9/5: along the sea

Today we headed out along 101, looking to the shore. There were still some hills, but tolerable.

[1 year anniversary note:
At one point, coming off the highway onto a local road, we were coming down a really steep grade with some winding curves. Suddenly, we came to an intersection. The stop sign had been hidden by some trees, though I could tell there was a 4-way before I saw it.
Gabe and I jammed on our brakes. Gabe was leading and stopped a few feet into the intersection, where a truck was stopped, waiting to go the other way.
Matt was still coming around the last bend and not quite straight up. When he got on his brakes, the tires locked up on the wet asphalt. I heard him falling and sliding as I was still slowing down. Gabe and I ditched our bikes at the intersection and ran back up (as fast as we could on bike shoes in the wet). Matt didn't look seriously hurt, which was good. We wheeled the bike over to the side of the road at the intersection and checked things out. That was what were were doing here.
Matt had a lime sized patch of skin missing under his ass cheek and a few decent scrapes on his palm (shredding his glove), but that was it -- no head smacking the ground, no joints banging hard on the road. His Ortlieb panniers held the bike off the ground (and him) and didn't have much damage. He ducked into a local bar/lodge to dress the skin with his first aid kit. I checked out his bike. The rear inner tube was hissing, and the fenders were misadjusted. But the wheels were fine, as were the handlebars. It took maybe 45min to get the bike in order and Matt bandaged up. At the time, I was super concerned about our schedule. It seems irrational in retrospect.

Matt was ok to go, so we proceeded. It was no cakewalk to ride with those scrapes, but that fall could have been a lot worse. I know at the time I was thinking about what other incidents lay in store for us. Fortunately, other than Gabe toppling over at a few stop signs, this was it.]

Some of the towns were very cheesy and touristy, which is starker when no one is up:

Others, at least from a distance, could have been right out of Twin Peaks:

There were some cool vistas onto the sea, including this ancient magma formation:

Look at the people for scale. Another smaller outcropping had the classic scene of lone pine on the rock:

This is Matt and me doing the Lewis and Clark pose we see on all the trail signs:

The string of towns we went through had such linguistically diverse names: Manzanita, Nehalem, Garibaldi, Tillamook. Two of those are names for the same Chinook tribe, of now less than 50 people according to the 1990 census. 

We are holed up in a hotel, 50mi advance. But another night with hot showers secured. We rode into Tillamook with the rain right behind us. The heavy drops came down right as we got to the lobby. I guess tonight will be a little more conventional. 

We ran into another trio on bike tour. Their route was to about the halfway point of our trip. 

Cycling has been hard on our bodies. We are being careful to monitor pains and adjust accordingly. There's definitely ways to pedal that can take too much of a toll [on day 2, I got a pain in my left knee that came up if I pedaled really hard, which was sometimes unavoidable while climbing]. We have to keep marching and seeing what comes. For the moment, clean sheets help a lot.

9/5 pics: https://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/BikeTour95?authkey=Gv1sRgCM3xmJC5yZ_vDw