We drove to Yakima, WA on Friday for the 2007 edition of the Northwest Tandem Rally. Each year it is in a different place, and it is usually over a long weekend. This year that weekend fell on Memorial Day weekend. None of us had been to Yakima before, and we have heard several people tell us that we should do one with the kids, so we decided to give it a go. We had done some rides with the girls in tow to check the feasibility of the longer distances, and they did ok.
I took the day off from work mostly (with just a couple check-ins on mail) to work on packing. I came up with a pretty decent packing strategy for both the trailer and the trailer bike. It'll be nice when we get the quad and it all goes on the roof. The drive took us approximately 4 hours with one potty stop along the Columbia River on I-84 east to Biggs where we met up with 97 North into Washington state. When we reached Yakima, we stopped at the Chamber of Commerce to get signed in. Our camp site was the lawn of Eisenhower High School on the other side of town. On the way over there, Ellen noticed a house adorned with several American flags and remarked, "they must really like America" without even a hint of sarcasm. Ah, the innocence of youth.
We setup camp on the lawn of the high school next to the empty outdoor pool, and across from the tennis courts. It was already after 5pm, so we went in search of food. We went with the comfort food route, and ate at Red Robin followed by a stop off at a nearby Safeway to pick up some breakfast food for the next morning. On this ride, the rest stops are provided and fully stocked, but we're on our own for breakfast and dinner. It's kind of a bummer, but it works out ok. Some of the other people camped near us had brought their camp cook stoves which Jada and I had actually had a little debate about bringing finally deciding not to bother. After dinner we headed back to camp to put the girls down to bed. It took them a while to calm down as it usually does on the first night in the tent, but they finally did fall asleep. It was difficult for me to sleep too with all the activity of people arriving throughout the night. Not to mention the warm welcome from the local HS kids who were driving up and down the street in their loud cars with loud stereos honking horns. It didn't take me long to get off the fence about staying over Sunday night and driving back on Memorial Day and making the decision to drive back as soon as we finished on Sunday afternoon.
| Dist | Avs | Mxs | Time |
| 32.43 m | 13.7mph | 35mph | 2:21:28 |
We were up early and after potty stops and policing our camp site, we drove back over to the Chamber of Commerce for the mass start of the first day's ride. As the volunteers setup the staging area, I worked on setting up our train. It drew many a comment and question from curious onlookers. We met on of the volunteers who was an University of Illinois alumn. As the staging time of 8:30am drew closer, more and more teams started showing up (that's what we tandemers are called - teams). Jada, Phoebe, and Ellen all ate their breakfast, and we discovered that the ice I had bought to keep the milk and yogurt cold had leaked out on the floor mat in the car as it melted.
As we worked, the coolness of the morning air changed to warmth telling of the 80+ degrees to come on the day. Final potty stops were made, and we listened to annoucements. Jada had been worried that she wouldn't feel special since we're usually one of the few tandem teams, and now were just one of the many. She didn't have to worry. Several people came and took our picture. We were likely the longest thing there. Even longer than the lone quad that we saw. We all launched at 9am sharp under the helpful watch of the Yakima P.D. It appeared that all the teams were very experienced. there were no pile-ups or crashes. Even though the initial corners and roadway was tight with bikes, I never felt that we were in danger of touching wheels. Ellen managed to throw her chain early on, but we got it back on and into the pack. We had a great time riding along among the hundreds of other teams including standard tandems, a couple triples, recumbent tandems, and 1 quad. We saw all manner of trailers and trailer bikes. We saw many kids along for the ride. We literally clogged the road with tandems for the first 6 miles to the first mini-rest stop where we had muffins and bananas.
We climbed well, and were mostly by ourselves as we moved into the hills surrounding the Yakima valley. We ran into a tandem jam at the turn-off for the longer routes. We stopped along the side of the road along with many other teams and had a quick discussion about which way we should go. We had originally planned to do the medium option of 48miles, but with the heat of the day well upon us already we opted for the short route to keep the girls from burning up too much. On the way down from the hills, Ellen wanted to go faster, and Phoebe didn't want the wind in her face. She was a bit fussy stuck in the trailer, but Ellen does enjoy the riding and pedaling. We had a beautiful view of Mt. Adams (we had originally thought it was Mt. Ranier until we were corrected by the locals) across the orchards and vineyards. We rolled into the lunch stop a little before 11am. They had sub sandwiches, chips, tiny apples, carrots, cookies, watermellon, and Gatorade. We spent about 45 minutes there chatting with some folks from Washington who run an orchard. They were riding a hybrid tandem that had a recombent captain seat with a standard stoker seat.
After the lunch stop, the girls serenaded us with songs about fairies, cows, cookies, whatever happened to cross their minds. Phoebe's favorite was something about "chocolate chip, zip your lip". And at some point, Ellen turned around and found Phoebe asleep just as we were coming through a canyon back into the edge of Yakima proper. Jada was dissappointed that there was no fan fare at the finish, but we met a few other couples under the shade of a tree in the parking lot. Then after I got the car packed back up, we walked across the parking lot to the Dairy Queen for ice cream to cool down. That place must have pulled in some major money from us that day because it seemed that everyone was stopping in there after the ride because it was right there. We overheard someone say, "there sure are a lot of tandem bikes in this town."
Phoebe couldn't wait to get back to camp. She loves camping, and she loves the tent. They both played in the shade of the tree near us while Jada tried to nap, and I tried to write this journal. By the time she woke up, we were ready for dinner by 3:45pm. As an aside, apparently Yakima has a semi-pro football team (I don't know what that means) that plays at the HS football stadium. There was some double-booking that happened, and the players started showing up and taking up parking spaces. They were mad that they couldn't pull all the way up to the locker room door like they were used to. I watched one guy move a dumpster to make a space to park right next to the gate that was closed. It's amazing how lazy these guys were.
For dinner, we ran to Subway and hit the Safeway again to pick up next morning's breakfast. It was time for the sock hop, ice cream shoppe, and vendor fair when we got back. The girls each got to have their first ice cream floats (They chose the orange soda instead of root beer) and rice crispy squares. Before the sock hop, we watched a song and dance troupe made up of students from around the Yakima valley from age 6 up through high school. The put on an hour long show split between the younger kids and the high school kids. Both included multiple costume changes. Ellen could best be described as enthralled. She liked the older kids better because they did jumps and catches. We didn't stay for the sock hop since it was already getting late. I did stop by one of the bike shops to ask about quads, but they didn't have information with them. It was a shop based in Bend, OR called webcyclery.com.
We put the girls to bed, and worked on getting things set out for the morning. The girls fell asleep pretty fast that night. We could hear the football announcements as we lay in the tent trying to fall asleep. I wasn't looking forward to the end of the game anticipating a bunch of juiced up players from either a win or a loss being quite noisy by the time they were leaving which I was guessing would be around 12am. However, a wind storm seemed to also be moving in. It was quite stong and gusty. Ellen and Phoebe slept through it, and it actually was buffetting the tent enough to provide a nice white noise to help me fall asleep.
| Dist | Avs | Mxs | Time |
| 33.90m | 12.0mph | 33.5mph | 2:48:45 |
Wow. It was a windy and loud last night which actually worked out a bit as it deadened the noise from the footballers as they departed. It was so bad for so long that I work up at one point thinking that it would be better to bag the day and just go home than fight the wind and cloudy, cool conditions. However, when I went for my potty run at 4am, the wind was gone and the the sky was clear. Though the wind did return a bit by the time we rolled out, the sky stayed clear. It was warm in the sun as we ate our breakfast at 6:15am, but the air was cool as we rode up the first climb. The course opened at 7am this morning, and departed from the high school, so we could take off when we were ready...which was nice too. Ellen had put her jacket in the car instead of in the trailer as we had suggested because she was warm at that time, and she's 6 and knows more than we do. She was complaining about being cold not long out of town on the long climb into the wind.
The headwind was fierce up the climb, so we were crawling along at ~6mph. Even the steep descent down the other side didn't give us relief. We struggled to keep our speed in double-digits. At the bottom, Jada had tired of the complaining so we stopped to check the trailer to see if Ellen had put her jacket in there after all. Finding that she hadn't, Jada gave Ellen her jacket instead. Since we were stopped anyway, we broke out some snacks. The first rest stop was only port-a-potties, but we stopped to rest and empty our bladders before pushing on again. We started tacking along the back roads to bring us into the main rest stop for the 30 mile route. There were lots of munchies, so we grabbed a little extra in case it took us as long to get back as it took us to get that far. I handed out the girls' cameras so they could take some pictures while we were there and walking around to get their take on things. As we departed, we had a pleasant surprise...the wind...at our backs. It was glorious. We started making great time flying along at ~25mph. Rocketing, really, even though we were slowly climbing. The views of the valley were terrific. It was more or less at this point that Phoebe dozed off. She woke up again just before we plummetted down to the valley floor on a fun, twisting road. We had one more climb to do to get back over the hills to Yakima, and it was steep so we stopped before the bottom to refuel. Then we attacked the climb. We managed to catch one tandem before the top, and then it was down the other side to camp as fast as our little legs would carry us. Everyone was just going flat out into town. It just felt so good to be able to move again after the oppressive ride out to the middle point of the ride.
We didn't bother showering after the ride, we just started packing. I have to say, it is not easy to fold up a tent in the sort of wind we were experiencing. Ellen was a big help, though, in wrestling the tent down. Even Phoebe did some work carrying things to the car. Once we were packed, we hit the road and had lunch at a Taco Bell just before heading out of town. The wind did not let up, and it was quite exhausting fighting that wind with the bike and box on top of the car. It kept up until we reached Hood River, OR. It was so bad, that when we stopped at the Dalles for a potty stop, Jada noticed that my wheel fork was pointing to the rear of the car when I had it pointing forward when we left. I repositioned it back to facing forward before heading off again. Phoebe had fun pointing to Oregon when we were on the other side of the river in Washington, and vice versa. She's so funny that way. She was excited to be in another state camping.
Even though we didn't get a lot of rest, we all had a good time on the ride. Unfortunately, the next 2 years are over July 4th weekend, so we won't be able to go. Ohwell. We'll find a way to do this again some time.