Seattle to Burns Lake: 733 miles. 55 degrees F, 2300ft elevation. (View in Google Maps)

So, on the night before departure, I was completely packed by 7pm. That made for a relaxing evening, but should have been my first sign of problems.

I was ready to leave at 7am. Got completely suited, ready to go, fire up the music. Nothing. Spend time tracing things down, Tamara grabs some extra headphones, realize it is the MP3 player. It is running, thinks it is playing the music, but it isn't. So I unsuit, go in and transfer my 4gb of MP3s in a slightly different bitrate. That works, but takes a LONG time to transfer. By the time I'm done it will have taken 2 hours. I made the best of it by burning the music to a bunch of CDs and a DVD. That way I can redo the transfer on the road or at least buy a MP3 cd player and use the CDs.

Traffic out of Seattle wasn't at all bad, though not long before the border I discover the drinking tube on my hydration pack has come out of the bladder. That means 2 liters of Gatorade have been dripping out onto the lower side of the bike. Construction detour, then stopped for some gasket compound at NAPA in Sumas.

Border crossing wait was 25 mins (what else is new?), then I blasted on to Hope (nasty traffic that whole leg). Stretch north from Hope was a little clogged, but not bad.

I always forget what this area of BC looks like. The east stretch from Sumas to Hope wanders through a valley with steep sides, kind of like North Cascades Highway, but with a flatter, greener valley. From Hope it quickly turns to central Washington terrain, but with a little more variety, water, and trees. I'm intruigued by the geology of this section (and everywhere, actually). It's cool to look at terrain and have a basic grasp of what caused it.

In my mind, the terrain is the same from Hope to Prince George. This isn't really true, it gets progressively greener, higher in elevation, and eventually you are on this plateau that is about 2500 feet up. Prince George is very green, and it stays that way as you turn west and start heading towards Hyder.

Somewhere through here (right before the town with the steep descent and 270 degree highway turn, I'll look it up later), I was following a flatbed semi truck. I was waiting to pass- and an incredibly aggressive jacked-up 4x4 truck was behind me. I saw a piece of wood on this semi move, and backed off a long ways. I watched the wood tilt and seesaw off the side of the flatbed for a few seconds, then flip off the right side of the semi and go sliding across the highway. I scrubbed and then swerved, but it wasn't a panic move- the block slid into the oncoming lanes fairly quickly. This block was a 4"x8" by about 4 feet- a beam, really.

Also got lasered by the mounties, I had warning but that same aggressive truck nearly got dinged for a large handful over the limit. Probably would have but there was a lot of traffic and they probably didn't get a good lock on him.

Traffic in Prince George was heavy, then I had to contend with recreational boat traffic headed towards the lakes. Things died down fairly quickly. As I'd hoped, I got here to Burns Lake before sunset- enough time to make camp and eat before it got dark.

Temperature hovered between 65 and 75 until the last little while. Quite comfortable.