Saturday 22^st May Sunset Motel, North Bend, Washington.

17.00

We ate in Mama Vallone’s Restaurant last night, a decent, if a little subdued, Italian restaurant across the road from our motel. Then I headed off to The Caboose which was a much jollier place. I’m finally getting into baseball and the Seattle Mariners were beating the San Diego Padres. (their first win in a long time). Diners, not apparently even watching the game, burst into cheers and rounds of applause for home runs. Good stuff.

Today was a real roller coaster of a day. I’m still not sure if we've been lucky or not. The day started cold and very windy and we had thirty-two miles uphhill, on a very noisy motorway, to get to a mountain pass. This was bad. Then n we discovered two separate sets of road works on the hard shoulder which meant that it was closed to cyclists for stretches of a few miles each. . This was very bad. . For the first closure they had installed a special phone for cyclists. You just called and the highway people came, picked you up in a truck and drove you 5 miles to beyond the roadworks. .This was good,. The very nice Texan girl who drove us, actually took us an extra few miles up the hill which was much appreciated in the cold windy rain. This was very good.

There was no phone at the second set of roadworks but they did provide maps showing a nearby lakeside trail which allowed you to rejoin the road 8 miles later. This was good. Unfortunately the map was very misleadng and we ended up travelling four miles uphill on a wretched pot-holed grave road before we realised we had made a mistake. This was very very bad. We stopped a car which contained a couple of old guys, Charlie and Denis, out fishing. They agreed that our interpretation of the map was right but they also agreed that we were lost and would have to go back down the pot-holed road.. This was rolling around on on the ground, weeping, bad . Charlie and Dennis were not locals but were working on the area. Charlie then offered to drive us to the summit, a distance of about seven miles and completely out of their way. Unbelievably generous and so good it is off the scale. They were really friendly and interesting people; explosives experts who were working on a project to move a large hill so that a road could be expanded.

So we got to Snoqualmie Summit at 1.00, Nerves pretty frazzled but it was downhill from there and the sun even came out. . We reached North Bend.at 3.00. Just outside town Mike noticed that my back wheel was buckled.. He spent the next mile or so telling me how buckled it was and how it was a miracle I could ride at all. This was bad. Fortunately there was a bike shop nearby and it turned out to be just a broken spoke. Ten minutes work to fix. This was very good..

So there we are. Or here we are. Never a dull moment and all in all it could have been a lot worse. Thirty miles from Seattle. 25 more on the motorway but it will be downhill. Desperately not trying to count chickens yet, but this time tomorrow it could just all be over.

North Bend is a pretty little town and it's where they filmed Twin Peaks so I'm hoping to get some cherry pie later.