Sunday, June 28, 2009

Day 8 Dorian Park to Walla Walla


We are off to Walla Walla, the onion capital of the world. The onion festival is in July, we will miss it. We pass miles of onion crops and a few onion processing plants. They smell strongly of onion even from the road, so don't know how people can work there and get that smell off them before heading home. We ride to Touche for breakfast but again there is no restaurant there. We get a drink and snack and I meet Hans Pader from Switzerland. He is cycling from St Louis to Portland. His two companions have already dropped out so he is finishing on his own. He is very experienced and has toured Europe and the USA extensively. We leave Hans to the headwinds and finish our ride into Walla Walla and meet Suzanne at the Budget Inn. We have a laundry and swimming pool here and there is a market and Mexican restaurant next door so it is just about a perfect rest place for a day off. We decide to ride a short ride tomorrow to a campground 25 miles up the road anyway. We will clean up, rest and sleep in tomorrow. John will be sending some extra stuff home at the post office to lighten his load. We find that we don't need everything on our cumulative lists so we are starting to shed some weight. A good idea before we get to the mountains coming up next week. We have a planning session and get a rough estimate that we should be in Missoula Montana at the Adventure Cycling Headquarters by next Monday or about a week of cycling. Another 375 miles . Today we rode 31 easy miles with one big hill.

Jim Suzanne and Beau

No comments:

Post a Comment