9/7: rest day

We elected to stay in the hotel another night as our official rest day. No biking at all today.

We plotted out the remainder of our trip. If we time everything according to schedule, we'll arrive in San Fran 9/20 early afternoon or late lunch. Our next and only other rest day will be on 9/14 or 9/15. So we either go 7 days/5 days or 6/6. The middle section is the harder one. The last three days into San Fran should be easy. So at this point, we are still very on schedule. 

Here's us at Lincoln City beach. 

A length of kelp stretched out between Gabe and Matt:

I tried cracking one like a whip unsuccessfully. Gabe has the video:

http://instagram.com/p/d-M7UtxPuP/

This beach has tiny streams dumping freshwater through the sand to the sea:

After an afternoon of watching tennis and In Time, we headed out to the casino, which might as well have been Mos Eisley:

An adequate seafood buffet later, we ducked out, skipping out on any gambling. 

some Strava data

I'm uploading these from the hotel computer. I missed a couple days from not having enough juice.
Strava limits a bike weight to 50lbs, even though we're probably closer to 70. I've too much pride to pump up my weight to compensate. So the reported estimated power figures you see here are probably low. The pathing is pretty accurate, but I wouldn't quite trust speed or distance covered.
 
http://www.strava.com/activities/80609394
 
You can see the others on my feed:
http://www.strava.com/athletes/1141234

I'm not sure when next I'll get to upload. I'll do my best to capture all the days.

9/6: when it rains

Today, we saw shadows on the ground for maybe 5 min. The rest of the time it was overcast or raining. Doesn't make for great pictures:

We went along the coast and into the forest a bit. Not a very hard day, but the drizzle was not fun. It doesn't show up as precipitation on radar! Nor did the weatherwoman feel the need to call it a wet day. The stuff that comes down just doesn't rate as rain, I suppose. It just has the effect of preventing anything you have airing out on your bike from drying. 

Put in 55mi still. We had lunch in a beach town that had maybe expat Hawaiians? I was pretty different burritos. I had a baja burrito and smoked salmon tacos. 

The baja burrito was dynamite.

When we pulled up, there was sand everywhere, from the wind and cars driving onto and off beach access. I saw some woman driving an enormous bro-truck. Matt and Gabe talked to some older man on vacation who was very jealous of our cares-in-the-wind trip. I think he was trying to goad his son into trying something like it?

Under light rain, we pulled into Lincoln City and plopped into another hotel. Free wash and dry for clothes. Maybe not worth the ~$100 differential on a campsite. The rain stopped right away, so we walked out to get food. There was this weird strip mall spot for rent:

We decided to eat at a kitschy 60s burger and shake joint. 

This is me trying to eat a 1lb burger in 15 min:

I did not get even close. I did exactly half in 11min and knew that would be that. I did have a few fries after that. 

9/6 pics: https://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/BikeTour96?authkey=Gv1sRgCJK-u4XjrKaU9AE

A single kitten

At some gas station, I heard mewing from across the street at a truck stop. A kitten of no more than 9 months was under a truck begging loudly for food, chasing the feet of passersby and mewing in a cartoonish, gravelly voice. I think that truck driver obliged, but I was struck by how circumscribed that cat's life was. I felt very bad for that single life, and immediately realized how pitifully insignificant that one kitten's circumstance was against all the deprivation across the world. 

It made me appreciate how precious each individual's existence is, and how we have to be glad for every little bit of fortune that comes our way. 

A ways down the road was a vet's. I wonder if I ought to have scooped the kitten up somehow and delivered it to the vet. Maybe the notion of karma is to remind us to do good when we can. 

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

Bike statuses

Matt's Trek:

Squeaking chain: greased

Tire pressure low: pumped

Front fender rubbing: position tweaked (while we were accosted by Mormon missionaries)

Gabe's Randonee:

Seat post slipped: raised and torqued

Meng's Aurora Elite:

Creaking crank: torqued

Squealing front disk: not sure yet

I can tell my rear shifter cable is slacking up. Need to adjust soon. 

The bikes are holding up well so far. We haven't asked anything crazy of them yet.

Misc pics

Cat at the ferry. Orange/black mix. 

This is the typical touring bike pose.

The beach area looked like this.

Gotta sample the local chips. 

Someone's personal vehicle. How Portlandian. 

A view from the office these days. I can see myself reflected in Gabe's fender. Yes, this is riding very close. 

Not sure if I uploaded this one. From us riding through Centralia and getting lost. What a cool windmill. 

The town felt achingly small in a way that Astoria (a town of less than 10k) doesn't.

9/4: into Oregon

Almost 70mi today. At least 10 out of our way, though. 

We awoke to sunrise over the salmon channel. Gabe was right -- every different angle of the sun makes a different beautiful scene. 

Biked a bit through some back country full of cows and rusty farm equipment to get to another ferry, this one much smaller:

Picture the three of us clattering our bikes down this gangplank, nervous like foals going down that metal walkway.

This would be the start of a long time along the Lewis and Clark trail. We ground upwards a couple hours to get to this vista in Oregon:

The route was not very scenic, but lots of blackberries on the roadside:

Matt and Gabe would be popping these at any opportunity, but I don't think I had a single wild blackberry the whole trip. Hadn't they heard of Agent Orange?

After a ton of climbs and dips, we got to Astoria, which was extremely quaint and charming:

Gabe reposed in front of a legitimate trading store. Too quaint for me to check out.

The vibe is incredibly west coast. Even in town, we would just lean our bikes outside a shop and go in to order. For sure it was a false sense of security, but I guess we lucked out and never had any problems.

 Got lunch at the well-reviewed Bowpicker's, a converted fishing ship that sold fish and chips:

They don't use ordinary whitefish or cod. Not sure what it was, but it was firm and good. They had a decal from the route maps we're using!:

Those posted hours are very typically west coast, IMO.

As we ate, a few other bike tourist parties coasted by. We gave them very firm nods, as though we'd been doing this all our lives.

After lunch, we continued along the path of the trail toward the sea. We could have gone on 101 for most of it, but this way was more scenic. Extremely hard climbing, but beautiful. 

Eventually, we got back onto 101, at which point I started singing the OC theme song. We wanted to camp on the beach and got lost trying to find the campground. Seems like beachfront property development might have taken camping out at that site. Developers clearly couldn't keep out the local fauna, though:

We cautiously biked through this herd of elk to the beach, and then back when it didn't have camping. I haven't been this close to large wild animals in the open before. At one point, an elk was maybe 20 feet from us. The whole time we crept by it, I thought, "we're so screwed in one of these charges us. What about the whole herd?"

So we doubled back to an RV camp. 

Cons:

- no view

- expensive

Pros:

- hot showers

- laundry

- camp kitty cat

- wifi

The hellish climbs and fast descents made me think of something -- ups and downs can follow one another in life. It's the ups that are fun in life, though. If you can live out the hard parts, there just might be a reward just around the bend. 

9/4 pics: https://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/BikeTour94?authkey=Gv1sRgCIXotIb7iu7YZw

9/4 video: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6tGRkDszv0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sspL4FwKPCI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMPRl1AJCrE

I owe Carrie

The following items:

- waterproof matches

- regular matches

- sleeping pad

- mylar blanket

I'm sure there's more to come, but having her cooking supplies to borrow has been a huge boon. 

9/3

[written on the anniversary of the trip:
I'm reviewing what I wrote for to try to correct typos and add commentary where needed.
At the time, I didn't mention it since I didn't want to worry any of our readers, namely our parents. But now I suppose it's fine to say. Overnight, I had some real trouble breathing under the tent housing. Rain sheeted over the already muggy tent fabric and made it hard for air to circulate. It was super stifling in my bivy. At one point, I started hyperventilating and had to unzip in a rush and stick my head out into the rain to breathe. It took several minutes for my breathing and heart rate to get back to normal. It happened one more time after that. That's on top of being miserably cold without a sleeping bag and a sleeping pad that kept deflating and putting me in contact with the ground.
I got maybe 2 hours of sleep that night. In the early morning, I was super cold and tired. The fear that I was going to have to quit kept shooting pangs of panic back into me. While it was by far the worst that night, I would suffer aftershocks from that for the rest of the trip. It was part of why I was in a bad mood frequently. Even to this day, I can still feel the roots of that kind of panic stirring around sometimes, usually in response to feeling cold while biking]

Day 3. It's already getting hard to remember what day of the week it is. A few more hard climbs and scenic vista descents today. Matt's got a few of the downhills on video. You'll have to wait.

Riding in flat ground is easy. You can maintain 15mph even with some headwind all day, as long as people rotate who's in the lead. But the moment we hit a big slope, our pace grinds to 5mph. For long hills, our MO is to keep ratcheting up the hill in the lowest gear available until we hit a crest, at which point we take a break. By far, the hand signal we are most anxious to see from the lead rider is, as we're climbing, whether the road still rises upward. If so, a thumbs down is held out to temper the hopes of those behind. But if it levels or drops, thumbs up!

Today, we banked a detour of 15mi to help me get a sleeping bag. It didn't help that Longview, WA has two 1111 Hudson St.'s. More on that later. [as I wrote above -- I needed that sleeping bag. Even fully clothed, I was way too cold. The one I got was not only pretty cheap but also packed up very small.
My whole bivy + tent cover experiment was a qualified failure. If the tent material had breathed better, it would have been a hell of a lot more tolerable. For the rest of the trip, I resorted to using it in a lean-to configuration, exposing myself to the air but hopefully still getting shielded from vertica rainfall. This day was the first day that I used that configuration. Along with the sleeping bag, I slept much better.]

Now we're camped out at the modestly named County Line Park. It's a cliffside beach with a small strip for renting. We of course got the very cheap hiker/biker area, with quite a view:

It's King Salmon spawning season on this river. Folks are down on the beach fishing them. You drop a weight to anchor the line and lure out in the middle of the river. When a school swims by, some salmon take the bait, pull the line off the tin can alarm, and run. Then you have to reel them in:

After this photo, the salmon was expertly gutted and cleaned. Its head cast back in the water made for a slow meal for some noisy and persistent pelicans.

Biking through these quiet Washington towns, with only the roughest schedule and sense of direction, it's easy to get overwhelmed by a tinge of wanderlust. My adult life prior was so structured, so specific in its contexts. I love my job and it is a huge part of my life. I'm not afraid to say that. It's true. 

Out here, the most important things are to steer your bike safely and to keep rolling forward. Everything else is whatever you decide to do that day. I'll admit -- the culture shock is pretty strong. Something that would come naturally as an awesome vacation to some has me a bit lost for purpose. The purpose now is to get to SF safe.

9/3 pics: https://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/BikeTour93?authkey=Gv1sRgCO3sroXUkIX3zgE
9/3 video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6AOILcxeSw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOPtBFZLLME
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE-NlT4XV2w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W9xCLrmV40

9/2

Woke up at 4, pretty fresh. Rain thumped on my bivy and kept me awake. Got up at 6 and decamped. We felt fine, but the real test would be getting back on the bike.

I plugged the GPS into my dynamo at the start, and we set off. Having the dynamo charging devices is rough. Takes maybe 2mph out of my pace. Which is brutal for any hills. But it's my electricity solution. 

The morning ride was mercifully flat. Even ominously flat. But it meant we covered a lot of ground. Just under 50mi. The scenes in rural Washington are picturesque:

It's hard to describe how quiet some places are. We got out at this intersection and heard nothing but a couple of crickets.

Lunch was pretty good.

I didn't cram as much as yesterday to ride better than I did yesterday on afternoon climbs. There were some brutal ones, but also some thrilling descents. I'll share those on Strava. 

Our campsite tonight is in Lewis and Clark National Park. It looks like the site of Sean Parker's wedding:

9/2 pics: https://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/BikeTour92?authkey=Gv1sRgCMP_9cPi0Z72Yg
9/2 video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdlCN4exRmw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_Q1w1wsT0g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8jxnMIKvng
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC0buGCrEZU

Next day

First day on the road

Something at our host's apt that I found very apt for what I perceive to be the Pacific NW mindset:

About 55mi covered. Some of it brutal. We started early. Seattle was dead on Sunday morning.

The ferry:

Us kicking off to Bremerton:

Two seals lounging on a buoy!:

Some of the climbs were brutal, and I wanted to throw up. But we made it. With some hard resting:

Now we are settled into our stealth camping spot: 

Some guy looking to dump garbage pulled into this spot and promptly backed out when he saw Matt. I think that's what this area was for, given the (not pictured) overturned couch and various bonfire party leavings.

9/1 pics

Next day