And the rains came!

The eerie glow in the sky of the forest fires on the road into Idaho

After months of exceptionally hot, dry weather, southern BC finally got at least a bit of relief with the rain it so badly needed last night. It started gently around 8pm with just a few spots which then developed into a full blooded storm which was still raging when I went to bed around 10pm. Hopefully, it will at least have helped to damp down some of the huge number of forest fires which have been burning all around the area. Today we can see across the valley once more and also see blue sky instead of just smoke. For someone like me who has never had to put up with such things in the UK it’s actually been quite worrying at times. When I went across the Idaho border yesterday, as I posted before, I was told that a lot of people had been evacuated around there and that is just 10km to the south of us. Returning home via Creston, as I looked across to Taz & Joel’s place, the whole area was completely masked with dense smoke. So bad was it that I even wondered if they would have been evacuated whilst I had been away. However once back to the house it wasn’t quite as bad as it had looked from the other side, so all was good.

I spent this morning replacing the fork seal in my right front fork leg as it had started to leak a week or so back. An easy enough job if you can only get the retaining circlip out. It’s one of those jobbies with no eyes for circlip pliers so you have to just prise it out with something thin, whilst trying not to stab yourself. Anyway, with Joel’s help the job was completed successfully and is now (hopefully) leak free. My kit has all been sorted out and another rather large but not too heavy box now sits here waiting to be posted home tomorrow, leaving my panniers with a good bit more space than they have ever had before on this trip.

It’s been great having a couple of places over here to chill out in for a few days; my cousins in Edmonton and Taz & Joels in Creston, but from here on it looks like I’m on my own. Although there is still a chance of meeting up with Jim & Caroline in a few weeks somewhere along the Mississippi and I have an invite to stay in San Jose with Sue, a lady I met early on in North Dakota. There are so many things to look forward to now that I am of course having trouble sleeping, as soon as my head hits the pillow, the thoughts of the journey past and future start.