Chuck:
The plan is to get fuel at Prophet Creek; we can see the station from our campsite. I will bike to the top of the hill and wait at the station for Betty. Oops, the station is boarded up, closed. Across the highway is a heavy equipment yard with pumps outside a large warehouse. As I bike up to it, four barking dogs charge out. Now I can see the large black trash bags pulled over the pumps; time to exit. Fortunately, these are well behaved guard dogs, as I turn to leave they have done their job and return to their “duty station”. Betty is now coming up the hill and will see me biking away and know we cannot get fuel until later.
A great day to be on a bike, clear skies, no wind, mostly flat terrain. Cruising along effortlessly at about 18 mph, tires singing, creating my own breeze and the open road ahead; beautiful. Lunch at 22 miles and back on the road; Betty will wait for me past the 50 mile point. Later in the afternoon, the sky darkens, then lightning, thunder rolls and a few rain drops. Looks like I am headed right into thunder showers. Wow, here comes our little Honda, Betty is going to “rescue” me. We quickly load the bike and start driving back to the RV, it is 7 miles, I would have been drenched. Back at our “dry-camp” for the night, it rains hard for a couple of hours. Most turn-outs like this one are pretty quiet with only an occasional vehicle stopping and maybe one or two others spending the night. Evidently, this one is a holding area for a quarry and an asphalt plant and some kind of drilling support operations located down a side road, directly off “our” turn-out. The heavy truck traffic is nearly non-stop until about 8 pm and starts again at 6 am. We suspect the heavy equipment may be supporting the road construction ahead of us. Steve (biker from Montreal) warned us about the construction, he said it is a “mess”.