May 24th

Milepost ~400

In case you’re wondering, this sign is a good indicator of my status, as pictured while awaiting a milkshake:

One of the nice things about fitting entirely into 4 medium/small bags is that I don’t generally have enough stuff to lose anything. I guess the flipside of having exactly what I need along with me is that losing anything is kinda a big deal. So I spent an hour this morning looking for my keys. Had a great night at Nancy’s but awoke and luckily noticed the missing keys as I was packing, rather than the first time I tried to use them, for instance, to change a front flat (my wheel is locked to the fork, and I need a key from my keychain to remove it; also my most-often-used bottle opener and my bike lock key are on there, and my emergency/backup flashlight. Not stuff I necessarily use every day, but stuff I’ll really miss when I next need it. So I spent the hour looking for the keys until I found them deep in the couch rather than in the yard or deep in some bag I swear I didn’t even unpack. Seems like an inauspicious beginning, but spoiler alert: the day was fine and ended with good company!

Even the first biking was great as I got to ride along the off-streety path in the linear park in Longview until it took me to the road out of town that had a bike lane for ~8miles until I was on freeways with variable shoulders for the rest of the day. Oh! And a boat! And a fine bike path in my destination town of Astoria. The day definitely featured a higher concentration of highway riding than I’d experienced before on this trip, and it was a pretty busy day on the roads at that, but things went pretty fine.

Set out on some roads I’d never been on before (car or bike) to the west of Longview, heading towards the coast but the coast (via Hwy 4) was +50 miles from my turn, so there is still a large chunk of WA State highway 4 waiting for my next visit, I guess. It’s pretty indirect so we’d have to “want” to drive it, so…maybe not anytime soon :)

While I missed breakfast and a missed a real sit-down lunch too, I had taken a liberal helping of some nutrition-bar-type substance that Nancy had made - lots of oats and peanut butter and seeds and honey and some dried fruit and it was AMAZING and I ate all of it. It powered much of yesterday between the milkshake stop (if your town has a coffee/ice cream shop and nothing else, yes I can and will make sure to patronize the milkshake lands! and it was good.) That nutrition chunk also supplemented the some-fried-food-from-the-hot-case stop-where-there-was-no-coffee+icecream shop (that was the last thing I bought in Washington).

Then, I took an amusing picture of me “entering” (really leaving) Washington:

…and put my bike on a boat to cross the river. This is not either of the routes I’ve taken before to Astoria - via boat - and in fact some signage claimed it to be the last ferry still operating in the “lower” Columbia river (let’s say “past Longview” since I don’t know about boats to the east, though I suspect there are some.)

Post-boat it was all territory I had ridden before, maybe 5-7 years ago with Kirk and Erinne when we made a wrong turn heading to the coast and ended up in Clatskanie (which town I did not see again, it being east of the crossing). I joined highway 30 in Oregon after that point, and never fear! I still got the ~30mi of highway into Astoria. Oregon’s commitment to workable-for-bikes highway shoulders is a bit more “serious” than Washington’s, but there were still some very high-traffic/high-speed sections with not enough shoulder and they were especially annoying since it kept trying to rain on me and I couldn’t figure the appropriate amount of rain gear to be wearing - either I was soaking and doggedly saying “but it’s not QUITE really raining yet!” or I was totally dry and sweating up a hill because I swear it was starting to rain. #firstworldproblems . It never got very cold, at least? Windy yes…headwind for much of the day…but nothing more uncomfortable than the proximity of oblivious motor homes to my left ear.

I did stop at a couple little parks that I never would have gone to otherwise that were neat!

Once I got into the outskirts of Astoria, I got onto the riverwalk which was way better than the highway, and on it I passed a gaggle of college-aged girls that were barking back at the sea lions, and I thought, that’s probably the best use for sea lions I’ve ever known of.

Note - I did not cross that many-miles-long bridge. I won’t cross it today. Highway 101 does, but I won’t be mostly on highway 101 until tomorrow’s ride (and then for much of the oregon coast!)

Friend Nell had arranged a place to stay for me but wasn’t thinking she’d be in town; unfortunately some of her plans to skedaddle developed a kink and so mine got more pleasant and we got to go out to dinner before she returned to her posse. Whilst drinking the good beer and eating the good pizza at Fort George brewing, I met something like half of Astoria that came up to Nell and said hi. Good conversation and then, good sleeeeeep.

a middling number of pictures in ye olde album-du-jour

Written by Chris McCraw who resides in Portland, OR but maybe his heart is on the bike?