We have begun the launch sequence......

Wow....has it already been 10 days?  Our days here in Vancouver have just flown, and that is probably because they have been busy days.  We put about about 50 miles on our bikes, and have seen a lot of cool places both by bike and by car.  

By the way, we apparently broke another spoke on the tandem again yesterday.  I will need to locate a small supply of appropriately sized spokes, as I have a feeling this won't be the last.  I really need to have that rear wheel rebuilt with new spokes.  My experience has been in the past that if one breaks others will follow.  Ironically, these are not breaking on the cassette side, which is more typical.

Since we will be leaving tomorrow morning around 9am I spent most the day finishing up a couple of projects, lowered the solar panels (not good to drive with them tilted....lol!), and straightened up the trailer for the insertion of the T-Bird tomorrow morning after we back out of the 85' driveway we have been parked in.

One of the projects was to mount the hiking poles on top of the cabinet in the trailer.  I had purchased the hardware last week at the Home Depot in Hillsboro, OR, but had had the time until today to do the work.  Here is how it turned out.

And this is what the trailer looks like just before we insert the T-Bird.  It takes a couple of hours to get it looking like this.  The boxes in the foreground will not be there tomorrow.....where they will end up, I'm not sure, but we will find a spot for them.

We will head south and east on Interstate 84....the farthest we will go is Arlington, OR, but we may stop in Hood River, OR....we'll see what strikes our fancy.  As usual we have made no reservations, and will trust to serendipity.  One thing is for sure, we will be staying somewhere along the Columbia River tomorrow night.  We are just hoping it is not the typical wind tunnel that it normally is, but either way, we will proceed in style!

We took our hosts (well, just Lee, as Patty was feeling under the weather) out to El Rancho Viejo Mexican Restaurant for an early dinner.  This is a great place, and I highly recommend it.  The food is high quality, and the service is magnificent.  And the Negra Modelo's were ice cold....just like I like them.  To make it even better we arrived during Happy Hour (3pm - 5pm) and got 20% off our tab!

We had missed "Dancing With the Stars" last night, but Lee's DVR records all prime time every night and holds it for 24 hours, so we got to watch it tonight commercial free.  His DVR automatically skips the commercials if you ask it to, and we did.  We watched a 2 hour show in less than 90 minutes!

We will, as always, feel a little melancholy about saying "Good Bye" to our hosts tomorrow, but we are looking forward to new scenery, and adventures.  Tomorrow will be new territory for us after Cascade Locks, and we can't wait.

Thanks for stopping by!