Gear sorting, bus rides and catching up with friends, old and new...

Having had a good, long, much needed nights sleep, I was up at 0830 feeling a heck of a lot fresher than the night before.

Tom was at work already, so I busied myself with sorting through my gear and getting the various items ready for boxing up for the flight to Anchorage.
Tom is almost ready for boxing up his gear too, with the faithful ping-pong table being the gear sorting platform as usual..!




My bike box had been opened, as expected, by the TSA, but I didn't realize my pack had been opened up also... And it appeared that everything had been thoroughly poked through and emptied out... Things were all back there, but stuffed in any which way. Unfortunately, they'd also opened up my handle-bar bag to search through that. The bag, when being closed, requires it to be held closed first before being zipped shut... They hadn't done that.




They'd yanked on the zip to close it, and in the prices snapped the zip right off... Dammit! So now I need to shell out for a new bag.




It took me a moment to figure out why they'd gone through the entire pack so thoroughly, even though everything usually goes though the x-ray... I'd packed a zip-lock bag of glucosamine joint-supplement pills, so I reckon that must have shown up and caused the initial alarm bells...




Around 1030, I made my way to catch the bus into town, where I met Tom, his friend and colleague Elaine, and we all caught up with the one and only Roadwarrior Gordy for a great lunch at Kieran's, in downtown Minneapolis.








After that, I checked out cellphone plans at AT&T for a while before meeting Tom again for a good yarn, snacks, and few drinks at Dan Kelly's with a whole bunch of Toms work colleagues.








It was a great afternoon, with a great turnout. It was a lot of fun to meet Toms friends, share stories and see how valued Tom is, and strangely, how concerned everyone was about him surviving this adventure..! Haha.
So now it's time to rest up, update this journal and get ready for a big day tomorrow... We'll be hitting my most favorite store in the whole wide world... REI..! YEAH!!
Also, it'll be the World Premiere of Roadwarriors 5: The Pacific Crest Trail at Jim & Diane's place, so we're looking forward to that too.
For now, this is RWK signing off... (But if you're really lucky, maybe RWT will make the odd post at some stage too..!)
Seeya.
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Location:2nd St NE,Columbia Heights,United States