Revolutions for Relief
  • Home
  • Mission
  • Team
  • Journal
  • Photos
    • Media
  • Donate
  • Sponsor
  • Stats
    • Individual Country Stats
  • Contact

Back with the Boys

9/5/2014

0 Comments

 
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.
Picture
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.
Picture
On the road again
Picture
Peaceful riding through western Montana
Picture
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.
Picture
Cruisin' along Koocanusa
Picture
Libby Dam, holding it all together
Picture
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.
Picture
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.
Picture
Riding along Lake Pend Oreille
Picture
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.
Picture
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.
Picture
Cheers to new friends!
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.



    Countries

    All
    00. USA ~ Trip Preparation
    01. China
    02. Kazakhstan
    03. Kyrgyzstan
    04. Uzbekistan
    05. Kazakhstan
    06. Azerbaijan
    07. Georgia
    08. Turkey
    09. Greece
    10. Macedonia
    11. Albania
    12. Montenegro
    13. Croatia
    14. Slovenia
    15. Italy
    16. France
    17. Monaco
    18. Andorra
    19. Spain
    20. Portugal
    21. USA

    Archives

    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    January 2012
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011


    RSS Feed


Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.