Travis has been reading this bike blog of a guy touring the same route as us, and according to this dude, he wakes up at 5:30 every morning (just like he always does) and goes for a one to two mile jog to warm up his legs before biking.
OKAY OVERACHIEVER.
If we don't set an alarm, we sleep for 11 hours. Which is exactly what happened this morning. I have visions of getting up and out of camp before 10am, but after breakfast, breaking down camp, and deciding where we're riding that day, it takes us about two hours to get on the road.
We had a special treat this morning because we camped on a river, and I got buck naked and bathed myself in it without getting spotted by a stranger. I felt like a water nymph in a medieval tale. By the way, neither of us have had a truth bathing since we left Haley's house (gulp).
And where are the pictures of what we biked through today? There aren't any, except for one, because we biked through timber land and clear cuts.
With our late departure time, we were hard pressed to book it to a campground, with the added urgency weekend competition. We had our sights on the overflow site at Kalaloch campground on the coast, which we reached at twilight.
Kalaloch was full as we expected, and on our way down to the beach overflow campsites we were stopped by a park ranger in an SUV with police lights. He was very stern, saying that the beach camping was NOT in fact overflow for Kalaloch, and in any case it was full. Our ONLY CHANCE for a night's rest was to go back to Kalaloch and ask the ranger on duty VERY NICELY if we could pretty please stay in one of the emergency spots, which is usually reserved for people who try and pull up to the campground at midnight, NOT for cyclists with poor planning. Now that I'm thinking about it, what exactly is the difference between our cyclist poor planning and a motorized vehicle with poor planning? Travis says there's no difference, that dude just wanted to give someone a lecture.
On the way back to Kalaloch, we ran into another cyclist named Calvin, who had received the same lecture. We waited at the ranger station to talk with the ranger on duty, and soon enough he pulled up in a ridiculous bubble-looking electric vehicle, struggled with the door, and asked if we were looking for a place to stay. We relayed our tale of the stern ranger, and the nice park ranger said that he's a ranger who thinks he's a cop, and there would have been no problem with us staying at the beach campsites if stern ranger hadn't bothered us. Soon enough he had us and Calvin set up at a perfectly nice emergency campsite, and he tipped his goofy ranger hat at us, saying we really shouldn't miss the ranger program tonight, it's gonna be a good one.
We learned a lot about bald eagles tonight.