Day 14 – June 26, 2015

Day 14 – June 26, 2015
“O Day” – Walla Walla, WA

Audrey

The most important thing about these O days is to slow down and rest your weary bones. We slept in to about 9am knowing that the next few days or maybe week we will be rising at 3 am and departing at 4am. Our days will be short. Riding from 4-9am.

We solved our hotel problems by booking $50 motels, with air conditioning, for the next few days. We won’t attempt to camp in this heat. Staying in motels gives us that other advantage of getting up and going without the added time to breakdown camp. So Dayton and Pomeroy will be motel nights.

The other thing we do on our days off is laundry. Since there is the Model A Ford convention happening in Walla Walla right now we had to opt for a slightly more expensive digs, a Hampton Inn. The hotel is great, comfy, and they even upgraded us to a Suite, but it is far from town and does not have one of our most important needs, a laundry room. So, we gathered all our soiled bike clothing, Gregg’s are especially dirty with a film of white salt crust covering most of his shirts (a clear exaggeration – GB), and got on the free bus that had a stop just across from the hotel.

The bus was on time and air conditioned, a relief as the temps are already at 95 in the shade. It is interesting to ride buses in this country, especially in this car, or shall I say truck, dominant culture out west. As opposed to Europe where a large cross section of society rides the bus on a daily basis, here the riders ride the bus for other reasons. Most of them because they most likely cannot afford a vehicle. Today when I sat down in the bus the seat I sat in had a familiar stench of dried sweat and dirt that you occasionally get a whiff of as you pass the poor marginalized folks we often see on the streets of the big city. Yep there we were. Yet, riding the bus let me into a world that I, by circumstance, and life’s hectic pace, usually seem to not be part of in any way. I can’t take the time to ride a bus in LA, and I have the means to do otherwise. So therefore, I rarely sit with “these people” who ride buses — many of whom would not if they had a choice. Or are these people the bottom of the bottom of the economic ladder? Not really sure. Strangely it felt good to be there and exposed to this part of our society. It also made me reflect on what I have, and what I am so profoundly grateful for. It also made me see how people get by, like the mother and her two young kids, who were polite and courteous, and most of all, just happy to get onto a cool bus to ride for 20 mins downtown. I wondered to myself if they even have air conditioning, a must in this 100 + degree weather. All of this a very humbling experience for us privileged folk from Culver City.

The rest of our day was spent folding laundry, taking the bus to town, eating at an excellent cafe called Olive in downtown Walla Walla, buying breakfast for the next 3 days and going back to the hotel to chill out. Temps by the time we were back were about 106!!! ugh!