Flea The Race

I crawled out of bed this morning at 8am, JP and Colleen had left, Colleen had stuck a note to the door beside my bedroom for me to find before I left, it had some nice words along with instructions to let myself out followed by permission to take as much food with me as I could carry!  It took an hour of fustering to get my stuff packed, I left behind me a bag of stuff containing clothes and other stuff that I knew I probably wouldn’t use allowing me more space and less weight for the remainder of my trip.

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Once packed I wrote another blog entry while I still had the wifi coller on, I made some tea and toast, filled my 3 water bottles before packing up and hitting the road for some more punishment.  Todays ride was along a highway between Lacey and Aberdeen, the task was to spit out the miles as I figured there wouldn’t be much to see along the way.  The first 30km flew by and my average speed was up in the early 30km/h which was great, the next 70km were the opposite where I was riding into a headwind for the most of it so churning out the miles was slow going, I was utterly trashed by the time I got to my destination.  There was one food stop on route to get a footlong meatball subway inside me before continuing onwards.  I didn’t have a stop decided upon but the road I was on had loads of suitable places to set up camp every few hundred meters, I pushed myself to keep going until I hit the 100km mark at which point I stopped and found a decent spot to camp off the main road, secluded, with lots of flat green grassy patches.  The area I chose was a clear felled forest strip used to house electricity pylons, there was loads of dead dry wood along the strip which I collected together in a pile by my tent so that I could get a campfire going later if it got cold in the tent at night.

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I put up the tent and got dinner going which consisted of potato salad, fried chorizo and toast, once full I decided on a power nap as I was bloody tired at that stage.  I spent an hour after that planning my route and reading up on the upcoming attractions listed in the book I have with me entitled ‘bicycling the pacific coast’.  Sleep happened around 10pm and tonight was the first night where I didn’t freeze my ass off in the tent, it was pretty comfortable all night so I never had reason to light the fire and decided to leave it so as not to draw any unnecessary attention to myself.

The next morning I awoke at 6am and spent another half hour thinking about getting up, it was damp and misty outside so I decided to light the fire after breakfast to keep my warm while I decamped and packed up my gear.  The fire light real easy and it was a welcome friend for the 2 hours it took me to get back on the bike for another days toil on the road.  On my way back up to the road I saw a humming bird by some flowers, the noise of it sounded kinda like an electric motor buzzing away, I know I have heard that noise around my tent before and wondered what the hell it was!

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