The Blog Has Moved!

Hey everybody! Blogspot is super annoying to use, so we've switched our blog over to Wordpress. Hopefully we'll have a travel map updated soon (since our clever decoy map has been found out). 

You can now find us at: www.radbikeblog.wordpress.com

And on twitter @radbikeblog in case you're not already following. 

Stay tuned!

-RaD

(I'm not really that much taller than Robyn) 

Biking break, blogging break

When we last left you on the blog, we were drinking mimosas and celebrating the one-week-iversary of the trip. In one week since then we haven't actually moved very far geographically, but we've kept ourselves pretty busy. While we've been taking it easy on the biking, we've taken it even more easy on the blogging (sorry folks, we'll strive to do better in the future), so here's a rundown of some of our escapades this past week.

We're staying in manzanita, OR with our friends Emily and Fletch who have been farming here in the Nehalem Valley since they got back from the Peace Corps in 2010. Check out their website: www.peacecrops.net 

We've been biking out to the farm to harvest veggies and keep up with the endless task of weeding. In the Pacific Northwest, Himalayan Blackberries are a persistent invasive weed and are always lurking and waiting for an opportunity to overtake everything in their path.   

Pickin' them peas. 

Obligatory open-mouthed beach selfie #3

Sunsets in Manzanita are amazing. 

Robyn likes to antagonize birds

Our humble campsite

Check out that farmers tan!

When we thinned the carrots, we discovered that some of them had become friends.

My Mom and her fella Bryant stopped by Manzanita as part of the west coast road trip they are on. We hiked to the top of Saddle Mountain. It was a clear day and we could see 4 volcanoes and the Astoria Bridge. Sadly, a wide angle lense is incapable of capturing these things, so you'll have to settle for our fierce mountain climbing faces. 

Off to the great unknown. 

Bryant plays real life Katamari with a volcanic rock. 

Like I said, the sunsets...

Mama bear and baby bear, awww

We had a beach feast of veggie dogs and s'mores. As one must at the beach.

Found a shelter, put it to use

We walked allllll the way out to the end of the beach where the ocean meets the Nehalem river...

...and there were sea lions! Also we got a leettle bit lost and had to do some trail blazing, but have obviously made it home. Other attractions included a seagull carrying a tennis ball around like a dog. If iphones could zoom better we would have approximately one million views on youtube.

Fletch and Emily recently bought a plot of land off of Rt 53. There's and old house on the property, and since Fletch is an architect, they are fixing it up. It's going to be amazing when it's finished, but there is a lot of work to do before then. When we arrived that day there was a wall there, complete with a sliding glass door. After jerry-rigging a rope support around the frame we knocked the door out. Aaaand the frame fell apart sending the glass pannel barreling down towards the ground. Miraculously it fell inches from a block of concrete and did not break! I guess the rope slowed it down.

Apart from being a farmer, architect, leatherworker, published author and licensed pilot, Fletch is also a kayaking guide. We took a trip down the Nehalem River and saw lots of birds. 

Not sure why people feel the need to make even decently designed racks less useful

Today I called Christina to have her pop into my room and go into my side table drawer to get my routing number off a check. It was not until she picked up the phone that I realized that it is not my room, I got rid of that side table and my checks are packed away. Oops.

-RaD

Cheers!

To the one week anniversary of bike tour

-R

A day at the farm

The road to manzanita is long and hilly. Actually, a lot of it is not all that hilly, but the last 20 miles are a doozy. From manzanita, the ride out to Fletch and Emily's farm is really lovely. 7 or 8 miles of rolling river valley nestled between forested hills. Well have to take some pictures tomorrow. We rendezvoused with Emily there, harvested some peas,  then caught a ride back to town in the pickup truck. Our bikes were cozy in the back with vegetables.  

This morning, after making some delicious pancakes, we headed back to the farm for a day of weeding. There are a lot of weeds on farms. 

Before

After! 

Weeds beware! 

-D

Margaritas and shipwrecks

We made it across the Astoria Bridge yesterday, and honestly I expected it to be a lot worse. The shoulder is exactly as wide as a bicycle with panniers, and most cars give plenty of room as they pass. And if we'd had the opportunity to look out from side to side, I'm sure it would have been an excellent view. As we crested the final arch of the bridge, we encountered construction (which has proved to work to our advantage for most of the trip thus far). The flagger gave us a head start on the descent, and we made it all the way off the bridge before cars caught up to us. 

We made it Oregon!

If you are ever in Astoria, OR and need some bike related assistance, stop into Bikes and Beyond. It is one of those rare and wonderful places where they are more concerned with fixing your problem then getting your money. This amazing guy Pat (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Jeff Daniels) was helping us out. When we asked for chamois butter, he recommended we go to a drug store for a cheaper and more easily available solution - desitin. The diaper rash cream that he, and apparently the Tour de France champions, prefer. I will let you know how that goes today... My left pedal had been clicking. He let us covertly go through the bike graveyard in the basement to find a temporary    replacement till I could order the ones I really wanted. I almost bought some BMX pedals but those things are super heavy. The clicking has not been fixed so it seems to be more than a bent spindle, even better that I did not buy new ones. Anyway, they truly seemed to have our best interest at heart, I guess they get enough business to do so, he said they get about a thousand bike tourers through a year. Good to be one of he first shops out of Seattle on the adventure cycle route. Also good that some people put their pedals in backwards and cross thread their crank arms and need help by the time the get to Astoria. Apparently Pat has seen that a lot, though I am not sure how they make it even that far.

After errands in Astoria, we made our way into a relentless headwind ( and over another long bridge!) to Fort Stevens State Park. This is the largest campground I've ever see, and has a whole section dedicated to hikers and bikers (there were a whopping 15 bikers sharing the site, and there was plenty of room for more). We made a beverage that closely resembled a margarita, and walked down to the beach where we found the remnants of a shipwreck from 1906!

It was also very windy. 

-RaD

Oregon Ho!

Yes, we are about to bike across that...

Overdue post about how we ended up in a motel on Monday night (and some photos!)

So it's 4:30pm and we are standing at the entrance to a KOA. To go on, or not to go on? We both still have some juice so we decide to venture boldly out into the great unknown. There was  a green patch on google maps about twenty miles down the road with a pine tree icon to indicate a park. It now seems silly to have hoped for a campsite, especially considering the local we talked to in Raymond had never heard of it, but hey, it was early on a sunny day and my butt wasn't even complaining that much. I have always been a "more miles now, less miles later" kind of a gal. Short story short, no park, no town, no nothing. 

I had been optimistic about the park existing, but now we were in the middle of nowhere at a crossroads 20 miles from Astoria and it was 7:15. Signs indicated a town a few miles away. There was a restaurant icon, a lodging icon, and an rv park icon on the sign, but when we rolled into Naselle a half hour later we found the only store in town closed, and the streets nearly deserted. When we finally found some locals and asked about camping, motels, or a restaurant nearby, everyone scratched their heads and looked confused. 'I guess there's the Sleepy Hollow Inn back up the road a ways' one of them said before adding 'you know, you're only 15miles from Astoria and they've got some real nice places to stay over there. 

A great debate ensued! Actually a slow, option-weighing, indecisive stand off. If the sun hadn't been so obviously setting we might have gone the extra distance. It was, so we ended up at the Ol Carol motel. It was actually pretty nice though I think we may have been their first customers in a while. The attached Ol Carol restaurant was no longer with us so we put together a gas station feast of mac n cheese, icecream, and popcorn and ate like five year olds while we did our laundry in the shower.

Rails to trails in Raymond

(Spoiler alert: it's fake)

Our bikes by the sea

Second generation clear cut. We saw a heard of elk here. 

The Ol' Carol Motel

-RaD

They sure know how to put the 'gray' in Grayland

Made it to Grayland beach yesterday! More to come when the phone isn't about to die. 

The ocean is cold! 

This is the path to our campsite. 

-rad

A very scenic ride

Yesterday, after a hearty breakfast of oatmeal and fruit, we packed up camp and said goodbye to our friends who'd biked out from Seattle with us. One thing you quickly learn about biking around all day is that you are always hungry. We hadn't made it 5 miles from camp before we took a detour and followed signs to a community pancake breakfast outside of Union. We ate many pancakes, and I had a second cup of coffee for the day (quitting is gonna be hard) 

Robyn broke her fork

After a while of riding on 101 in holiday weekend traffic, we decided to take a less busy and more scenic looking road. It turns out that more scenic roads mean more winding and hilly roads as well. 

After 50-ish miles of very scenic traveling, we stopped at Schafer State Park for the night. And cooked a lovely meal with veggies we picked up at farm stands along the way

We forgot to bring a cutting board

All the fixins ( we took some extra butter packets from the pancake breakfast for our sautéing)

Voila! 

-D

Day 1: On the road

There were hard final goodbyes this morning but we got all packed up, took off and made the (luckily) late 1:30 to Bremerton. Aunt Barbara and Liz were sweet enough to meet us on the other side and send us off with some ice cream.

 After surviving the fist bit on a less than ideal highway we had a pretty scenic ride most of the way. As soon as there were cars zooming by us on the rubble strewn highway shoulder I felt like I was on bike tour again.

When we arrived at Tawanoh state park at about 6 we saw an ominous "campsite full" sign. Good thing we weren't in cars! The park ranger kindly allowed us to camp in a day site because the hiker/biker one was full. Having camped in that site before I know how much we lucked out. close to the water but with a sound  barrier to the road. He only scolded us for showing up so late on a holiday weekend a little bit. 

-R

It's on!

Packing

We've been doing a lot of packing lately. Sometimes it's hard to decide what to bring and what to leave behind, but in the end there is a comforting realization that if we forget anything, we will be able to pick it up along the way, or just make do without it.

I think this is all we'll need...

One thing we will not be bringing a lot of is keys. Back when I was a teenager, one of my favorite teachers told me that the more keys you are responsible for, the less freedom you have in life. I'm not sure if this is always true, but there is a probably some circumstantial evidence to back it up. Two weeks ago during my last day of work before leaving my job to go on this trip, I took all of my work keys keys off of my keychain. Remaining were the key to my bike lock, the key to my house, the key to the lock for my cargo bike, and an unidentified key that I had assumed for a while was work related, but turned out not to open anything. I removed that key and put it in the garbage. My good friends Tom and Kelli are keeping watch over the cargo bike while I'm away, so I relinquished that key. Tomorrow I'm not going to live in a house anymore, so I will part with that key. For the next several months, the only key I will carry around will be the key to my bike lock. The grams of weight that we're saving aside, this is a pretty liberating feeling.

It is more keychain now than key

Today we tied up a few loose ends, cleaned up our bikes and drank many beers with friends.
Tomorrow we're hitting the road

Happy 4th of July!

-D