Day Total - 24.8 miles
Trip Total - 1,141.6 miles
Rain-shortened day. No dog chases though.
When we woke up this morning, it was raining. Hard. That's pretty much what the forecast said would happen, and it was immediately clear that we weren't going to be able to do the 60 miles we had planned. So I got back in my tent (Kevin had never left his) and read my book until around 9:30. By then, the rain had become less severe, although it hadn't stopped. I figured that it was a good time to get packed up so that we could leave once the rain stopped. Kevin had other ideas though. He, as usual, wouldn't get out of his sleeping bag, which rendered my plans pointless (in fairness, they weren't necessary either).
The rain finally stopped at about 10:30, at which point I just needed to take my tent down to be ready to go. Kevin, in the meantime, got up at 11. By the time he was ready, another band of precipitation was hitting us, so we didn't end up leaving until 1:15 in the afternoon. We were only going as far as Centralia, a little over 20 miles away though, so time wasn't really a serious issue.
We biked north on some flat roads with moderate traffic until turning off the highway about 8 miles into the ride. All of a sudden, an extremely steep hill, probably the steepest of the trip, was in front of us. It's good we hit it this late in the trip, because I needed all of my strength to get up and over it. Exhausted, we dropped back down into barking dog farmland, though there fortunately weren't any chases this time around.
Then we rounded a corner and came upon a hill even steeper than the first. I don't know why Adventure Cycling chose this way, but it's pretty terrible on a loaded touring bike. Bad roads and mediocre scenery don't make up for the low traffic in my mind. In any case, we both got into very low gears and plugged away. My legs were already not feeling great to being with, so it was an ordeal to get up and over the crest. But once we did, we had a pretty straightforward ride on a gradual downhill into Centralia.
Centralia was the largest town we had seen since Coos Bay and North Bend in Southern Oregon. It also had two bike shops listed on the map, good news for Kevin, who needed to get his bike checked out. So we went to the first one, only to find that it had gone out of business. We turned around and headed back to the other one, in the center of town. They were open, but it was a bike shop in the sense that they had a few tools for sale. They couldn't fix Kevin's bike, and they thought that Olympia, about 25 miles north and way off the ACA route, would be the closest place where someone could. There was no way we could make it there today, but we discussed a change of route. Ultimately though, Kevin decided to stick it out another few days to the next shop on route near Bremerton.
From there, we proceeded west to the Motel 6 near the I-5 interchange. We checked in and got an average Motel 6 room (tiny, cigarette burns on the sheets, may have been recently used as a meth lab), then walked to Wendy's and the grocery store not far away.
View Day 31 - Toledo, WA-Centralia, WA in a larger map
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