Elma - Aberdeen

We reached our hotel in Elma, excited for beds and showers after a few days of camping. Cristina told me I am losing muscle on tour. The hotel beds felt like a luxury! I slept so soundly both nights there. We dined at the nearby Rusty Tractor, which served surprisingly fresh foods and grass fed meats. Although their table decor included some strange off-color stuff...

We were both ready for some time apart, since we had spent nearly all of the last 2.5 weeks together. This tour seemed to be more of just us, we ran into only five other cyclists by this time and were primarily camping so we didn't even have WS hosts to chat with us. This plus something else that was mounting and I needed to get my arse to a meeting. In Kalaloch I was trying to start fights with Cristina over silly things, instead of talking about what was actually bugging me. I left on my pannier free bicycle and took the bus to Aberdeen for a meeting and sightseeing. The meeting was very cool and the folks were friendly. There were two topics- and one of them was character defects- so I had the chance to get honest about what I had been doing. My insisting on being right about stuff is a character defect. There is definitely more to it, but that is the crux. After the meeting I cycled around town, visiting Kurt Cobain's Memorial Park, the Nirvana Mural, and the fantastic Star Wars store before picking up supplied at the Safeway.