Day 4: The Lava Beds of Eastern Washington

This is the first organized tour I've participated in (including tours of duty). One of the aspects that created my aversion was being required to work on someone else's schedule. But lets face it: in order to cross the country in 31 days you have to make some adjustments and compromises. Unfortunately one insurmountable hurdle remains: how to get a cup of coffee with real half & half first thing in the morning.

My first attempt at a solution was put into motion Tuesday nigh: buy some half & half at the Grand Coulee grocery store Tuesday evening after dinner, store it in our room fridge, then have it available when the PACTour coffee machine was put out in for staff and desperados before breakfast setup in the morning. It didn't work - the coffee machine never made an appearance; probably because there was a convenience store/gas station 100 feet from the motel, with coffee and creamer. So like many of my plans this one went to the "overkill" bucket.

Lon (PACTour guide, if you will) had been doing some road scouting and identified backroads that would take us off the aptly named "main drag."  He provided a revised map as an alternative for the intrepid riders willing to give them a try. That would be me and Paul and about half the others. This introduced a new wrinkle in the ride flow as a split in the group is not what we are tuned for. We pretty much just pedal along following whatever rider we can see in front of us. Luckily for me Paul had the backroads alternative loaded in his Garmin bike computer so it told him he had missed the turn towards the south. We doubled back to tackle a road which climbed directly up the lava sides of the gorge. Frodo, a fellow tourist from Norway, and Paul both went after the climb with gusto. Fourteen percent in places ... finally a real hill! Paul got to the crest with enough time to prepare a shot of the lesser mortals finishing the climb:

The little used road traversed a broad plateau which had both lava features

 and the celebrated amber waves of grain.

We were treated to some really long views

including one from the top of a rise looking out more than 8 miles where the next town was visible (the great picture which I thought I took while riding was focussed on the road 20 yards ahead - bummer!).  As we dropped from the rise, the undulations in the plateau soon obscured the town and we didn't catch sight of it again before we arrived in it.

The farther we proceeded on the day's course, the worse the traffic got, especially trucks. Tractor trailers, double axil dump trucks, loaded logging trucks and our favorite - empty logging trucks (the excessive power when there is no payload seems to turn the drivers into Indy 500 competitors) - we saw them all. Many of my fellow tourists find the close proximity of fast moving heavy vehicles aggravating in the extreme, but for me I think the noise bothers me more. Its LOUD, especially when the road surface is rough. 

There was one nominal benefit we got though: we had a pretty strong quartering cross wind from the North and when a big rig came by you'd get sucked down the road a bit and pick up a few miles per hour.

Paul, Grant and I had just got off the main drag into one of the backroad alternatives when Jon, the big strong rider came wheeling by on our left, not unlike a semi himself. I decided to go for it and jumped to reach his wheel and then hold it at 24-25 MPH for the miles into the next town where we had lunch. That was a lot of fun and I found that the painful spot on my rear which had received considerable attention up to this point in the day was suddenly forgotten. Probably because I had something else to focus on, but also because when you pedal hard it shifts your weight from the spots that take it when you are just rolling along.

The previous night I had read a series of placards placed along the bridge over the Columbia river that explained the geology behind the Grand Coulee area. It turns out the lava flows which are omnipresent in Eastern Washington only happened 25 million years ago (some rocks around our house in the Appalachians are 50 times older than that)! The context of how it cooled created all kinds of different qualities of rock, including these interesting hexagonal columns:

As we got further East the terrain started to get more wooded:

The last leg of the ride was a grind past Fairchild Air Force Base into Spokane along US 2 which became a very busy 2 lane road, then a moderately busy 4 lane road, then dumped us into the city where we traversed at least 20 stop lights before reaching the Red Lion hotel (NOT motel) we were staying at located next to the Spokane River. Now, I have some knowledge of Spokane from my days as a consultant to Community Mental Health Centers, and from my first independent road trip to the 1974 worlds fair in the summer before my senior year of high school. As we approached the terminus of the ride I couldn't see the Red Lion hotel anywhere, which was confusing since it takes up a couple city blocks. It turns out the marketing mafia had gotten to it: now it was the "rl" and "rlh". Soooo much cooler, don't you think?

The advantage of having a city like Spokane as part of the tour is that there are menu choices you can't find at the Rest & Rant (an actual bar & grill name we've seen). Paul used his superb unparalleled restaurant locating skills to find a Thai place for dinner. To get there we needed to walk a bit over a mile on Spokane's "river walk" (really a walk/bike trail) and Gonzaga University of basketball glory. View from the river walk looking appropriate for a jigsaw picture.

There were a boatload of groundhogs along the trail begging for food, I've never seen so many.