Last Day on the Bikes

Friday September 23
Distance travelled: 124.9 km
Maximum speed: 144 kph

Total distance travelled: 4,536 km.

Once again, my Verizon $5 phone fails to wake us on the alarm setting, so we sleep till 9. Tom says he can't understand why anybody would want to get up early while on holidays.  Despite that, it is his idea to set the alarm for this morning so we can get a good, early start. I think he is anxious to be home. Despite the fun holiday, it has been two weeks for him away from everybody important in his life; unlike everybody else on the trip, we have all had some connection for at least part of the time.

We go to the hotel restaurant for breakfast and I order fruit, oatmeal and toast. They charge $3 for the oatmeal and there is enough to feed a small African nation and $2 for toast and there is one piece. But it is cut into two, so it is like there is two pieces.

We are only an hour and a quarter to Idaho Falls. We go straight to the storage compound and Les's bike is beside the truck on its centre stand. We load all three bikes, get Les's bags from the office and make a souvenir stop at Wal-Mart. I bought a beard trimmer. 

Bikes loaded for home.

The "falls" of Idaho Falls.

We drive to Grand Falls, Montana, about 500 km. Our first choice is the Hampton Inn and they only have smoking rooms. They didn't indicate if a smoking jacket came with the room.  We go to the Best Western and it is a total party place. There is a casino and the place is jammed with partiers. Either way, the hotel is full, too. We decide to try the Hilton and on the way there, we see the Crystal Inn and it looks o.k. so we go in and they have room, so we check in.

We are chilling in the room, drinking "pops" and we realize we have uninvited guests as a largish bedbug is crawling on Tom's bed and scoots under the covers. Then he spots a cute little baby bedbug. I happened to have some electrical tape in the room so I stick it to the bedbugs and we march them down to the front desk, where the front desk clerk says "OMG". She obviously recognizes exactly what they are and offers to move us to a different part of the hotel or refund us.  We don't really have a plan; we are not freaked out because we know that they are common however, it is hard to get rid of them if they get into your house so we opt to leave the hotel rather than change rooms.  If they are in one room, they will be in all of them; the likelihood is that they have been in rooms where we have stayed already but we haven't seen them so "out of sight, out of mind". If we know with certainty that they are there, we figure we are better off in a place where there is a chance that they have not been imbeded. No pun intended.

At 11:45 p.m., we check into the Hilton, which had been our destination. It is $6 cheaper, nicer rooms and nicer hotel in general. The beds are very nice, with adjusting pressure settings and lambskin mattress covers. We know this because we rip the beds apart before we sit on them or get too settled. Generally, it looks good.

We go back to drinking the beer we had started and continue on with the movie, not quite where we left off.