Even God Needed To Rest

Saturday, June 14th. We awoke to in our garbage paradise to a baking tent. I don't think I've mentioned yet, but the amount of body heat and exhaled vapor from the two of us causes a sauna-like effect by 9 am. I'm usually so drenched in sweat I think I had pissed myself. Happily, self-urination is rarely the cause of the feeling though. Anyway, we awoke and broke camp. The wind had died down so getting everything ready moved rather smoothly. We had only one plan for the whole day and that was making it to Spokane, a mere 15 miles away. A piece of cake for amazing cyclist like ourselves.

So, pedal pedal pedal. Yada yada. You know how it goes. Does anyone actually read this to hear about the cycling?

We arrived at Spokane pretty quick and effectively. It was even closer than we thought. I forget the exact amount but like 5-10 miles. While coming into town we noticed a couple cheap places to get a room at. We had decided a few days earlier to take a days rest once we got to Spokane. After 300+ miles without a break and a week on the road, we decided we deserved it. I mean seriously... God spend 6 days on the job and took the 7th off... we spent 7 days on the job and took one off. Then again God created the world and we only managed to traverse 1.2% of the globe, so I suppose he had better reason for the rest. Anyway, I think we earned it.

So here were our errands-
1. Cheap ass motel
2. Laundry
3. Bike Shop
4. Blog updating

We biked around town, asking about these things and checking out the town. Honestly, Spokane wasn't too exciting. Kinda smaller than I expected. No big buildings, just a long main stretch. Kinda run down a little bit, certainly not as luxurious as Seattle but certainly more so than Airway Heights.

First things first, we found a nice bike shop with some really helpful employees. I was looking for some add ons to my bike- specifically a handlebar bag (for easy access and more storage) and a rear view mirror of some nature. The employees hooked me up with a real nice handlebar bag for like 40 bucks. It works great, holding my two wallets (yes I have two), camera, notepad, chapstick, GPS tracker, multitool, rape whistle/knife, ipod, Josh's hand sanitizer, and my mace. Lotta stuff, no? Here's a picture of it while I sit here at McDonald's updating.

I was also shown a nifty little glasses mirror. It simply clips on the side of your glasses and has a mirror you can adjust. Nothing fancy and only 10 bucks. An easy buy. Let me tell you though, it takes a fair bit of getting used to. It's at a weird angle and kinda hurts your eyes until you get a bit adjusted to it. Still though, it's much easier than turning around a whole bunch to see if Josh was hit by a car, or how close the semi's coming to the shoulder.

I was busy playing with my toys/assembling my handlebar rack while Josh toured the store. I forgot to mention before but the dar prior I was having HORRENDOUS chaffing of the inner thigh. God it killed biking 2 hours at 18ish mph. Our old solution was this....

Baby powder. It worked ok but it was no long term solution.

So I had him ask around for some anti-chaffing solution. He got a couple things but also picked up the holy grail of this trip "Chamois Butter" (pronounced Shammy Butter, or at least we call it that). It's just a cream you rub all over your man-thighs to stop them from chaffing. Or ass. Or whatever. Regardless for the remainder of this trip, and for the remainder of my blogging, it will be referred to as "Ball Butter." So I buttered my balls and hit the road. Sorry, no videos of that.

Greasy like a baby seal, we made our way over to Subway for some food. Jen, Josh's girlfriend, had given us some buy-one-get-one free coupons for subs before we left and we had just realized that some of our coupons were expiring today! My oh my! How could we let that happen? So we both went and bought two 12'' subs for like 7 dollars. We'll see who loses weight on the Subway diet Mr. Jared!

It was probably about 3 o'clock and we wanted to find a real cheap motel. Josh had claimed he saw a few cheap ones, $40, a few miles back. So we back tracked and asked every establishment we could heading that way their prices. Most were 50-70 so we decided against it. We finally came to Josh's $40 locale (which in reality was 45 what a liar) and I asked the neighboring motels their prices. I wish I had taken a picture but its fair to say this was not the nicest neighborhood. I was less than comfortable. The first place I checked close by was housing for recovering alcoholics and the second place was freaky. The lady had to of been on some sort of drug considering she was glazed over and took 15 seconds to respond to anything. She offered me a room for $27.50 but refused to let me have it until she saw Josh. I don't know if she didn't believe someone else was with me or if she thought I was doing something shady (aka prostitutes/drugs) but I figured I had gone deep enough into the slums and we got a room at Josh's 45 dollar motel.

And that was that. I spent hours upon hours updating my blog (yes, it takes me forever to do this for those of you who don't know) and that was the last time I mass updated. We slept like babies and washed the taste of salt from our skin.

Trip Summary
Day's mileage- 17.14 (day of rest)
Total mileage- 348.31