs where our Nepalese sherpas feared to thread. And finally, after nearly perishing from our ascent we immediately encountered a harrowing and near-certain-death experience at the hands of a critical highway construction site. Yet we knew that just beyond the grasp of these death traps laid the warmth and comfort of a Starbucks. It was like the siren call beckoning ocean sailors to the dangers that lay ahead. So we journeyed on as we had done previously during the day after John’s discovery of the world’s first Bigfoot vertebrae.
And this account is coming from vanilla-flavored me. If Ed Drouin had been along he would have had an inclination to embellish the story. Neil