| Sunday in Seattle | |
Tuesday, 24 June 2008 |
A few Sundays ago an adventure was had.....smuggling.
Timmie and Quavid Dick headed down to America and into Seattle on Thursday to get a few touristy days in with some lassies they had met up in Whistler. Jack and I followed down on Sunday, picked up the new Iron Horses and had a days riding.
I overslept my alarm and Jack woke me at 4am, the race was on to catch the bus at half-past. It was raining, dark and shitty as I got a backy down the road to the bus station, but we managed to get there with 5 mins to spare. Jack also managed to forget his helmet. Nice one. To be honest though, he did a good job of pretending to be fit, as he made it back up the hill, and back down with the helmet in no time.
So on to Vancouver now, managed to get some sleep then transferred onto a bus to Seattle. The boarder. Now that was an experience. The young lady seated infront of us told us to stop messing arround or they wont let us through......ok, so its not like a Euro border....
It was time to be 'interrogated' at the border. Jack was getting a bit pissed off (he is a bit angry sometimes!), and we had a 'heated' discussion about the difference between moto-x and downhill with the fat arrogent american wanker who was stupidly confused about our full face helmets.
He thought we were riding over the border, so we told him the bikes were on a bus, he told us we were lying because you can't put motobikes on a bus. Then he asked us where we were going riding, we didnt know, so he told us we were going to the hunter valley. Because that is the only place to ride moto-x near Seattle. 'No mate, its mountainbiking', 'then why have you got moto-x helmets', 'they are similar', 'no there not, my son rides moto-x and its different to mountainbiking', 'no err....yea sorry we are going moto-xing. 'ok lads, telling the truth now, go and pay over there'. 'Pay?....'. 'Yea, 6 bucks'.
So we are at the next counter now and the (fat) lady is demanding, very rudely, for 6 bucks American. We replyed with a simple 'We only have Canadian',and managed to get into another confusing discussion, 'American only',she barked, 'but we only have Canadian', 'American or credit card', (we are getting somewhere here), 'credit card then please', 'the machine has broken, American or nothing', 'cool, nothing then'. The last comment wasnt really appreciated, and it took us another good 5mins to get some sense out of her, and get directions to duty free to change some $.
I sat with the bags (we had to get everything off the bus) while Jack ran accross the car park to get the doller. I got my bag sniffed out by the sniffer dog, it turned out to be a muffin i stole, and then forgot about, from the holstel i stayed in when i arrived in Canada a month before.....nice.
On the way back from the duty free jack was running accross the car park. A border control guy lost control and pulled his gun on him! Apparently you cant run arround the border, apparently it is ok to point a gun at somone for running. Weird.
Right, this is turning out really long, so, fast forward to Seattle, well Bellingham actually. The purpose for this trip was to pick up the new Iron Horses, and the guys at the shop, fluid ride, said they would take us up int hills for a spot of riding, to get the bikes dirty for the smuggling accross the border on the way home.
We headed of in a convoy of 3 pick-ups, up into the hills. We stopped on the way to buy a 1L can of monster energy (yes 1litre) but were soon on fireroads in some big steep sided forest. We followed the fireroad for quite a few miles then pulled over to fill 1 pickup for the uplift. 11 bikes and 11 people in one truck, BIG truck. V10 (not the bike, think V8, not the pedals, the engine, but bigger) actually.
So we headed up high and rode our first trail on the new bikes. A really cool, fast flowing trail with not much in the way of tech sections, but some awsome turns, flat turns, burms and a few burms with little kickers coming out of them. Fun 4 mins was had by all.
After 2 runs we headed off into a different zone. We went up and up and up heading through massive old growth forest, and some clearcut logged areas right up into the mist. 
When we couldn't see our hands infront of our faces, and our faces were numb from being sat in the open bed of a truck for 20mins we stoped and padded up.
To get into this trail we had to climb over several fallen trees and then walk allond one that was spaning a big gully.Then we came across the trail. Steep. Wet. Loamy. Rooty. Steep. Misty.
The track was a good 20mins long and probably the best i have ever ridden. The top was steep, wet and rooty with fantastic loamy loose soil, much like biodegrading heather (not the girl down the road that went missing and is probably rotting on the moors somwhere).You know that springy fun soil you get when a track hasnt been over ridden? well it was like that. Eventually it opend up and went into faster flowing corners with flowing (wide) northshore and then going into a backwoods, and actually fun, a-line with big gap jumps.
We did 2 or 3 runs of this trail and it was deffinatly the best 40/60 mins of my riding life.
Eventually we had to pull ourselfs away from the mud and headed to get some food.There were about 7 locals plus us tourists so we had to wait a while to get seated in this cool log cabin pizza place. Jack got agro again as he wasnt allowed near the bar as he is 19.ha.
Halfway through the meal some clever clogs rememberd the road closed from sqarmish to whistler at 1am. Bugger. Pizzas scoffed, were off.
We did a Colin MCrae impression up to the boarder where we got stuck in traffic for the full length of disorder 8, which we watched on the lap top. Eventually we got to the crossing and lyed through our rotten yorkshire teeth and smuggeled $19,000 worth of bikes through the boarder. We did however answer one question truthfully-we didnt have any weapons.
We then pinned it up up to Squampton where we missed the road closing by 10mins, even though it closed an hour later than we thaught. We sat there for 2hours, and eventually got home at 4ish.
One of the best days ever. 24hours of fun. The next day, my first day at a new job, started at 7am and wasnt the best day ever.
Oh and P.S the Iron Horses are amazing!!!
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