Day 21: Spokane

 Distance traveled: 450.3 km

Cumulative distance: 5,866.9 km

Maximum speed: 120 kph

Moving average: 76 kph

Temperature range: 9.4 - 20 .4

I had a restless sleep but not because of banjo music.  It rained off and on from about midnight plus, somebody drove through the tiny campground about 4:00 am. Hunters, looking to make an early start is my guess.

On the road before 8:00 a.m. Happy to get good, early starts but packing up when everything is wet looses its appeal pretty quickly.  Getting out of the campground, dodging the enormous potholes filled with water was good. The first hour on the road was the last of the real, twisty riding, I'm guessing. The road followed the John Day River North Fork for quite a way; the best part was that in the bottom of the valley, it was out of the wind. 

Once up on the plains, I had a better look at what was in store for me: while there were rain clouds in

every direction, there would be little patches where blue was trying to break through. Not patches of open sky but just where the clouds were thin enough that they looked... bluish. Still raining on me but never really very hard. This went on for all of the morning. I never bothered to put on my rain suit because it just never seemed like it was warranted any time I stopped to take a picture but I did wear rain gloves because there is just no protection from the wind for hands.

Oregon state has massive wind farms. Not that I counted all the wind mills I saw but I stopped a couple of times and took pictures and at one point, counted over fifty just in my view and I had passed several of these groups of windmills. 

I arrived in Spokane just in time for rush hour with no real plan in place, other than to find a motel and visit a Costco and a motorcycle accessories store called Cycle Gear, which listed products from a company called Gerbing, which makes heated accessories for motorcycling. I immediately ended up on the interstate 90 which goes east. Not a lot of point in doing that so I arbitrarily made an exit and found myself in a Home Depot parking lot where there was a lot of space to park the bike and spend some time on my phone looking up motels. This is where having a little OCD would be good. I always hate getting to a place THEN having to decide which place to choose however, I had envisioned riding into town and seeing a long line of motels and then picking one of those. Then I would check in and go look at the two stores I wanted to visit. However, there was no long line, not even a short line of motels. Nothing at all, in fact. The highway just went straight into town and then there was a choice of interstates. I guess I could have sorted this out at Starbucks in Pendleton, where i had morning coffee,

As always, I agonized over the reviews of the motels. Lots of the reviews listed bed bugs or bad neighbourhood so I eventually opted for one of the big chains. I had hoped to take out my tent and related to dry out but that wasn't going to be possible given my bike wouldn't be parked right in front of my door.  Motorcyclers always like to have motels so their beloved bikes can always be close. 

Amazingly, while in the Home Depot parking lot, I see that I am right beside one of three Cycle Gear stores and a block away from Costco! My original thinking was to check into a motel then dump as much stuff as I could and go ride to these destinations however, I had been getting queasy about that given how busy it was driving around. I was just going to have to hope that nobody messed with my stuff, but I did take my tank bag with me into Costco.

I saw this launch ramp in Spokane and I thought it interesting. I thought it must be for Fireball XL 5 but it is actually, much to my disappointment, what looks like a new interstate route through town. What was interesting is that this elevated section was the same at the other end, so they had built the middle section first and they were working on the road to connect to it.