If we are not ready for bike touring now, it is too late.  In our second attempt at riding an Adventure Cycling Association tour this year (our first we canceled the day before the tour, outlined in an earlier post), we are finally underway to the starting location, a week away.

We left Chaos Central in chaos, naturally, with the big relandscaping project underway.  Our last “training ride” was on Tuesday, when we rode with The Pedal Powered Family as far as the Buck’s Prairie Store, about 20Km out on the Cloquallum Road toward Elma.

We parted company as Harper helped mom fix her tire, which had picked up a tiny wire somewhere between Poulsbo and the Bainbridge Ferry last week.

We made a loop back to Shelton on Highland Road and the Shelton-Matlock Road, zooming to 50Kph on the downhill into town.

Later, we found that the Key West-to-Fort Myers ferry we are scheduled to take on our tour doesn’t take tandems. So, we experimented with “crunching” the Mean Green Machine to disguise it as a single bike, but still able to restore to rideable condition in a few minutes.

Satisfied that we could get through that hurdle on our bike trip, we packed the bike and our camping equipment. Friday, we dropped the cat at the cat hotel and headed east, stopping for the night at Judy’s brother’s in Eastern Washington.

Saturday was a busy day, starting at dawn with an icy drive through Spokane. By the time we reached Idaho, the temperature had risen above freezing and the roads dried. We stopped for lunch in Missoula with a client and then on to the Lubrecht Experimental Forest Conference Center to drop off quilts at the Bitterroot Quilters Guild fall retreat. The route back to I-90 took us east on MT 200 to MT 141, which we hadn’t driven before. We enjoyed a beautiful Montana fall day, with the larch and cottonwoods in full color. Darkness caught us in Bozeman and we stopped in Livingston for the night, a bit short of our goal of Billings. But, we have a few hours leeway in our week-long transit.