Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Day 122 - 2nd October, Ellensburg - Cle Elum, 29.04 miles

Day on the Iron Horse Trail. Freezing cold in the morning persuade us to buy booties for our shoes. We found really cool bike shop (Bicycles Recycle Shop Inc.) in Ellensburg downtown. People here were very nice, they let us in, even it was about half an hour before opening and help us promptly to find what we needed. The booties help us to warm up nearly immediately. From Ellensburg we headed to the Cle Elum on the Iron Horse Trail, it is with gravel, but we biked worst already. It was nice to stay away from traffic for a while. And there were small bonuses like wild plumbs with soooo sweet fruits, tunnels, huge basalt cliffs, Yakima river or alive rattlesnake long as my arm. That rattlesnake was amazing, looked so deadly, dangerous ... even it was getting slowly away and was very noisy, we went around it with big respect (and in big curve).
In the afternoon started to rain, not very hard, but without pause. And in one moment, in the middle of nothing, suddenly, without warning my front rack broke. First I didn't get it what happened, luckily we rode very slow, because of the rain and gravel, so nothing horrible happened, only rack was on pieces, paniers survived without harm, even I run over them. Ortlieb is really good. So after a few minutes, in the rain, cursing like an old sailor, I fixed it. With tape and some rope you can fix nearly everything. To Cle Elum we got after dark. Again. And even it stopped rain for a while before we found place for tent it was again raining. In nearly freezing temperature it wasn't very pleasant evening. During the night it started to freezing. When I had to go out, I had to fight with zipper on the tent, it was completely frozen. At least rain stopped an sky was full of very cold stars :-)

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