Every year, my brother Doug, myself and a mutual friend named Rudi, take a week-long bike trip. These are usually in the Northwest because I live in the Northwest and my brother wishes he lived in the Northwest. I don't know this for a fact, but I do know that in the summer when it is 100+ in Southern California, Doug wishes he was in Seattle where it is 75.

For this year's trip, we decided to do the bitterroot 300k… sort of. The reason we only sort of did the bitterroot 300, is that the bitterroot 300 only takes three days to complete, and we wanted something longer. Also, Doug enjoys seeing how many rail-to-trail bike trails he can string together. So, we started in Cheney Washington and added most of the Centennial Trail and some roads to come up with a six day ride. It looked more or less like the map on the next page.

Doug's primary goal on this trip was to take us on as many bad gravel roads as possible. He had the advantage that he had done this trip once before with his wife, so had a pretty good idea how to find bad gravel roads. The fact that his wife declined to do the trip again with us should have tipped me off that we were in for a rough ride.

My primary goal on this trip was to see a live moose, something that I had never seen before and was not completely convinced existed. Doug assured me we would see a moose.