This was Day One for Cajun, Day Two for me. We left around 7am, fully loaded and looking forward to an event we didn’t have any context for. Gassed up in Eatonville, where I realized that the top case on my pack had been open; I think I only lost my “Walk Hard” DVD. All the important stuff was there, anyway, so on we went.

Mount Rainier stuck with us for a long while. We had our first gas stop in Packwood, south of the mountain.


The east side of White Pass became scrubby pretty quickly. There is a large lake part way down, quite long and very blue.

Pee stop:


Pee stop at the roadside potties was fine until I stepped on my BRAND NEW Smith sunglasses and ruined them. Utterly. Luckily I had my riding goggles. Picked up new (very ugly) sunglasses at Safeway in Yakima, but thought maybe I could hit the REI in Spokane and do something with their newly instituted unconditional return policy.

First, and perhaps only, near-miss on the road happened right before we exited to 16th and Fruitvale in Yakima. An older woman came within 5 feet of clipping Glen with her huge blue Oldsmo-Buick. She plastered her eyes straight ahead and did not acknowledge what she’d done. That seems to be the usual way drivers handle almost killing bikers.

Glen had his first Miner Burger. Gnomely didn’t eat, but thought Miner’s was cool anyway. They made a damn good hot fudge milkshake!

After lunch, we went east on Hwy 24 through Moxee and acres of hops fields. Amazing. (I’ll probably say that a million times, because the whole trip was amazing.)

The day became relentlessly hotter as we headed east. By the time we got to Hanford, it had to be 100 degrees F. I can’t verify, but damn, I was suffocating. I’m a Westsider, that’s for sure. We took a wrong turn at Hanford (right to Richland, instead of left to Othello), which resulted in nothing worse than about 10 miles of interstate (which the ride was routed to completely avoid).

Thanks to the VW Jetta that alerted us to the railroad tie in the middle of the highway at Hanford. Thanks also to Anna at the 7-11 on Van Giesen Avenue in Richland, for pointing us to the freeway so we didn’t have to travel through the heart of Richland’s retail core. That indeed would have been grim, both for the view and the slow ride through the heat.

We arrived in Dayton, our first-night destination, with time to spare. The Palouse was just lovely in the evening light. We checked into the Blue Mountain Motel ($44 a night, if that tells you about the high quality of this accommodation). Gnomely was not really impressed, but consented to continue the trip (what choice did he have?).




We’d heard about how cool Palouse Falls was, so we dumped our luggage in the room, and headed to see it. The Tucannon River valley on Highway 261 is worth riding – nice curves, lots of sun, just fabulous. And you get to stop in Starbuck!






I think it was somewhere along this route, maybe not, but at one point Glen had a tumbleweed come across the road and hit his foot. It didn’t cause a problem, it was just a random road occurrence.




Okay, so Palouse Falls is quite impressive. It’s in a coulee, it’s tall, and it’s massive. That said, there is no way to swim at the base of it. In fact, getting to it involves a precipitous scramble down the cliffs of columnar basalt for an elevation loss of probably 300 feet. Cliffs, I kid you not. No way. We were bummed, because we’d been looking forward to a swim all through our sweltering day.

On the way back to our motel, we stopped at Lyon’s Ferry Park, on the Palouse River. There was an appealing swimming area there. Unfortunately it was a stagnant backwater area and murky. No can do. We cooked our JetBoil freezer-bag dinner, ate, and left. Better to be in the breeze than sitting in the heat.





I ran over a snake in the road. It wiggled a lot. Glen avoided it after I had already run it over.

Slept like rocks.