Day 12 – June 24, 2015

Day 12 – June 24, 2015
Crowe Butte Campground to Pierce RV park (Trouchet WA)
62 miles

Bumble Bee – Audrey:

Another day and another ride. Today was a long one but it didn’t feel that bad.

We started out earlier than we have in the past few days, right around 8:30am. Our goal was to beat the heat. Yesterday’s lesson learned, lots of water and start early. When we left the temperatures were fine – just around 75 degrees. We rode an easy 15 miles to a little town of Patterson where we stopped for a proper American breakfast at their only cafe. Wow, all of a sudden we really jumped into the middle of America. Not only was the breakfast triple sized but everything was served on styrofoam! I said to Gregg “didn’t Santa Monica just ban styrofoam?” and he replied that we are just about as far away from Santa Monica as we could get. It wasn’t the distance but the attitude. Two roofing workers walked in for lunch, and both of them had hands covered in dirt and tar, but not one got up to go to the restroom to wash their hands before taking bites of their burgers even though Gregg later told me that they even had industrial grade hand cleaner in the men’s bathroom. Yummy.

Off we were again. The road was long and a little monotonous. The scenery didn’t seem to change much for miles. When this happens I play another little game – “find the roadside treasures”. Along the highway people throw things out of their window or maybe someone just got unlucky and something flew out their window. Most of what you see are discarded bottles of some kind of liquid – old soda cans, Gatorade, water, Starbucks coffee cups, and yes, bottles filled with trucker pee. As many people must know, long haul trucker don’t stop to urinate but many just pee in a bottle and throw those out the window. Yep, disgusting but they are everywhere.

But, the good news is there are other treasures of the highway shoulder that may be worth picking up and I look for them as a way to pass the time of day. It has to be something real good to stop. Gregg said he saw and excellent pair of pliers but thought they were to heavy to carry. Well today I found my first little treasure – a very little worn John Deere camouflaged trucker hat. I went back to get it, and it was barely dirty and in perfect condition. A good little souvenir of this area.

Another 17 miles down the road we got to our “big town” of the day Umatilla Oregon. This was our resupply stop since there were no other services from here to our campsite just south of Touchet. We stopped at a funny super market with a giant 30 foot John Wayne beckoning would be shoppers in. Too funny. I had to get a shot of Gregg next to it.
Shopping done – tonight it will be rib eye, mushrooms, beans and cajun dirty rice, with another bottle of Maryhill red wine — got to keep with the local stuff.

After leaving the supermarket we went to have lunch at the Java Station, a local sub sandwich shop. There we met 3 retirees who were also touring across America. 2 were on regular bikes and 1 on a recumbent. They were from Minnesota and Colorado. They were all sharing a motel room down the road where they stopped for the night. They were wondering what we will be doing about the week’s heat wave that is hitting the region tomorrow since they decided to take a week off, rent a car and head to the ocean. What? We had heard that there may be some warmer temperatures but didn’t think much of it.

Right there, in the Java Station, we confronted something we hadn’t really planned on, heat. Since reckoning with the 85-90 degrees we have already dealt with, we thought we could manage. Well, that is nothing. We looked at the internet weather sites and the mercury will rise to well over 100 reaching a peak on Monday of about 110. No way, are we going to deal with that. Serious heat advisories have been posted everywhere. Now what? I called ahead to Walla Walla to see if we could stay an extra day at the hotel we booked – Nope, everything booked because of the Model A Ford convention taking place there over the weekend. Ok, how about 20 miles up the road? Nope, again everything full. What do we do now? We have a few days to play with but even considering camping in that heat is dangerous.

So we came up with a plan. We will get up at the break of dawn and ride until it got to hot. If, let’s say we started at 6 am, we could got perhaps 20-30 miles before it was no longer manageable. But, we still had to figure out what to do about hotels/motels? That, we would sort out once we get to Walla Walla.

So with the fear of the “heat God” ahead, we slogged on. We had about another 30 miles before our campsite destination of Pierce RV park. Strangely enough, as moved along it was very pleasant riding as the clouds had rolled in and we road most of the rest of the day in overcast conditions. The ride was a bit hectic in parts as the road followed the Columbia river along a busy, with trucks, HW 730. In some spots there was virtually no shoulder. The scenery was quite spectacular as the river got very narrow, winding its way through a canyon like countryside. On both sides of the river freight trains were barreling along. We even passed one of those nasty “oil trains” that periodically derail and explode. This one was from Canada which made me think it was maybe even carrying “tar sands” oil.

We said goodbye to our friend, the mighty Columbia river, at Clever Hill as we started up HW 12, which will be our companion for the next week or so. After about 60 miles of riding we stopped for our energy gummies. Just a few more miles. We got to Pierce RV campground just about 5:30pm. It was a good ride. Can’t complain about too many sore spots. My neck and the bottoms of my feet hurt, but nothing major. But, it was a long day and we were exhausted.

Pierce RV was a funny place. There were a hand full of RVs, no tent campers. No camp host. We knocked on a camper that looked like a someone lived there. A very skinny wired lady came out, must have been some kind of “tweaker” for sure, who was very pleasant and pointed out the tent campsites. They had water and tiny little wooden picnic benches that looked like someone had bought them at Toyz R Us. There were only chemical toilets and NO showers! Oh well, this was home for the night. We each took sponge showers under our campsite faucet, mainly just to get the road grime off not really to get too clean.

The sun had come out again, it was hot. Across the way there was one RV that was just traveling thru, different then the perma campers that seemed to be most of the residents there, they had a nice young lab named Bailey. He was a fun and friendly dog which made me miss Zoey, Jasper, and Lexi. I hope they are fine?

Tried to get to bed early, since we wanted to put our plan to the test, get up at crack of dawn. Alarm is set for 4:45am.