The Eagle Has Landed

We boondocked with this van in the Bellingham Wal*Mart. It was festooned with sculptures of eagles. An older couple (like 80’s) were not shy about being noticed! Car after car drove up, rolled down their windows, and took a photo with cameras or phones. One woman left her car running in the middle of the busy lane and made a slow walk-around video.

Shangri-la Backroads 2

Bill Weir and Alice and Andoni, cyclists we’d met way back in Almaty in 2005, suggested we take a back road to Tiger Leaping Gorge.

High Places and Thinking of Food

We’re getting to the stage where we think about food a lot, and we tried to make a decent dent in the big bucket of rice, but we failed to come close to finishing it. Yes, we’re eating pork now, or any kind of protein for that matter, and we eat whatever vegetables they bring us. At the grocery stores, we study and poke the packages and hope they’ll sustain us through a night of camping. Yogurt and cookies (a whole roll) is a before bed tradition of carbo loading and we even bought Tang for our water bottles tomorrow.

Highest Point: Continued

Though the mountain was crowded with lots of construction workers, it was somehow comforting to have some of the road crew trying to beckon us over to their fire to warm up. They didn’t seem to understand that our lightweight clothing was plenty for as hard as we were working and we would only cool down if we stopped. Much as we would have liked to have tea and a visit, we had to keep moving.We got many cheers, thumbs up, much misinformation and even a push from two road monitors.