Day 4: Addendum - an episode with Halt!

This is AK writing. As we were going to sleep last night we realized that we had forgotten to include one of the most hilarious (sort of) episodes of the trip to date. As we were pedaling along somewhat late in the day (a few miles away from our destination), a giant (to me, but Jeff says he was medium sized) brown dog came tearing out of his yard right for us. My legs were weary and I knew I couldn't out run this one. Jeff is usually in the front so he has learned that the dogs will typically go away if you shout at them. He had told me this, but it was my first time in front with a dog kicking up dirt behind him as he ran so I was quite shaken. I grabbed my Halt! dog spray and pressed the button. There were two problems with this, 1) I had never sprayed the stuff before, and 2) Jeff was pedaling like mad not too far behind me. Instead of spraying a stream, the spray was more of a cloud (I obviously didn't push it hard enough). I heard commotion behind me and later got a very gentle reprimand from Jeffrey about NOT using the Halt until it was crucial to do so. He said he had to swerve hard to get out of the way of the Halt cloud while he was trying to get away from the dog at the same time. And to think people wanted us to bring a real weapon on this trip!

As no one was harmed, the incident goes down as a humorous one. Had the cloud actually hit Jeff, this would be a much different story and I would owe him a thousand more apologies (without laughing) than I have alreay offered.

Just to make a point, he did take my holster of Halt and spray it at our next pull-off site. Stream it did, smoke cloud it did not. I've learned my lesson on this one!