Pai -> The Royal Project (Mae Ya Noi) Today was the day that was hardest on paper. There were no places to stay (without camping) between Pai and Ban Pa Pae, which, depending on the way we did it, would’ve been 40-ish miles with 7000-10000’ of climbing. Fortunately we were able to get in contact with someone at The Royal Project (thanks to Margaret A) and found out they also had rooms available. There is a lot of climbing to get up here, mostly concentrated at the end. Our plan in the morning was to go back to Barbari Bakery to get breakfast and take food to go for lunch and dinner up at the Royal Project. Disaster! They are closed on Tuesdays. Emily is always pretty upbeat - we have a running joke about how she’s always, “Grass half full”, but she was “devastated”. We quickly found another bakery that was the opposite way from the way we came. I thought maybe it’ll be even better. Narrator - it was. Before we left, Natalie Telis wanted to tell me she missed me by having a garbage truck come by collecting garbage. 🤣 On the way to the other bakery we stopped at a food stall and picked up some delicious bao and samosas. The other bakery was in this super cute wooded setting with a smoothie shop, and a couple other food stalls too. The pastries were good but not quite as good but the mango smoothie and the fried chicken over rice from one of the other stalls was great. After sampling all the foods, we decided the samosas were the best to take to go. Riding out of town, the roads were smooth, quiet and nice. That didn’t last long before we turned off onto our first, steep, road climb. At the top of the first peak we ran into Greg from Seattle was also doing the route and headed to The Royal Project. Once we got onto the singletrack, it was really nice, I thought maybe I’d been all wrong about today’s route. It was pretty and fairly flat. Then we got to our first river crossing which was fine but soon it was taking us less time to get to the next river crossing than it was taking to change in and out of our shoes. Carrying the bike across was tiring too. We had just relubed the chains and didn’t want grouchy drivetrains right away. For the final river crossing indicated on the map, I decided to leave my water crossing shoes on even though they’re really slippery on the pedals. When we got there, we realized there was a bridge. I think Emily was turning to tell me when she had a slow speed crash where she couldn’t unclip like she did in China. She was lucky she wasn’t on the bridge when that happened and fell into the water. She was also lucky because she almost fell on some lumber left behind for the bridge. After we got through all the river crossings came the steep, muddy, climbing. The peanut butter mud was getting stuck in our cleats and making it hard to ride, even hard to hike, which we had to do a lot of. On one of the muddy steep sections, Emily was spinning her wheels trying to stay upright and trying to move forward but not really going anywhere. It was pretty funny and she managed to save it. I was so happy once we reached the top (where the Royal Project is located). When we got there we met Thomas who is also doing the route too. We were happy to find that there are rooms for us and even better they’re making dinner for us! Groups of nurses and social workers from various surrounding villages were having sort of a retreat there and also going around giving vaccinations. So I guess we were even more lucky they had a room for us.