No, not the shoes and clothing store, but Washington state logging country. This morning’s ride from Centralia took us through vast timber plantations – mainly poplar and giant pines. We’d been advised in advance to be careful of the large logging trucks that would be on the road, but we were pretty lucky as all the loaded wagons seemed to be heading in the other direction to ours. The few trucks that did pass us were empty and gave us a very wide berth and a friendly honk of the horn. The full trucks were enormous – almost double the length of a standard UK lorry with vast tree trunks stacked up on them.when empty the timber trucks did a very clever trick of collapsing down with the back part of the truck sitting on the front.

Cycling through the USA is a fantastic way to see real America. The pace we’re travelling at means that we can see stuff that we’d probably miss if we were going by car. At one part of our trip today it really felt as though we’d been transported into the set of the Walton’s. There were traditional timber houses with porches, people driving around in old Chrysler and Ford pick-up trucks from the 50s and a real feeling of old-town America. If we’d been travelling by car, we would probably have zipped down the Interstate 5 and missed all that. Today was the day we also left Washington state and entered Oregon. So in true Walton’s style it’s goodnight Seattle, goodnight Centralia and goodnight to route signs with George Washington’s profile on. So, hello to Oregon, Portland and route 101 down the Pacific coast and onto California, but that’s for another blog entry…