Rain to Skykomish

Monday June 9th. We had spent the night with Claudia and Rolland and slept like logs. Claudia made us a huge breakfast and we ate like pigs and again- delicious. She even bakes her own granola and holy crap- she needs to slap a label on that stuff and sell it! Fantastic. She stuffed a huge ziplock full of the stuff for us on the road.

It's amazing how nice people can be out of the big towns. See, Josh and myself had wanted to head into town to run a few errands. See, we had already biked 6 miles past town, and a total of twelve miles on a bike is about an hours worth of riding so we didn't really care to negate what little time we had put in. So what do Rolland and Claudia do? They hand us the freaking keys to their truck! Seriously. Two completely strangers. A very nice and pretty new Ford F150. Yep. That's me driving the manly vehicle.

So we strolled into town onto to find the bike shop we needed closed. I should mention I was suffering EXTREME saddle soreness (aka, my butt was in severe pain) so we were going to try and find me a new seat. No such luck. So we just went to the post office and shipped out our extra materials.

We came back to our gracious host place and fixed up a few things. It was raining slightly so we put on our rain gear. My personal favorite was my "rain shoes" which consisted of grocery bags duct taped over my shoes. I also changed my seat to Josh's secondary seat. See, this seat is made for men with prostate problems and reduces pressure up on your groin. It was definitely a needed change, but was also about 1/2 as efficient when trying to pedal. The price I paid for comfort I suppose.

Finally at about 2 pm we were finally prepped and left east on Route 2. Now Route 2 is very interesting. It's more or less a long valley with huge mountains on either side of you. It was a really cool view heading up. Take note- that's snow on top of the mountains. The pass starts off nice and flat, and slowly the grade increased. Also, as the grade increased, the amount of rain increased. By the time we had made it about half way up the pass we were soaked, cold and completely exhausted. My hands were also killing me. The water was removing the adhesive of my band aids, so I was forced to make my own "McGuiver gloves" using duct tape and... more duct tape. Not bad, eh?

Around 8 o'clock we cycled past a small little town called Skykomish. I wish I had taken a picture of it, it looked kinda cool. We found a small little motel for 50 bucks and honestly- nothing has ever been so worth it.

Chilled to the bone and filthy, god that shower felt so good. We made a clothesline in our room and tried to dry out clothes, but sadly it didn't do too well. Overall a pretty crappy day, but a wonderful night's sleep! And hey, no flats!

Trip Summary
Day's mileage- 27.78
Total mileage- 90.16