May 20th

Milepost 265

It was another day with slightly more miles than I was intending, plus some hills, but features a great ending! I left camp without rain gear but .6 miles down the road in hopeful-breakfastland I put my jacket and pants on and that lasted me for an hour or so of heavy sprinkle (for non-local folks, Pacific Northwet is mostly damp, rather than soaked - it doesn’t really rain here, and this day was no different).

Fantasies of nearby breakfast remained just that as the tamale shack (which did mention biscuits and gravy on its signage, so the fantasies had some basis in reality) was closed on Monday morning, so instead I biked 12 miles into the next town where I found a shopping center pretty quickly that had open restaurants. Pizza and a milkshake for 11am “breakfast” and then got a burrito to go since I anticipated a long afternoon with minimal available resupply stops. I would have been fine, but it was only a couple of quickie marts between “eat all the snacks I’m carrying” and “being well-fed”. The burrito later served well along with supplementary soda or gatorade at each stop.

The hills were generally non-awful - not the “lowest gear grindfest” I had been trained into in prior days. Lots of peaceful low-traffic routes, some with a nice shoulder and some without but few bad driver behaviors, more frustrated by wind and sprinkles today than drivers.

A cool thing happened in the town of Belfair. I had pulled off the road into a grocery store parking lot and a woman approached me and started quizzing me about my route. To be fair I am very unclued about where I’m going and where I’ve been - I’m following very precise maps but I don’t know where I am or even where I’m going particularly, so my answers to her questions were vague and “I don’t know :)” but eventually she mentioned the Warm Showers project and then I understood she was looking to see if she could host me! I was pretty tired and pretty smelly, but was aiming for her hometown about 20 miles down the road to stay, so I let myself be talked into staying with her, and we set out in that direction, in our separate modes of transport. Fortunately her advice about avoiding an unnecessary climb was useful and I arrived slightly less zonked than I might have!

I pulled into Christmas Village (her community, part of Shelton, WA) and enjoyed chatting with Carolyn and her son Robin for several hours. I bought us dinner, and in general had a great evening socializing and then slept in a very comfortable bed and did laundry and I feel wonderful this morning, as I set out on another ~55 mile day towards Centralia. Carolyn’s husband (and Robin’s stepfather) died last Friday and I was worried it was too soon to be another factor in their time of grief, but we talked a lot about grief (they were almost relieved as he had been old and very sick for too long), and family and coping and living good lives, and the blessing of passing out of extreme pain. Sounds heavy but I really enjoyed the (fairly different) outlooks of the two of them and left feeling buoyed and happily anticipating my next change to pay it forward and host someone passing through town.

I didn’t take many pictures yesterday, but the few I did are in this album. Check out especially the signs in the first and last picture in the album. In the first some random good advice next to a logging road, and the next is the extremely cute street names in Christmas Village (I stayed on Comet Ln where it intersected with Donder Ln).

Written by Chris McCraw who resides in Portland, OR but maybe his heart is on the bike?