Awful Winds

We started off today by talking for a few minutes with a guy who was driving a tour bus-sized RV and towing a car.  Believe it or not, these behemoths of the road, these monstrosities of tourism, are common.  Taking your home with you seems to me to be too fast, too comfortable, and too expensive to really get to know the places you go.  It also seems extravagantly wasteful: not only do the drivers let their RV/tour buses idle, but upon stopping, they turn on the car they're towing and let that idle, too!  All this happened this morning right next to the sign that declared "B.C. is idle-free" and denounced idling for its impact on air quality.  Not everyone can bike tour, but it seems to me there are better ways to travel than driving a personal bus and towing a car.

Perhaps I'm just touchy today because the wind was as bad as it's been all trip.  The first ten miles weren't horribly headwindy, but after that it picked up and we struggled to maintain five or six mph on the flat sections.  

We were going this way: <----------

We would have stopped had Jade City, population 50, not been within reach just 20 miles farther.  So we pushed on through the gale and managed to get there just after it started to rain.  It turns out we weren't riding through a gale, just that this area of the country has severe and persistent south winds.  This is rather worrisome, as we'll be heading south for the next 500 miles.

They don't have a restaurant here, as we had hoped, but they do sell ice cream and provide wi-fi, which is how I'm sitting here now writing this.  They also have mountains of jade, as the name implies, cut in every shape and size you could ever want.  The table is jade.  There's a jade globe in the corner.  

What's not jade is painted jade-green.  It's pretty crazy.  There are two other cyclists staying here too; they've been here for two days waiting for the wind to lessen, and we're excited to talk with them more later on tonight.