Road Trip to Wildflower

Wednesday night, we packed up the car and went to bed. Laura and I woke up at 4am and hit the road by 4:10. Ready for a 17 hour road trip......hm. Maybe it turns out a smidge longer than that. Details to follow. Here's the first shot of our Nav....somewhere out in the middle of nowhere.

Although this shot is blurry, I love the feel of it. The silhouette of the saddle with the sun rising......ready for an adventure.


I felt it was only appropriate to take a picture of every Starbucks we stopped at. Here's the first one. Many to come.

YARD SALE! We were a little afraid to get busted parked out in front of this persons house taking pictures with my telephoto lens. But seriously, how could we not?

We drove for hours on hwy 97 at 55 mph because that was the speed limit and we didn't want a ticket (cops were hiding out everywhere). After tirelessly looking for "just the perfect picnic spot"(per Laura's request) we stopped to eat our lunch that I'd prepared for us the day before. We found this trashed parking lot and this was our view. This lovely (dead, but lovely) tree had a tag on it that actually read "SOLD". It wasn't quite the spot that Laura was hoping for but it did give us something to ponder on while we ate lunch.

Across the street from the sold, dead tree, we could see this sign. Great lunch ambiance.


Now doesn't that look good? We decided that we couldn't depend on the gas stations and fast food restaurants to get good pre-race nutrition in. So, I shredded up chicken breast and we ate some fully loaded cold chicken tacos with fresh guacamole for lunch and dinner.


Here's Laura, loving me for making her such a good lunch.
Notice how much bigger the taco was in the picture above. That was my taco. I'd like to say my eyes were too big for my stomach but I devoured the entire taco completely. Power to the little people.

Just one of the many lovely views we found along the way.

Laura and KISS go way back.

Shoe tree. Like, a real tree with shoes in it. Stopping to take pictures of things like this and the yard sale is probably what turned our "17 hour road trip" into a "21 hour roadtrip". Next year, we are going to bring a pair of our own shoes to hang. Hopefully, it's still there.

A bunch of smelly, old shoes in a tree.

And Laura is trying to touch them.

Starbucks stop in Bend, Oregon.

Me, happy to have another cup in my hand. Many hours to go.

This is at the last Starbucks stop of the day.


I love this picture. Notice Laura's parking job. There were even folks sitting outside on the patio to witness this. When I got back into the car, there was a guy that was getting into his truck next to us. I noticed that he was really checking out our bikes.....I felt cool. Then I realized he was most likely gawking, not at our cool bikes, but a car that was most definitely parked by a girl.

So, the sun went down and we continued driving. We talked on the phone with Spokane crew #2 (Haley, Troy, Sean & Molly) who left a whole 6 hours after us yet were only 3 1/2 hours behind us. How did this happen? Was it the shoe tree? This is when the realization hit that we probably weren't going to roll into the Paso Robles Motel 6 at 9 or 10pm. Oh no, it was going to be much later than that. We were in our lovely motel 6 beds at 1:30am and asleep by 2. After a 21 hour road trip.

That's day one of our Wildflower adventure. More to follow.....