Eric's Bike Adventure 1995

Trip Log Part 2: Portland to the Pacific Coast

• Portland to McMinnville, Sunday, July 16, 1995

  The original plan was that I would get up bright-and-early in the morning -- crack of dawn! -- and get on the road. No such luck. Instead, I took my time getting up, started my journal, and then repacked the bike, and went out to breakfast with Tom.

  

  We ended up eating at Zell's Cafe, a couple blocks down from his apartment, where I had an egg for the first time in quite a while. It was actually pretty tasty, on top of the corned beef hash. A pretty good breakfast to power the ride from Portland. I enjoyed the time to talk with Tom, since I haven't really gotten to do that in a long time. Lots of thinking, and trying to put together some pieces of how we got to where we are, and general thoughts about our family as we grew up.

  

  After breakfast, we headed back to his apartment, reloaded up my bike, and it was time to head out. By this time, it was noon, and I found out at the end of the day it had gotten over 90 degrees. Yow!

  

  Immediately after leaving Tom's place, Portland gave me a goodbye greeting, a wait for a drawbridge. While waiting for the bridge, a guy who pulled up on a bike started talking to me about touring. He said I should ditch the extra water I was carrying, that it would always be easy to tank up on water on the route I was on. I ignored him then, and even wrote that I wasn't ever going to ditch the extra water in my journal, but did end up taking his advice later down the coast.

  The route out of Portland was along Terwilliger Boulevard, a nice somewhat hilly tree lined route out of town. After gaining some elevation, the road gave a wonderful panorama of the Portland skyline, slightly obscured by trees, but nevertheless beautiful. I was glad for the tree cover, since it was definitely getting warm. After Terwilliger, I ended up on Barbur Boulevard, which turned into State Highway 99W, my route to today's destination at McMinnville.

  When turning onto Barbur, I discovered my first bike damage of the trip. One of the clips on my left pedal had lost a screw, so I could only use one side of the pedal. Ack! I would have to think every time I started moving on the bike! At least it wasn't crippling. The only bike store I passed was closed Sundays, so I would have been out of luck if I absolutely needed one. I hadn't brought anything to repair my pedals, since they weren't supposed to be a threat!

  Onward! Barbur is a wide, treeless thoroughfare going through the suburbs of Portland. I think the thing I hate most about the 'burbs is the lack of trees. Big shade trees on the side of the road just make the whole ambience of the road nicer. You notice this much more when the day is baking.

  I stopped in Newberg for lunch, over halfway through the day. After paying for my food, I saw a guy checking out my bike, so I went to talk to him. He was a really nice guy, who said he had done a couple rides out to the coast, but would really love to get out and do a longer tour. I told him he just needed the time, but it sounded like that was his problem -- he wasn't able to take the time off of work. This was the most striking encounter of my entire trip of somebody longing to do what I was out doing. I really hope he can find the time to take a longer tour. If he does get out to do it, I hope I gave him some of his inspiration, however small. It made me feel really lucky to have the privilege of having the time and resources to take my trip.

  

  After Newberg, the terrain was rolling hills through farmland. All of my visions of Oregon are of big trees and the coast, not farmland, but there were only bits of forest to be seen today. The land, though, was beautiful. The sky was bright blue, without even a single cloud. By the end of the day, a pretty hefty crosswind had picked up, causing me to stop a couple times to just take a break. I couldn't believe how fatigued I was at the end of the day, even considering this was my first full day of riding with a loaded touring bike. Forty-two miles was supposed to be easy, not this tiring!

  I arrived in McMinnville, and after checking the phone book for a motel, talked with a retired couple from New Jersey who were in McMinnville to see the Spruce Goose. As a fellow Saturn owner, I felt compelled to see if they liked their Saturn as much as I liked mine. They did. They would have liked air conditioning while driving through the 105 degree Nebraska heat wave a couple days earlier, though. After talking for a bit, they topped off my water bottle with ice water. A couple more miles across town, got myself checked into the motel, got a cold drink and took a cold bath, and then went to take a quick nap. It was 6:30 or 7:00pm then, and I woke up from my "quick" nap at 3:00am.

  Day total: 42.3 miles, Trip total: 46.4

• McMinnville to Lincoln City, Monday, July 17, 1995

  

  The biggest advantage to waking up at 3am is that it makes an early morning start pretty easy. After rolling in bed for an hour, cooking a simple breakfast of cream-of-wheat and hot chocolate, and writing for a bit in my journal, I was ready to hit the road at the crack of dawn. I was rolling down the road at 6am.

  

  Today's route took State Highwas 18 from McMinnville out to Lincoln City, today's goal. The morning was crisp and clear, but not too cold. The route went started in farm country, and gradually drifted into logging land. The 18 business route through Sheridan and Willamina provided the first respite from traffic. Logging country means logging trucks, and it was good to get away from the traffic. The biggest problem with logging trucks is the wind blast as you're passed. You get knocked away when the cab passes you, and knocked back towards them after the end of the truck. Pretty unnerving while you're still getting used to riding with a heavy load.

  Shortly after getting on the business route, I saw a deer and a fawn start crossing the road. The deer went across, but the fawn turned back, frightened by traffic. I waited for the fawn to come back down from the hillside, but it never came back. I hope they both safely avoided the traffic...

  

  Breakfast at Coyote Joe's in Willamina ("Timber Town USA"), and it's obviously logging country. Many houses with "This Family Supported By Timber Dollars" signs on them. The road out of Willamina had a pretty cool lumber mill (at least I think it was a lumber mill) with bright colors -- purple, yellow, red, blue. Much more vibrant than the traditional dark green or brown colors.

  

  The road to the coast passes over one real hill, Murphy Hill. The hill is 765 feet at the summit, but felt like it was going to take forever. The day was heating up, another 90+ degree day, and my first day of substantial climbing with a full load. I made sure to drink lots, and stop whenever I got nervous about how long the hill would be. Painted on the ground were odd marks -- 281, 282, 283, all the way up to 320, 321. I wasn't sure what the marks were for, and was really hoping they weren't elevation markers. They didn't correspond to the mile markers, so these small painted numbers were pretty intimidating. Just after passing 340, though, I was done! At the top! Dripping sweat, getting tired, but exhilarated. Downhill to the coast! I stopped at the first cafe I saw, and got a tall lemonade. A little sugary, but it felt so good going down.

  

  The ride up the hill was good. Logging trucks passing, RVs passing, cars and trucks passing, no problems. I had been passed by a handful of pilot trucks with "OVERSIZE LOAD" trucks following them, without incident. The road going down, however, narrowed two one lane each direction, the shoulder narrowed to two feet or so, and the gravel on the side dropped off to a four foot ditch, all with traffic flying closely by. On the narrowest section, I was cruising down, certainly over 20mph, and I heard the a couple blasts from a semi trucks' horn behind me. Looking back, I saw an OVERSIZE LOAD. A semi carrying half of a mobile home. It was wider than the lane, so taking up a lot of space. Too much traffic for them to give me much room, so I got over as far as I could to the edge of the shoulder. Too far, it turns out. As the truck passed me, I suddenly found myself disoriented in the ditch, blood dripping from my knee, the truck still cruising down the road. After I got back home, I finally pieced together what must have happened -- when the truck blew past me, the wake from the truck pushed me over the edge, I lost traction, and dove into the ditch. If I were Max Headroom, the show would have been called Oversize Load. I saw that I was basically ok -- nothing appeared broken, so I pulled out the first aid kit and some water, and cleaned myself up. I look behind me in the ditch, and saw the last bit of a deer carcass. Some hide, a skull. I guess this was a bad spot in the road.

  The rest of the trip to the coast was uneventful. I was a little more hesitant with traffic, but otherwise had a nice ride. As soon as I got to the coast at Lincoln City, I stopped for a milkshake and picked up some more film. I actually felt pretty good physically, but didn't really want to deal with much more traffic, so just got to the campsite across town around 12:30 in the afternoon, and set up camp at Devil's Lake State Park.

  As I pulled into the campground, some kid, probably 11 or 12 years old, asked my why I was wearing a helmet, since I was clearly old enough that I wasn't required to wear one anymore. I told him that not only did I wear the helmet voluntarily, but that I also put all these dorky looking stickers on it so that it'll protect me not just from impact, but make me more visible too. He seemed to mull it over, and said "actually, it looks pretty cool". Maybe it'll help him get over the trauma of being so uncool as to actually want to wear a helmet.

  

  I definitely could have ridden further. This day wasn't nearly as draining as the first day out. I think part of it was getting to the cooler weather on the coast, part was just getting a really early start on the day. If you start pedaling at 6am, by lunchtime, you've already gone a really long way! However, if you're not mentally up to dealing with more traffic, then it's probably better to stay put, and not be a risk to everybody else.

  

  The disadvantage to stopping at 12:30 is that no other cyclists are around! So, I read some, wrote some, and just puttered around for quite a while. The campsite I was in had two levels on the hillside. The lower level is forested, and the upper level is a small meadow. I chose the upper level, since it had sun. It turned out the meadow also was home for the last day to a trio of people who had ventured out from Nevada to live "somewhere different". They were a son/mother/grandmother set, and seemed nice enough, though kinda skittish. They said it was their last day in the campground, something about a 30 day limit. It didn't seem like they were that thrilled with Lincoln City, none of them had jobs, so I'm not sure why they were really there, or if it was any better than Nevada for them.

  Around 5 or 6, other bikers started arriving. Other touring cyclists! Now there would be other people who didn't think what I was doing was super-human, since they were all doing it too. Jeff was the only other cyclist who camped up in the meadow. He was out from Michigan, cycling from Seattle to San Francisco. He said that airfare was so low, he couldn't pass up the opportunity.

  

  This was the first night of camping, and camp cooking, too. I whipped out my small frying pan, so that I would make sure to have used it on the trip, thus justifying the weight, and fried up some quesadillas. Yum! The pan definitely helped get those tortillas fried up right. It was today that I discovered one of the rules about touring: Eat Constantly. If you wait until you're really hungry, you have to eat too much, and have to fight the heavy digestion. If you eat smaller amounts all day long, your energy supply seems much more even, and you can just keep going and going. Clear sky for the first night in the bivy sac, a good sign for the ride down the coast.

  Day total: 51.6 miles, Trip total: 98.0