When we woke up today, one of the ladies we were camping with made us breakfast.  It was sooo delicious: warm oatmeal with walnuts, raisins, a little sugar, and milk all in the bowl.  I've never had anything like it; I wish i could have it every morning.  Mmm, mmm.

We also started a taking some serious Ibuprofen.  Claudia's late husband used to be a surgeon, and so she knows all about medicine, and she told us that whenever we start a big trip like we were, we should take 4 Ibuprofen each every 4 hours for the first 3 days.  That sounded like a LOT of medicine, but she assured us that it would help with muscle soreness and also help our circulation so our butts wouldn't be too sore. We decided to compromise, and instead of taking 4 Ibuprofen every 4 hours, we only took it with meals.

My gears had started skipping again before we got to the campsite.  So, even though we'd had them looked at yesterday by Ian at the Astoria Bicycle Repair store, Nathan strung my bike up and tried to fix them again.

After he fixed up my gears, we were off.  We rode many, many more hills today.  It was really hard, but we pushed on.  And then rode up the mother of all hills - a three mile uphill.  THREE MILES UPHILL.  It felt close to torture.  We realized that this hill is the one the other biker had talked yesterday about when he said we had a big uphill coming.  This is also where I had my breakdown.  :-/

The 3-mile uphill was all twisty so you couldn't see very far ahead.  Nathan was leading, and he quickly got pretty far ahead because his leg muscles are stronger than mine. I couldn't see the top of the hill so I didn't know how much more uphill pedaling I had to do, but my bike computer said that i had been going uphill for nearly 1.5 miles. I was exhausted and needed a break, but because it was a busy, twisty road, and I couldn't see Nathan, I didn't want to stop because I didn't want him to think something bad had happened to me..so I just kept going.  I finally rounded a corner and saw him wwaayy far ahead of me.  I was so thankful to see him, and I was so tired, and then I began to get a bad attitude because I was upset that he hadn't waited for me sooner, and my emotions just started snowballing. I finally made it to where he was, and as soon as I stopped my bike, my tiredness and my emotions all caught up with me and I just started sobbing.  Poor Nathan - he has to ride all the way across the country with me!  I wasn't really mad at him - I was just emotional, but we did decided that I should lead on the uphills so that we wouldn't get so far separated again.  So I lead the last part of the 3 mile uphill, and I didn't cry anymore.  :-)

We arrived at our ending point of the day, Rainier, OR, around 5:30pm.  Rainier, OR is on the river, and it is beautiful.  Our first sight of it was when we came down this big hill and around a bend, and then all of the sudden, the land and river and the mountains of Rainier and beyond stretched out in front of us.  The picture below doesn't really do it justice, but it was breathtaking.

There are no campgrounds in Rainier, so we went to the library, and I called every church I could find in the yellow pages, but no one answered.  We found a church that had Wednesday night services that was pretty close by, so we decided to bike there and ask for a place to stay.  When I met the pastor, he was very nice, but I felt a little weird because I was wearing spandex and I smelled pretty bad.  He listened to our story, said we weren't the first bikers that had asked for shelter at the church, and said that we could stay, but we had to stay outside.  We spend the night under their covered entryway.  It felt kind-of cool to know that other bikers had asked him to stay at the church too - it felt like we were a part of a long-distance biker group or something.

The pastor gave us his card too.  He said it was "in case the police come around and wonder who you are. You know we got a van broken into a little while back.  Oh, but nothing should happen tonight - it's really not that dangerous to stay here!"  So we slept with one eye open.  :-/