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Yes, it’s true, we must savor kicking butt by slowing down every once and a while and letting our bodies rest.
Since the last time we spoke, we’ve gone up two 500 foot mountains, one 750 ft one, and one thousand-footer, we’ve spent an accumulated three hours and forty five mintues eating “samples” in grocery stores, and we’ve all bought knee braces.
We’ve met a lot more bikers in the last few days, and most have had something to say about the crazy Astoria Bridge we went over the day of our last post.
A couple such bikers were at our hiker-biker site at Fort Stevens, our first stop in Oregon. They were two young chaps who came from Seattle as well, although not quite as strapping as we are because they were taking one day off already and then heading back up.
They opened our eyes to a different world of bike-touring, where you eat Taco Bell instead of Clif bars, drink beer every night instead of water and advil, and pull a trailor full of clean underwear instead of washing the two pair you have in your backpack in the sink and hanging it out to dry.
Well we made a fire, and they came over and shared their wine, stories, and bike knowledge. They set up Lindsey and I’s bike computers, which calculate our distance per trip and distance per hour. They’re still set on kilometers, but we figure its nice to do the conversion math to keep our minds on something while climbing up 1000 ft. mountains. (the views are worth it by the way).
The gentlemen also kindly informed me that my bike had been a little messed up and I had my front right break permanently rubbing against my wheel (for you drivers out there, this might be the equivalent of driving with your e-brake on).
So that night we fell asleep to a family who got in at 10:30 with 5 crying babies and the mother yelling at the baby to “stop f*cking crying while she tries to find her tobacco!”
We awoke and headed on to Tillamook. We went up two 500 ft. hills with beautiful views on top, our first tunnel, and had lunch at Oswald state park.
We had some bad weather in the morning, but we were really excited about the cheese factory and peddled out 15 miles in the last hour so we could get there in time!
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We all three got big ol’ ice cream cones first (Stef’s vegan), and as Stef licked her first ice cream cone in 7 years, she informed us that she wished to have pancakes for dinner, because we had seen 7 signs for the pancake house in Tillamook on the way. We piled on blocks of cheese on our sample toothpicks, and headed on to pamper ourselves at an INN! woo! Very nice to sleep indoors. We hung out in the 80 degree jacuzzi and sauna, did laundry, and lived the good life.
this is getting long.
On to Beverly Beach…hardest day yet. We had to climb over three big capes…one 1000 footer, one 750 footer, and the last, “cape foulweather” was about 450 feet. Before the final one we stopped for a huge, manly, greasy lunch, and as Lindsey sniffed her armpits and poured out her sandy shoes in her basket of leftover food, we realized manners were long gone. hard day, yada yada, we made it, we kick butt…on to the fourth of July…
Ha! it was supposed to be an easy day, but only in comparison to the day before, and we were all in a little knee pain in too excited for our break and day off. Stef had some bike problems, and we were anticipating a big hill and tunnel we had toward the end.
The lunch stop made our day. It was a quaint quaint little town called Yachats, and we arrived just in time for the 4th of July parade, which they called the “la de da” parade. We almost got run over twice by the fire trucks in the parade before deciding this was the town we had to stop in.
We checked out the parade which contained lots of old people walking dogs and locals dressed up like belly dancers. All of a sudden, a man started running up the street shouting, “let that fire truck through”. Well, the fire truck was in the parade, so people were uncertain as to whether there was an emergency or not,
“This is for real” “it’s not fake” said the people in the crowd.
And down came the fire truck, people in the back waving at the crowd, but the ambulance with sirens followed behind.
We got outta that scene pretty quick and headed on to the pie social, where we found out that someone in the parade had fallen due to a broken hip. Since the parade was over, the pie social started filling up, and pretty soon the whole town was in there. mmmmmmmmm. Stef topped hers off with some ice cream, she loves that stuff.
Okay okay, i’m gonna go soon…we got to our campsite but met a big group of 14-15 year old kids touring from Seattle to San Fransisco, all with big orange flags on their bikes.
We’re now staying at Jessie M Honeyman state park, where there’s plenty of sand dunes, trees, and beach for our day off.
We’ve been averaging a little over 60 miles a day but we have to take it slow in the next few days because we have a delivery of more Clif bars and shots in Brookings on Monday.
Okay? Thanks for Listening!
PS. Tommorrow’s my birthday
