Day 3: A long hard ride

Day 3 Journal:

I woke up in LaGrande early and set forth on my journey. I backtracked a bit and headed north through Walla Walla Washington. The ride was pretty and quiet… I wore my riding suit finally, and it kept me super warm. I also noticed that it took some of the stress off my butt as I rode. I would like to wear it more often… but it gets warm pretty quickly out in the world in the summer. I covered a lot of ground, quickly and ended up in Spokane at 11am. I thought about looking up my uncle, but changed my mind… also thought about visiting a friend, but I realized I just don’t care. Some people are of value to my life, old friends and acquaintances are almost useless. So I continued on… I asked God to help me have the fortitude to be the kind of man that I want to be… and powered through.

I stopped at Lake Coeur D’Alene where I took a girl long ago and her dad to dinner the night I asked her to marry me back in 2001. 11 years later I stood in the spot where I was too nervous to ask… when later I would ask her on her fathers front porch. I stood there for a long time staring out at the water wondering why I even asked her. I came to a few realizations here… the first is, she and I had been having a pretty good relationship up to that point… a lot of fun and excitement traveling around. But I wasn’t ready to get married. The pressure I got from her, her family, the church and my family is what made me ask… not feelings of love.

I also thought about the night I asked her. She got in a fight with her step mom and we ended up leaving in the middle of the night. Every day after that got progressively worse. Eventually she and I stopped being intimate… she would always say that she felt guilty since we weren’t married. I really ended up miserable in that relationship… and ended up subconsciously blaming it on marriage. Fast forward to my marriage and I realize that I was projecting a quality woman on her… and after we got married the fantasy slowly gave way to reality. She was not worthy of me, not worthy of my love… She was a parasite who attached herself to me to take care of her… whether or not she thought she loved me, or I thought I loved her; she was with me so I would pay the bills, and I was with her so I could play the hero. Ultimately our marriage failed… but honestly, it was a failure from the start; Another sub-conscious reason to hate marriage. These two relationships are what gave me a bad idea of what marriage really is… and frankly, my fear of it driving my last relationship apart (marriage, that is) was grounded in a subconscious premise that was false… marriage had nothing to do with my failures, it was the premise I set when I decided to be with those girls… the hero trying to save the wretch. Fuck… that is messed up. Never again.

After leaving Coeur D’Alene, I powered through on worn tires to Missoula. I drove into town through two Thunderstorms and in pain; I tracked down the guy who was to be my host (from ADVRIDER). He worked in a motorcycle repair shop where I met him and I was promised that I would get a tire changed in the morning. We drove back to where he lived, which wasn’t his house, exactly. He lived in a camper parked on the street. The house belonged to a nice woman, and she housed 4 other people there. The guy and I went to Flathead Brewery where we met some of his friend and had a fun time talking about all manner of adventures and topics. That night I slept behind the house on a couch under an unfinished shed and watched another thunderstorm roll on through. I actually enjoyed the accommodations, sleeping outside, listening to the town around me and the thunder… I thought of the girl I left behind as I drifted off to sleep.

This is where I slept

This is the lightning storm