OREGON - lush forests, cloudy skies!

Newport, Oregon was the starting point for our trip.  We took about 3 and a half days to get from Newport to Portland, about 100 miles, and being the beginning of our bicycling adventure it was also the hardest part of the trip.  Mark had most of our possessions loaded up in two white plastic buckets which he’d strapped onto a rack at the back of the bike with heavy duty twist ties.  I had the sleeping bags, tent and pads bungee corded to my rack and a heavy backpack on my back.  This, plus my complete inexperience, made hills excruciating – I felt like I was strapped into a heavy harness, straining to pull an overloaded cart.

As to the terrain, the first few days we plunged into lush primeval pine forests with rapidly running rivers, tall ferns, and hundreds of cute yellow and black caterpillars crawling in every direction like an alien invasion.  In the middle of the state trees gave way to canyons, the land turned hot and dry, and each town or campground felt like an oasis.

The places we stopped for the night ranged widely in nature, from a state park with hiker-biker campsites in woods just off the beach, complete with water and bathrooms, to the backyard of a long abandoned house, with dishrags flapping on the clothesline, rusted swing set, and huge skunk cabbages, like smelly billowing lanterns, growing wild beside the crumbling wooden rabbit hutch.

I was familiar with the lush, fertile western half of Oregon, but not with the dry, wind sculpted portion in the east.  I’d driven through parts of the state in a car, but had never experienced it so directly, hearing water gush loudly over rocks, smelling sweet pines, feeling the sun beat down on me all day.

We had flats at least once or twice a day, every day, and learned the culprit was usually a tiny wire from a piece of a truck’s tire; trucks shed their tires as snakes do their skins, and these steel belted radials were working their way into our tires like poison darts.  We had a lot to learn.

Hang in there, lots more Oregon soon!