Day 7 You can always depend on the kindness of strangers Elma to Lewis And Clark State Park

Elma to Lewis & Clark State Park

It was hard to leave the luxury of the hotel this morning but we managed to get on our way by 9.

Covered quite a few miles in the morning through the flat farmland of Chehalis River. Every other house had a gang of dogs who would run up to the fence to bark at us as we cycled past, the were almost certainly barking 'go away!' but in my head they were cheering us on our journey. We saw an osprey nest which was cool.

As we were approaching the town of Rochester we got another flat, boo! And then another one, we found the culprit, a piece if glass wedged right in the tire. We came to the conclusion that with all the flats we are getting our tires must not be robust enough so maybe it was time to get some proper touring tires, we also needed new tubes and patches and there was supposably a bike shop in the next town over, Centralia, so we thought we should stop and stock up.

Riding into town we stopped to ask a local guy if he knew where the shop was, he said he didn't but would look it up for us online in his tattoo shop, he was really nice and even printed out a map to the shop, it's a nice studio and what I saw of the artwork was cool so if you're ever in Centralia and fancy getting inked check it out, it's on Main Street it is called Fat Tattoo.

We cycled off in search of the shop and a little way down the road a lovely lady called Susan (or Banana Bread lady as she is known to the participants of the Seattle to Portland bike ride due to fact that she bakes over 100 loaves of banana bread each year to hand out to hungry cyclists as they ride through town) spotted us cycling slowly looking at the map and asked if we needed help, we said we were headed for the bike shop and she said she would call ahead for us to make sure the shop had what we needed, how nice. After a couple of calls she established the bike store had gone out of business but managed to find us another store that carried tubes and patches, awesome.

I have to admit I was feeling a bit down about getting all the flats but the kindness of the people we met in Centralia really lifted my spirits.

We headed out of town to our campsite. Another ride through farmland but lots of hills this time. Steep ups and downs it was like a roller coaster! We got as fast as 38 mph on one of the downs.

Got to the campsite feeling good, lots of miles done today.

Miles done today 64. Total miles 284