I’ve always said RVers have to be flexible. We planned to leave here tomorrow and spend one night at the Northern Quest Casino in Airway Heights outside of Spokane. Then we would head west to Twisp for a night on the Methow River before continuing west to Mount Vernon, WA.

We will leave tomorrow and go to Northern Quest Casino so we can join our friends Dick and Roxy Zarowny for dinner. But we won’t be going to Twisp. The North Cascades Highway (SR20) is closed west of Winthrop, WA due to forest fires. There isn’t any way to detour around the closure, so we can’t cross the mountains on the North Cascades Highway. We had reservations at Riverbend RV Park which we cancelled. They don’t usually refund cancellations but under these circumstances they refunded our payment.

We’ll be crossing the Cascade Mountains on US2 over Stevens Pass instead. We’ll spend Sunday night somewhere between Wenatchee and Leavenworth before climbing over the pass.

We played pickleball Monday morning at Memorial Park. Tuesday we played pickleball again and then had rainshowers in the afternoon. Wednesday we drove up to Priest River to join Cindy and Jim Birditt for lunch at Mi Pueblo – a Mexican restaurant in town. We lingered for about an hour and half catching up. Jim was concerned about a 30-acre wild fire burning about three miles north of his place.Thursday we were back at Memorial Park for more pickleball.

Donna had a mysterious problem with the rear tire on her bike. When we arrived here in Coeur d’Alene, her tire had gone flat. Last week we stopped at a bike shop in town but they were out of patch kits. The gal at the shop gave me an old inner tube and said I could cut it to make a patch and use super glue. I found a hole in the Donna’s inner tube – it looked like she must have picked up a goathead sticker.

I roughed up her inner tube and the makeshift patch with sandpaper and fixed the flat tire – or so I thought. The next day her tire was flat again. I pulled the tube, which I had put Slime in – it’s supposed to fill any holes in the tube. I found another hole in the tube with slime oozing out of it about two inches from the original hole. This was puzzling – I had checked the tire carefully the first time looking for anything that could cause a puncture and didn’t find anything. The tire held air fine after I patched it and pumped it up. The bike hadn’t been ridden at all. So, how did it have another puncture?

I made another patch and put it back together. Again it pumped up fine and held pressure. The next day the tire was a little soft – there was a very slow leak. I pumped the tire and Donna went for a ride Sunday morning. A little over half an hour later, Donna phoned me to tell me she her tire had gone flat. I drove down in the truck and picked her up at the Hampton Inn in Coeur d’Alene.

I picked up a new inner tube on Tuesday and this morning I installed it. Again, I looked closely at the tire and didn’t find anything to cause a puncture. Donna rode for over an hour this morning with no issues.

The daily temperatures were warm all week with highs in the low 90s. Today the temperature is expected to reach 100 degrees and the forecast calls for a few degrees hotter tomorrow. Western Washington will be cooler – we can expect the daily high to be around 80 degrees there.

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