- Day 1 -1 Week
- Day 1 -12 Hours
- Day 1
- Day 2
- Day 3
- Day 4
- Day 5
- Day 6
- Day 7
- Day 8
- Day 9
- Day 10
- Day 11
- Day 12
- Day 13
- Day 14
- Day 15
- Day 16
- Day 17
- Day 18
- Day 19
- Day 20
- Day 21
- Day 22
- Day 23
- Day 24
- Day 25
- Day 26
- Day 27
- Day 28
- Day 29
- Day 30
- Day 31
- Day 32
- Day 33
- Day 34
- Day 35
- Day 36
- Day 37
- Day 38
- Day 39
- Day 40
- Day 41
- Day 42
- Day 43
- Day 44
- Day 45
- Day 46
- Day 47
- Day 48
- Day 49
- Day 50
- Day 51
- Day 52
- Day 53
- Day 54
- Day 55
- The End
- Retrospective
Waking up today I am full of the thought that this is the end. Every day stepping closer and closer till tomorrow we will arrive in Astoria. It will have taken 53 days but on the morning of day 52 it feels like it snuck up on us. It’s hard to imagine how this happened, or how I could be surprised by this.
Breakfast was more of the same, minus the waffle machine. It feels like such a small investment to make breakfast so much higher level. There were many workers eating their breakfast and two older couples. It has been striking just how many hotels and motels have had construction, highway, oil and other workers I couldn’t even identify. These guys were talking about bolts and concrete. It’s interesting about how different fields have different vocabularies but the conversations are always the same. The older couples were interesting as well. They were talking about their first marriages… 30 and 48 years! I hope everyone can find their own ways to find happiness, but it was surprising to hear about the 48 year mistake, but at least we found each other. It was very cute.
We had to leave the bikes in a storage room, so after getting ready we carried everything down stairs to load up the bikes. It’s fine, but having the bikes in the room works so much better. We can put something away when your done with it and something else and something else, and then your packed. Bringing everything down stairs, checking double checking we have everything… laying out everything on the floor of the lobby to start packing. But soon enough we’re ready to go.
There is no great way to get where we want to go… Except I-5. We head back into town just a few blocks to turn to a road that will lead us to the next town, which will lead to a second road that leads to the next town… and that’s how our day will go. Not ideal, but it will be fine. We make our way back into town to get to the road out of town. We see the road grow to a large, almost highway… including a now bikes or pedestrians sign. We stop, check the map. There is no indication bikes are not allowed and there’s no indication how much of the road to town, to town, to town is bike unfriendly. Could be this first 5 mile section, could be the road through out the day.
With some map checking I find a second route. There’s many traffic circles that runs right along the airport. This could be fine, or could be a huge pain in the ass through out the day. We make our way back across town, under I-5 and turn toward our airport road. Just a few peddles down the road and we come across large concrete blocks with a large “road closed”. WTF!
I check the map. There is a side road that goes from neighborhood to farms to farms to other neighborhoods. This is not a real way to go across the state… but it is the only way we have at the moment. We head that way while I fear that this won’t work either. I keep waiting for the other shoe to fall off with every turn of the crank. Luckily as we peddle, the road just keeps going.
We snake our way through a small neighborhood into a group of farms. The farms extended across the rolling hills. These farms are much smaller then the massive expanses across the prairies. In these smaller fields it looks as if there might actually be more work. The large farms have such huge machines to handle the vast land, where these farms are too small for some of those big machines to even turn around.
Soon the farms gave way to a new town, smaller then the last but there’s still a Main Street. And right back to farm lands. We rode in and out of farm land and tiny cities. Vader was a high light for a Star Wars kid.
Soon enough we got to Longview. The woman sitting next to us for breakfast in Vancouver told us this would probably be the way we entered Oregon, and here we are. She warned us that the bridge was deemed to not be a draw bridge, would need to be tall enough for all boats to pass under. She was right, this bridge was impressively / intimidatingly tall. Not like this bridge is going to be the thing to stop us, but I was not expecting it to be this tall.
Over the bridge and we’re so close. But what’s with all these hills? Again, not that this will stop us but I wasn’t expecting this. But as I type I can’t help but wonder would these hills or bridge been un-passable to me 51 days ago? On the bike it’s all about the small steps or peddles. You don’t go over the mountain in one step, you slowly reel the peak in. Has this slow reel in become so ingrained in me that while reeling I notice these things around me but keep peddling till I’m checked into the hotel writing a new blog post.
It was especially nice that after a few climbs there was a 6% grade for 2 1/2 miles sign followed by a 6 1/2% grade for 1 1/2 miles. Basically down into town. I’ll take that any day.
A moment of fear when we didn’t even see the first hotel in town, and the second had a no vacancy sign. I said I’d check since we’re here. And to my pleasant surprise they were not full and here we are, the night before Astoria. +3 thousand miles and 52 days to get here… Well I guess we have one more day.
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