Back with the Boys

Theo Brun
Back on the road with the boys!  Last I left them was on a hilltop town in near the Georgia-Azerbaijan border with a bellyful of homemade wine that would have served just as well as gasoline.

Same as it ever was

Nothing had really changed.  Apart from the length of their beards.  But the howling headwinds were familiar, the aching quads, the seriously questionable diet.  So much for Great Falls and the edge of the great plains of Montana, as Kellen wrote we were soon on to the awesome national parks of Glacier and Waterton (albeit in “unseasonably cold” weather – a phrase we heard a lot and which I came to hate).  Kellen has left you in Whitefish so I will pick up the thread there.

We had a pretty steady ride through the day to a town called Eureka – just pine forests, old rail tracks, and very quiet little hamlets – ending our day at the tiny little village of Rexton on the shores of Lake Koocanusa (possibly the most satisfyingly-named natural feature in North America).  Our “stealth camping” wasn’t so stealthy that night; when we started to set up camp by a school, a teacher ventured out, thinking we were some of his wayward lads from the summer school he was running.  We had a great conversation and he let us stay, but only to the other side of his building.  He didn’t want us scaring the girls when they woke up the next day, opened their curtains and saw three hairy bikers get dressed outside – fair enough, I suppose.

On the road again

Peaceful riding through western Montana

Cooking up couscous at the school

Lake Koocanusa is amazingly long – 50 miles or more of uninhabited blue water, ending in the giant Libby dam.  We were hammering along, GoPro’s ablaze, up and down, up and down, trying to make distance – bonking (not in the rude sense), rehydrating, and sweating it all out again.  Still, now it was hot, I certainly wasn’t complaining.  We found a spot to spend the night, courtesy of a man with, in my opinion, the most wonderfully American name, Harold W. Winslow.  A logger, man and boy, who had lost his wife to some awful toxic mining pollution some years before and lived alone, next to his nephew and his wife.  Bill let us stay in his back yard.  It turns out most of the town went by the name Winslow too, and he had never travelled further than Spokane.  The western woods of Montana are not what you might call a globally-oriented bubbling metropolis.

Cruisin' along Koocanusa

Libby Dam, holding it all together

Not very active geopolitically, but still very pretty

The next day’s ride to Sandpoint was beautiful.  We took our time, but the pesky headwind seemed to find us whether we turned north or west or any bloody direction of the compass.  Just before Clarks Fork we crossed my first stateline – into the panhandle of Idaho.  We celebrated with a huckleberry milkshake.  As Kellen has I think pointed out, huckleberries are a wild fruit that only grow high in the mountains near pine trees (they benefit from the acidic soil), and generally sell for over $30 per gallon.  But, pretty much anything made from huckleberries is going to be the most delicious thing you ever tasted.  The shake was no different.

New state!

We pulled into Sandpoint with a lot of the day in hand and had time to enjoy the lakeshore beach and have a look at the sailing boats cruising around the windswept waters of beautiful Lake Pend Oreille.  We later found out Sandpoint is both a summer and winter vacation spot, with a massive ski hill overlooking the lakeshore from the west.  We had a beer by the lake – or, as I’m learning Americans often say, “we did a beer by the lake.”  On a scale of “not-at-all-hoppy” to “extremely hoppy,” the beer was of moderate hoppiness.  To an Englishman, the microbrewers’ obsession with how hoppy is any beer on the menu becomes a little ridiculous.  More creativity is required, I feel.  How about malty, grainy, sharp, sweet, tangy, bitter etc. etc.?  I leave that for you guys across the pond to figure out.

Riding along Lake Pend Oreille

Looking out over beautiful Lake Pend Oreille from the Sandpoint city beach

Through the Warm Showers network, we stayed with the very hospitable Marks family, who gave us the use of their pool, hot tub and giant TV, on which we watched the Lego Movie.  (At least the others did – I passed out after about 5 minutes).  This provided the theme tune for the next few days which was, very simply:  “Everything is AWESOME!”

By and large, that was true, but there were some moments to come in Eastern Washington when the ghosts of those bad ole western Chinese deserts came back to haunt us.  The ride from Sandpoint to Spokane was pretty forgettable.  The roads got hotter, noisier, more dangerous, until – after pounding away into our now familiar headwind – we came to the twenty miles of urban sprawl out from Spokane’s downtown.  As far as I could tell we could have been anywhere in the States for a while – and very useful if you happen to need a new hot-tub whilst you are out getting your car fixed up and picking up some spicy chicken wings.  As for any urban character – not so much.  Until we did actually reach the city proper and discovered we had 15 blocks of uphill to unwind our tired legs on for the last few pedals of the day.

Can you feel the serenity of our crossing into Washington?

However, it was certainly worth it.  At the top of our hill was our next host – Kate – the queen of communal living – our inspiring Spokane hostess who has pretty much the ideal set-up for receiving bone weary cyclists in her basement.  She grows a lot of her own food which was the prime digestive antidote to the unending intake of muffins, lunch meat, and granola bars which become the cyclist’s staff of life.  She also brews a mean beer: very hoppy.  But none the worse for that.

Cheers to new friends!