After riding to Walmart to pick up some stuff, I dropped the bike off at the bike shop for a badly needed cleaning. The rest of my errands could be done on foot. Despite this being a “rest” day, I still had lot to do (laundry, etc.).
Sandpoint has a population of only 5,200 but has a downtown which seems capable of handling much more than that. The K2 Motel is conveniently situated in town, walking distance from almost everything. This town is probably busier in the winter, being about 10 miles from local ski area (which seems to have limited accommodations due to the terrain).
I had to tend to the matter of the dirt and mud that got sprayed up onto the bags from yesterday’s adventure. At least the stuff inside was dry (rear bags are waterproof, the insides of the front bags are lined with garbage bags).
The tent and rainfly were still a bit damp from yesterday morning. I was able to somewhat set up the tent in the hotel room to let it air out OK.
I then prepared a package of stuff I needed to get rid of – 8 pounds of stuff to send home! Some of the items were things like the backup pedals I bought in Winthrop and the old Frog pedals that were replaced with the new ones. There were also items that I thought I had needed but didn’t – like the collapsible bladder to hold water (I already have a water bottle cage that holds a 1.5 liter bottle of water, plus two other smaller bottles). The next shipment home will be the cold weather gear after crossing the Rockies.
Then it was off to the library to check the “fan e-mail” that I can’t get on this Palm Pilot. It sounds like my stories are keeping some of you in the office from going postal! (as I say this with a sarcastic grin… or not?) I’ll consider that as motivation for helping my keep this journal going.
Internet access at libraries can sometimes be a pain in the a**. This one wouldn’t let you type in a URL directly, you had to go to a search engine home page, and then come up with a search that would find the URL you were looking for, and if you then clicked on it, it had a 50% chance of working. Ugh. All Java capability was also disabled, preventing things like instant messaging. Luckily I keep the file that has the latitude/longitude coordinates for all of my stops on the Yahoo groups page, so I was able to access that file to update it with all of the overnight stops I’ve done to date. So if you check out my website (link below) you can see the updated map with all of the stops to date.
BikingBrian 