In a departure from the last 8 years, we had no Warm Showers guests in 2019. About the time the season normally starts, we went on tour. With our tandem in the van, we traveled through Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario, and Illinois, staying a few days here, a week there, or just overnight, riding our bike where there were trails, with some camping, some motels, some AirB&Bs, or staying with friends, over a month “on the road.” After only a week at home, we were off again in our van/bike rig, alternately camping and staying at motels on our way through British Columbia and Alberta, spending some time at Prince George at a conference and with relatives in Dawson Creek.

Returning home on the first day of summer, we planned to receive visiting relatives, so stayed off the roles at Warm Showers for a few more weeks. Then, when we finally hung out the shingle, Judy became ill: we had to cancel a reservation for what would have been our first guest, in mid-July. After she spent 10 days in hospital and a month of post-surgical convalescence, we went on another camping/biking trip, to Oregon, coming home to prepare to receive yet another family visitor, so we decided to simply cancel the entire season, and will be open to receive Warm Showers guests in the spring of 2020.

Looking back over the past eight years, we have had well over 200 guests, ages 8 months to over 70, one to seven at a time, couples, friends, fellow travelers, adult child and parent, and families, including a few dogs, 25 to 50 guests a year, depending on how much travel we did during the season, which basically runs from March through November, and other factors, such as the summer five years ago when I was recovering from cardiac bypass surgery, which shortened the season.

This year, we’ve had to satisfy ourselves with keeping track of the many former guests with whom we still keep in contact, through Facebook or their personal blogs:

• Peter, who turned 70 on his epic trip from the Yukon to Argentina, a nearly two-year journey, and who, at 77, still tours, popping up here and there around the world.
• Sarah, who turned her first solo tour–from Seattle to Santa Barbara, when we first met her–into a career as a bike tour guide and semi-retirement as a world traveler and blogger, sending missives from Argentina, India, and Spain, among other places, in her blog, at http://www.honoringmycompass.com/
• Bastien, who became enamored of the kinetic sculpture races in northern California and came back the next year to participate, and who achieved the goal back home in France of riding 500 km in under 24 hours.
• Normand and Helene, who cut their 2014 tour short with a crash near Seaside, Oregon, and who later rode from Calgary to Argentina on their tandem, during which trip Normand turned 60, and who just finished a grand tour from Turkey to France through the Balkans, Italy, and Switzerland, through the mountains.
• Glen and Bobbie, in their 60s, who returned home after a trans-America tour to hike the Appalachian Trail and this year just completed a triathlon.
• Megan, who, with her friend Gordon, from Scotland, cycled from Alaska to Argentina and spends her summers off from teaching in Wisconsin to travel the world on humanitarian missions.
• Eric, who called us at the end of a list of 24 other hosts, stranded in a late fall storm 60 km away, 10,000 miles into a tour around the U.S. We picked him up and sent him off dry the next day. We since visited him when passing through Moab, where he worked at a bike shop. He now lives in Colorado and has twice participated in and finished the Tour Divide, which follows the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, a self-supported 2745-mile bicycle race from Banff, Alberta to the U.S.-Mexico border, on trails and forest roads.

• Chris, who cycled all 50 states and has published the first of several volumes of conversations with people he met on the way, starting his own publishing company in the process.
• Marge, from France, who bicycled solo from Canada to Argentina, sporting each country’s flag in turn on a staff and mount we gave her with the U.S. flag we carried on our East Coast tour in 2016.
• Klaus, a medically retired mining engineer who wandered the Australian Outback with two camels for 11 years before collecting a pension and traveling the world on his bicycle: he wasn’t a Warm Showers member, we met him at a bakery on a rainy day and invited him to stop for the night.
• Bryan, a professional cook, who stayed an extra day and cooked for us, surprised that we had equipment for southeast Asian cooking.
• Isabella, whose host gift to us was a pair of bike socks from a previous supported tour, which I often wear.
• Jayshil, who passed through from Canada returning to New Zealand years ago, now lives in Melbourne, Australia.  He regularly rides 100 km “training rides” and toured Iceland this past summer.
• Michael, who passed through with his college classmates after graduation, went to Africa with the Peace Corps and has completed medical school.
• Angela, from Canada, who found us through a Facebook forum, recommended by:
• Nico, an Iowan who has settled in Portland, and who returned several years later to introduce us to his fiancé.
• Lauri, another host a day’s ride away, with whom we have shared guests on adjacent nights, follow each other on Facebook, and have yet to arrange a ride together, but soon…
• Lindy, an award-winning weaver from New Zealand, who altered her itinerary to stay with us when she discovered we were also weavers.

Many guests for whom English is a distant second or third language, conversing through electronic translators. And many more, who have stayed, become family for the night, and moved on, sometimes turning up in other guests’ stories as met on the road or through Warm Showers as hosts or guests in other parts of the world, and some who have returned to “normal” but interesting lives as extraordinary people who once ventured to challenge themselves by traversing a continent under their own power, on a bicycle.

As it stands, now, we are looking forward to meeting our fellow cyclists again starting in Spring 2020, and extending ourselves just a bit more in our own adventures, inspired by our guests.

Road Trip 2019, parts 1 and 2 are now completed.  One of the goals for our road trips in our 70s is to ride our tandem bicycle on great bike trails and routes across the U.S. and Canada. This trip was no different: we took time out to ride parts of:

• Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes in Idaho
• Missouri Headwaters Trail in Montana
• Rapid Creek Trail in Rapid City, South Dakota
• Iowa Great Lakes Trail around Lake Okoboji and Spirit Lake
• Simcoe Loop Trail in Simcoe County, Ontario, Canada
• Great Lakes Shore Trail along Lake Ontario near Bath, Ontario
• Pheasant Branch Trail in Middleton, Wisconsin
• Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes again
• Shelton Valley Loop, a quick ride at home between the two parts of our road trip
• Bear Creek Trail in Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada
• Canyon to Coast Trail near Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada

Our total riding distance between the start of our adventure and the end was just a few meters shy of 340 km, while the bike rode nearly 15,000 km in the back of the van in that time.

As we usually do, we document most of our bicycle adventures with a video diary.

Edaville,Trail of the Coeur d’ Alenes from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

This was a very cold morning near freezing, at the end of April, so we rode a very short way down the trail and back, from the trailhead we rode up the trail from last year.

Missouri Headwaters from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

We camped overnight at the Headwaters State Park, where the bike trail ends, and rode into Three Forks in the morning.  It was cold, so we didn’t stop in town, but drove back in the car after the ride for our morning coffee.

Rapid Creek part 1 from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

We drove a short way, from Belle Fourche to Rapid City, intending to ride the length of the trail.  We rode from the Founders Park, near downtown up the creek to the end of the trail, racing back to the car ahead of a rain storm, cutting our intended ride a bit short.

Rapid Creek, part 2 from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

We stayed in Rapid City overnight, then started early on Saturday morning to ride the rest of the trail, again starting at Founders Park.  Bridge repairs near the end of the trail cut this ride a bit short, too, so we retraced a bit of yesterday’s ride and a spur trail to the north.

Okoboji2 from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

In 2017, we rode most of the way around Lake Okoboji, anti-clockwise, from the east side, when we had a tire failure.  A runner on the trail gave us a ride to the bike shop, where we got the bike tuned and new tubes and finished the loop.  This year, we started on the west side and rode clockwise, completing the loop with no problems.  We didn’t know it then, but my cousin Jack Parkins lives at the top of the hill on the on-road segment of the trail south of the lake: we visited them a few days later.

Spirit Lake – Loon Lake from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

Instead of riding from our resort and repeating almost half the previous ride, we drove to a trailhead in Spirit Lake and rode up the west side of the lake and took the Jackson County [Minnesota] trail to Loon Lake, where I spent several summers camping as a Boy Scout, in the 1950s.

Tay Shore Trail from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

After some rainy weather that kept us off the mostly gravel trails near where we were staying, we drove up to this paved trail, which was very nice, but the rain caught us at the turn-around point near Midland. Still, it was a good ride.

Wasaga Beach – Collingwood from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

This was quite a drive from our lodging, but was a route mostly on paved roads.  We had driven through Collingwood on the way to visit Own Sound a few days before and decided not to ride the gravel rail trail beyond Collingwood.  This one took us through beach home neighborhoods and through the Sunset Point Park on Georgian Bay, Lake Huron.

MillenniumTrail, Orillia, Ontario from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

A short segment of the Simcoe Loop Trail, designated the Millennium Trail, runs along the shore of Lake Couchiching in Orillia. We rode this on Saturday of this long holiday weekend (Victoria Day), so there were lots of people out.  We also encountered thick clouds of midges, and had to stop and clean them out of my eyes, nose, and beard.

Loyalist Parkway from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

We left the Orillia area on Sunday during the Victoria Day holiday weekend, driving east to Peterborough and then south to Bath, where we stayed at an AirB&B.  In the morning, we rode west from Bath along the shore of Lake Ontario before joining the heavy traffic into Toronto as holiday travelers returned home.

Pheasant Branch 2019 from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

We had ridden the Pheasant Branch trail, near our son’s house, in 2015 and 2017 and counted it as one of our favorites.  We were appalled to find that the trail had been almost totally destroyed in a flood in August, 2018.  Fortunately, most of the bridges had been restored, but it was largely rough gravel and sand down through the canyon, so we returned via the city streets.

Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes: Cataldo MP 39-44 from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

On the way home, we camped in Cataldo, Idaho, taking an early evening ride up to where we had turned around on that freezing April morning more than a month ago.  Passing our campground to ride farther down the trail, we spotted a young moose headed toward the trail through the campground.  We stopped for a few long-distance photos, then pedaled on.  We hadn’t gone too far when the  storm clouds building to the west flashed lightning and a very close thunderclap.  As it was warm and humid, we hadn’t packed our rain gear, so we turned around and sped back to camp.  However, the rain passed to the northwest.  So, we have a 10-mile section from mileposts 29 to 39 yet to ride on the lower half of the Trail of the Coeur d’ Alenes, plus the section from Osburn to Mullen through Wallace on the upper end.  The weather has never cooperated with us: it’s taken us 15 years to complete 96 miles of the 144-mile round trip ride on this trail, and 61 of that was the first time, in 2004.

Shelton Valley Sunday from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

When we really need a bike ride and don’t have time to drive to a trail or rural area, we ride the 10-mile loop through downtown Shelton and around Shelton Valley, just west of town.  We can choose to ride clockwise or anti-clockwise, and there is enough climbing to give a good workout.  This was an anti-clockwise run.

Grande Prairie from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

We thought we might get to ride some on the way to and in Prince George, but the weather didn’t cooperate on the way up and our weekend was entirely taken up with the fiber arts conference.  Then, we stayed with relatives on a gravel road west of Dawson Creek, so there wasn’t much opportunity there.  But, we found this delightful urban trail down the creek running through the middle of Grande Prairie, Alberta.  We camped next to the trail, but the wind was too strong to ride the afternoon we arrived, so we broke camp in the morning and rode from the parking lot at the mid-point of the trail.  The trail was a good workout with curves and rolling up and down the sides of the canyon, with a lot of children in summer programs along the trail, so we took the city streets back to the van, driving another 175 km south to our next stop: we should have pressed on another 150 km, as we drove that the next morning–in a late June blizzard along the Rocky Mountain Front.

Chilliwack–Fraser Valley from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

Our last ride started where it all began, 33 years ago.  In 1986, one of our first big group rides was an 80-km (50-miles, a “Semi-Century”) ride from Nooksack School in Washington State, down the Sumas River, across the border to Chilliwack and return.  This trip, we parked on the north side of Chilliwack and rode the dyke along the Fraser River to the Rosedale-Agazziz Bridge and back along the Camp Slough, reminded on the way back of the persistent wind that blows up the Fraser valley: that long-ago ride, we fought the wind all the way back, 40 km, arriving an hour later than the rest of the quite large group, though we had been with them at the turn-around.  Choosing to ride along the cottonwood-lined slough was a good choice: we had much less wind.

2018 was a typical year for our Warm Showers activities.  We hosted 29 bicycle tourists this year, turned down a half-dozen or so that passed through when we were out traveling or bicycling ourselves, and a few who made inquiries but ended up bypassing us  due to routing or scheduling.

Our first guest of the season, Luci, had traveled two years from Brazil, intending to tour Canada as well.  However, she ran into a stumbling block when Canada refused to issue her a visa.  With her US visa expiring, she retreated to Mexico and is still planning to continue when and if she can get permission to enter Canada.  Meanwhile, she has seen much of the U.S., thanks to the many friends she has made in her journey.

Our next guest, Liz, a British free-lance journalist, had traveled from the U.K. via Europe and Asia, continuing her trip down the U.S. coast to Central America before returning home to the U.K.

Sheena, from Maryland, and Emilie, from New Jersey, had met on a Bike ‘n Build crew a few years ago and decided to tour together down the Pacific Coast.  The discovered, to their surprise, while looking through our guest gallery, that two others of their crew had stayed with us when they continued touring after the group had reached Seattle.  We narrowly averted a disaster when Emilie slipped on the top stair and took a bumpy ride down to the living room, fortunately unhurt.

Tom and Becci, originally from the UK, but living in British Columbia lately, passed through in early June on a tour of the Pacific Coast.

Frank, from Germany, convinced his Swiss employer that an English immersion experience would help him with his new assignment as sales rep to English-speaking countries, choosing a bicycle tour down the West Coast as the best way to do that.

Charlie and Becci, both veterinary surgeons from the UK, took an interesting approach to touring, ordering new bicycles delivered to the U.S., then riding them from Vancouver to San Ysidro, California, where they sold the bikes and continued their tour by public transit to Mexico and Cuba, where they had very interesting (and amusingly related) adventures and volunteered their skills at veterinary clinics (albeit clandestine ones in Cuba, where small-animal practices are not licensed).

Ramon, a teacher from San Diego, and Peter, a pediatric oncologist from Indiana, arrived separately and went their separate paths the next day, though both headed south.

Daniel and Claudia, from Germany, had pedaled across Europe and Asia, then north through the U.S. and Canadian Rockies before heading back south along the coastal and Sierra Cascades routes.  When back at home, Daniel is a neurologist and Claudia is a political science graduate student.

Jennie and Daniel, aspiring actors from the East Coast, started their Transamerica tour in Arlington, WA, headed down the coast to the western terminus at Newport, Oregon to begin heading east to New York.

Tom and Amanda, from Alaska, were “drop-ins,” contacting us by phone late in the day after realizing they weren’t going to make it to their intended stop.  We usually prepare a meal for expected guests, but Tom and Amanda arrived late, so cooked their own.  We still got in a good visit.  Tom has had several pieces published in Adventure Cyclist, the membership magazine of Adventure Cycling.  They were on a tour around the Olympic Peninsula starting from Seattle.  We had just completed a car-bike camping tour around the same route, in the opposite direction, so gave them some tips, and got good feedback from their experience.

Yanouk, from Montreal, had ridden across Canada with a friend from the Gaspe Peninsula to Vancouver, then solo to Vancouver Island and around the Olympic Peninsula before returning home to continue his university studies.

Bill and Dave, Christian pastors from Oregon, on a short tour together in the Pacific Northwest.

Neeka and Kegan, from New Zealand.  Kegan has an outdoor job, so they devised an ingenious plan to spend  a couple New Zealand winters in Canadian summer to combine work and touring, intending to ride to San Francisco before flying home to New Zealand in time for spring building season.  Unfortunately, one of their excursions over the summer took them to Port Angeles, where the clock started on their U.S. visa.  After I asked them about the timing, they checked their visa and discovered they had mere hours to get back to Canada by bus and train before it expired.  Hopefully, they will be able to return to explore the U.S. next year.

Chris, from Colorado, made a fast tour of the Pacific Coast on her recumbent, by virtue of being a very early riser, getting on the road well before sunrise.

Alain, from Montreal, arrived the same day Chris did, but from a different route, delayed slightly by knee issues.

Carlton, from Michigan, and his friend Rachel, fellow travelers who met on a group tour several years ago, had traveled with a group of other cyclists from that first group down the Canadian Rockies, splitting off to ride the Washington Parks Loop on their own, arriving from Yakima via Mount Rainier and Elma on their way to Seattle.

Connie, from Colorado, and  Isabella, from Oregon, who met on a supported bike tour of Puerto Rico years ago, decided to tour the Olympic Peninsula Segment of the Washington Parks Loop route, with a side trip to the San Juan Islands.  The biggest problem they had in planning was where to leave their car, as the loop brings them back to the starting point.  We don’t have room to park extra cars, so they ended up starting their tour in Montesano, 60 km west of us.  Connie’s Bike Friday New World Tourist is the first BF in our garage besides our own “Q” tandem.

David, from Spain, toured across Canada from Montreal and was headed down the Pacific Coast on his first North American tour.  He was quite the celebrity on the Warm Showers network, as he was the first Spanish tourist most of us had hosted. I ended up picking him up near the airport north of town, to spare him the hill climb to our house and the rush-hour traffic through town, made worse by the extensive road and utility repairs that have made navigation across town interesting this summer and fall.

So, another season under wraps.  We had a few requests in October, as we usually do, but weren’t home, so no guests in October.  2018 brings our total number of guests hosted since we joined Warm Showers in 2011 to 216.  This year brought us guests from two new countries, Brazil and Spain, and cyclists from a variety of professions, as usual, including journalists, physicians, teachers, religious leaders, students, and retirees.  Yes, our food, water, and electric bills go up a bit during “the season,” but we do enjoy sharing our mutual passion with these world travelers.  With some, our contact is brief, but others we keep in contact with for years, passively through their blogs, or actively on social media.  One of last year’s guests is nearing her goal, the southern tip of South America, currently entranced with the scenery and people of Chile.  An early guest from 2011, now 76, continues to tour around the world, sharing his photos and stories in his blog and on Flickr.