Embracing More Suck, The Sequel

The day started with intermittent rain, and howling wind up the Columbia gorge.  That kind of shove puts some real shade on Armstrong at his most roidy.

It didn't take long for things to get pear shaped, in the form of a flat tire.

I was prepared for that eventuality.  As if.  Along with bad fortune, though, came good.  In the face of all the odds, we stopped directly in front of the Waving Tree Winery's tasting room.  The proprietor, Tekashi, was there, and could not have possibly been more helpful.

Which was good, because I was gooning it up by the numbers.  Because reasons, I comprehensively abused the CO2 inflator, which left us with a good tube in the wheel, but devoid of air.

And the backup pump we bought, on enthusiastic recommendation, had all the capacity of an asthmatic sparrow.  

By the way, we were doing all the work in his tasting room.  

After diplomatically watching me let all the gas out of the cartridges without passing any of it into the tube, thereby further aggravating the ongoing climate catastrophe, he offered up an air compressor.

Sorted!  And the better part of an hour gone.  

We have found that people have been extremely friendly to us along the way.

That is apparently natural when interacting with the feeble minded.

After effusive thanks, we were on our way, and shortly beyond pavement onto gravel.  Five miles of gravel.  Abusively bumpy gravel. (We had changed our route the night before to avoid the highway, and some climb, on account of the mapping program said it was paved.)  

The rest of that hour, and a chunk more, devoured traversing five miles of that stuff.

If we had taken our original route, we would have had a smoother, faster, journey getting a lot further from any help than ignorantly ending up on a goat track, but worse.

Once back on Hwy 14, though, things really picked up.

We stopped for lunch in Roosevelt.  Not as if there was a heck of a lot of choice in the matter.  Fortunately, the cafe let us plug our bikes in, because we had put fifty miles behind us, but that left 27 more to be dealt with.  

Which featured a quick cessation of the howling tailwind, rain and hail, and then a headwind.

Embrace the suck, some more.

Another 88 miles.  3128 still in front of us.