Hello Coast, Goodbye Sunscreen

The first task at hand was to find a route to the coast that didn't involve the relentless pounding of traffic and logging trucks, a task accomplished by simply riding out of town on the friendliest road I knew, and continuing to follow friendly-looking roads in a vaguely northwestern direction. The route took us through back-road Willamette Valley vineyards territory (with tasting aplenty), and quickly up into the national forest of the coastal range, where traffic virtually disappeared. We wheeled our way through thickets of thimbleberries and brambles of blackberries that suffered a surfeit of fruit, and we gorged our guts to gustatory satisfaction. A perfect amount of sun, clouds, and mild wind combined to create ideal conditions for the start of a trip.

Our arrival at the coast was laughably cliché, in that the coastline was tightly enshrouded in thick clouds, visible as a looming grey wall that grew to encompass us as we approached. My map said that the average summer temperature of the Oregon Coast is 58 degrees, a statistic I would come to find impossible to refute. While the rest of the country sweltered through a heatwave, I shivered along miles of highway, wrapped up in layers of long underwear under my jacket.

The Oregon Coast is part of one of the most well-traveled bicycle routes in the entire country, a literal interstate of cyclists from all over the world with all sorts of agendas: I met a family that left their home in Vancouver with their six- and two-year-old daughters, to hit the road for a couple of years, with no previous bicycling experience; a Brit making his way southward from Alaska; an eighteen-year-old from South Korea who is making his way to his first year of college in Vancouver by way of El Salvador; tandems and recumbents; ultra-lightweight speedsters and folks who just couldn't stand to leave their cast-iron ware at home. Everybody is out on the road; I even ran into a friend of mine from Seattle who was on his way down to Santa Barbara. (Hell, I even got passed by my mom in a car somewhere between Cannon Beach and Seaside.) And of course, most every one of them is headed in the opposite direction, as everyone knows that you're supposed to bike from north to south; the prevailing summer winds are said to dismantle a cyclist's spirits in the space of a schoolgirl's wink. As a result, much of the road's shoulders have only been developed one the west side, whereas the northern route contains potholes large enough to pitch a tent in. This, at least, was the word on the street...

As it turned out, however, it was a fine ride. The most tedious part was having to cross the highway traffic every time I wanted to stop and see something on the ocean side. Otherwise, the shoulders are quite manageable, and the wind, that fickle mistress, seemed just as likely to blow with you as against you.

A deceivingly fleeting sunbreak.

Several days worth of beaches, an almost equal number of days of clouds, one astounding Fata Morgana-esque sunset, and one mandatory visit to Rogue Brewery later, we made it to Astoria, last stop in Oregon before crossing the Bridge of Bicyclist Doom, more commonly known as the Astoria Bridge, a four-mile truss bridge spanning the mouth of the Columbia River. I'd previously crossed it twice before, once in each direction, and each time was a harrowing experience, sandwiched in a nonexistent bike lane between reckless logging trucks out for blood and a very long fall to some very uninviting waters. Fortune favours the bold, however; the bike lanes had been doubled in width since my last crossing, and we hit it on a Sunday morning, with a minimum of traffic. Aside from the thoroughly traumatic experience of watching a cormorant fly head into an oncoming car a few feet in front of me, it was an uneventful crossing.

Abandon hope, all ye who cross here...

It'll be time to start heading inland very soon; I'll be curious how long it takes for the sun to creep back out and make me miserable.