The Yakima Canyon

After my dreadful ride yesterday, Brian, from Georgetown ON kindly told me to go and relax that he would set up my tent. I told him that would be great and not to worry about pegging it as probably wasn’t necessary. I crawled into bed late and tried to drift to sleep. I was woken at 2:30 am to an incredible wind that was lifting my tent around me. Toto, We’re not in Kanasas anymore. I scrambled to find my pegs and quickly tie down. The lightning was amazing as the storm came in. Also, the automatic sprinkler system came on early in the morning just for good measure.

Day 4 saw us entering into the Yakima Canyon formed by the Yakima River. Incredible views and wild life surrounded us in the blazing sun.



Again it was hot and some of the wildlife decided to explore the cooling waters of the Yakima River.

Now before you get upset, I had permission from those involved to blog this photo, as long as I emailed it to their Moms as well. Now apparently, this public display is illegal in Washington state or so our SAG was told by the state policeman who received the complaint about this. He told the SAG driver that if he caught them, he would be putting their cute little butts in jail. Probably won’t be a future issue, At least until we leave Washington!
Now I was able to restrain myself and keep my clothes on while enjoying the cooling water.

However, I slipped on the bottom and felt something slice across my foot. It was bleeding fairly steady so I tightened my shoe for pressure and headed to camp to find the nurse. Nurse Betsy took a look and it was a close call to get stitches or not. We have decided just to use strips and keep it clean. I’m more worried about infection but we’ll see how the cycling goes tomorrow.

I decided that I needed to do laundry and Nurse Betsy and I gathered our stuff. We realized that we had room for more so opened the invitation to others. Sure enough we became very popular with the young guys! Hey it’s a good trade off if they keep my bike going. The area that we were in was a poorer area of Yakima with what seem like a high Latino population. We quickly figured out that they were probably workers in the orchards, working for low wages so that we can have cheap cherries and apples. These are the people we are cycling for.