Day 73, Saturday, August 27

In effort to beat the athletes into the showers, I set my alarm for 5am this morning, got up, showered, and packed up the tent and stuff, then started wondering. Wait a minute…why is it still dark? Turns out I’d failed to change my clock from Mountain to Pacific time which means I’d actually gotten up at 4am! Oops. I actually made pancakes and scrambled egg breakfast, cleaned the dishes, packed and was on the road by 7am! Outstanding! I headed the couple of miles down the road to hotel in Oliver where the motorcycle show was being held and got a schedule. What I found out was that the really interesting stuff didn’t get started until the afternoon which left me all morning to ride around and see the country. What I found was that valley around Oliver is famous for its vegetables and fruits, a fame I definitely took advantage of. $2 Canadian got me 4 huge peaches and 4 huge tomatoes. Try getting those deals back in the states!
In the afternoon I went back to the motorcycle show for two events, the Moto X jump show and the street stunt show. Unfortunately, the event that I really wanted to see, the trials riding demonstration. For those of you who don’t know about trials riding, it’s basically guys riding small displacement motorcycles over flat out impossible obstacles with an emphasis on never allowing the rider to touch his/her feet or hands to any part of the obstacle. What these riders can throw their motorcycles over boggles the imagination. The Moto-X jumps were pretty cool, but what really impressed me was the street stunt show. Impressed me negatively, that is. These are guys who get a kick out of damaging and destroying equipment. I recognize the amount of skill that goes into some of their wheelies but when they start doing smoky burn outs until their tires pop, and intentionally crashing their motorcycles, I just stand by looking on in disgust. I’ll take skill and preservation of machinery over destruction any day of the week!
After finishing with the motorcycle show, I decided it was time to point the motorcycle back into the US for a while with a destination of somewhere in Seattle.
On this trip some of the most interesting events have resulted from purely chance circumstances. It happened again tonight. BIG time. As I was leaving the motorcycle show I decided that I wanted hamburgers for dinner so I stopped and bought some ground beef there in Oliver. I completely forgot that the US border guards are being sticklers about ground beef coming into the US. So, as I crossed the border at Sumas, WA the border guards confiscated my dinner. Crap. Since I really had my mind set on hamburgers, I decided to stop briefly at a Safeway to pick up some replacement beef. When I was putting the meat into my cooler 5 minutes later, I noticed that a car had pulled up behind me and a guy was leaning out of the window looking at my motorcycle and trailer. Seems like everybody is curious at seeing a BMW pulling a matching trailer. Well this was different. Out of the blue, the guy asks me "Do you have any place to stay tonight?" Immediately my alarm bells went off. Loudly. (Why the heck is this guy asking me this?) "Yeah, I’m headed south of here a ways and staying at a campsite down near Seattle." (I thought that would end the conversation.) Instead he came back with "You ought to stay at my place." Now the alarm bells were ringing LOUDLY. "No thanks, I think I’ll head on down to the campground since I’ve got plans in Seattle tomorrow." Again, I thought that would end the conversation. Wrong. He introduced himself as David VanKirk "You really ought to reconsider. Both my wife Marcia and I are BMW riders and we’d be pleased to have you stay with us. You’d save yourself some money also." All the sudden the bells weren’t ringing quite so loudly. On this trip, I’ve found that every single time I’ve ignored the warning bells, something great has resulted. Warning bells silenced and retired, I said "You know what? Sure. That’d be great." and followed him back a couple of miles to his place. Marcia was definitely startled when David confronted her with "Hey Honey, look what I brought home!", but to her credit took it really well.
Turns out that David and Marcia are really wonderful, warm people with a wonderful huge extended family which they have displayed proudly in pictures all over their walls. Definitely proud grandparents! I had a wonderful evening talking with them, and while I took a shower, David actually prepared the burgers for me and made a mixed green salad to go along with the burgers. What did I do to deserve such hospitality? I don’t know but this type of generosity has been given to me on more occasions on this trip that I could ever have imagined when I set out