Day 5: Takin' it easy into Idaho

Prologue: if you have a hankering for even more information about the PACTour 2018 Northern Transcontinental ride, a couple of my fellow riders are also writing blogs. Check them out!

https://arnies2018pactournortherntranscontinental.wordpress.com/

https://mikestranscontinental2018.blogspot.com/

The first step of the morning routine starts with bringing your bike from your room to the parking lot, filling the tyres (if you are British), fill your water bottles (yellow tanks at back of trailer) and perform any other tuning you need for the day's ride. Leaving your bike on a portable rack shown in foreground,

you return to your room to get your bag and bring it to the parking lot. Next you swap your street shoes for you bike shoes and tighten those up (as demonstrated by Paul, lower left), then hand your bag to Lon (standing in trailer) for transport to the next night's motel. Finally you remember to start your Garmin (bike computer that records the ride) because "if it isn't recorded, it didn't happen." Then you hit the road. 

In the case of Spokane the road had stop lights every 1/4 mile or so, but PACTour had a great route north out of town on a one-way street so cars were able to pass easily. Paul, Jon, Steve and Grant on the way north out of Spokane:

Since there is no national bike route, you have to use the roads that are there, and like the case coming into Spokane the day before, sometimes those roads are major arteries with lots of trucks, RVs and cars. Then sometimes you get lucky like in the case below where the original road was left whole (on right) when the big four lane divided highway was built (center & left), giving bicycles a direct route with no traffic. Our best conversations take place in these conditions since you can safely ride side-by-side long enough to have a real conversation.

After running mostly north to the town of Newport WA, we crossed a long bridge and looking down the road a quarter mile I saw a gaggle of PACTour bike riders stopped on the side of the road, their red tail lights blinking. I immediately thought something catastrophic had occurred since these riders don't stop in large groups for simple problems like flat tires.

Coming closer I saw the hold up was lining up for a photo op. Lynn and her trail buddies seem to be glad to see the last of Washington:

We had to get some of that action too:

Last fall Charla and I drove through this part of Idaho in the other direction down to Spokane and didn't leave with a particularly favorable impression. From the Montana border it seemed like the road wasn't well maintained and there was a lot of junk in people's yards. The drive into Spokane was very tedious and ended with miles on miles of slow-to-switch stop lights.  After that drive I thought "this section of the transcontinental ride will be tedious."

The difference in that experience inside a car and the experience we had today on bikes is night-and-day. Our ride and route and the country was, for the most part, really nice. Which got me to thinking why car travel on a road can drain you while bike riding the same road can be a pleasure. My theory is that the experience in a car is inherently less interesting. You don't get the direct exposure to air, wind and sounds. You sit there behind some other car, fixated on its rear end for mile after mile, so the stimulation to your senses is muted. When on a bike, while there may be a rear end in front of you, there is no need to fixate on it, and your whole body and a good portion of your mind is engaged in a changing environment.

After crossing into Idaho we got on a beautiful back road on the south side of the Priest River. 



The road bent around this farm pond and if you look hard you can see a pace line of PACTour riders trucking along on the north side.

We were also treated to a man-made osprey nest:

Local yard art:

OK, time for me to fess up. It looks like we just ride through paradise day after day. But these pictures aren't a statistically valid sample of the range of riding conditions we face over the course of a day. In particular you don't see the busy roads with heavy traffic, because 1) it would be kinda stupid to pull out the camera, and B) my focus is to get that section of road over with as quickly as possible.

When we are on a stretch of busy road, sometimes we get a break by having the rest stop at a local attraction. Such was the case with Albeni Falls Dam:


One of the placards gave a classic misuse of the passive voice:

Its just amazing how those waterfalls metamorpihize into dams, isn't it?

The following photos show the approach to Sand Point on a dedicated bridge. We don't know why they stopped using this span for traffic, but we sure appreciated it.

Accidental art shot of the day - Paul's shadow at high noon.