Day Ten – 6/3/08

We finally made it into Oregon yesterday. We've been averaging a shade over 50 miles a day, but that includes a few half days, so I'm not too disappointed with the average. After nine days of riding, we decided to take a rest day today. I'm not sure whether that was a good or poor decision, because it rained fairly had last night and effectively forced to stay put. Anyone who has spent more than a couple of hours holed up in a tent can attest to the strange pace life takes in tent filled with all of one's smelly gear and reading a paperback in the gray light filtered through the tent. The rain has since let up and we've dried out all our gear.

Upon arrival at the campsite last night, we met a noteworthy guy, Art, who was in the midst of a “peacewalk”, (I put in quotes because I'm not sure peacewalk is an actual noun), from Mexico to Canada. I couldn't quite figure out how walking actually promotes peace – he did give PeterB and I stickers – but I was impressed by his level of commitment. I asked him if he was going into Vancouver, to which he replied, “I can't go into Canada”. I was not surprised by that.

We spent the good part of the last three days in Humboldt County, and here are my observations regarding this almost mythical place: it's a very beautiful county with some stretches of stunning coastline and incredibly majestic old growth Redwood tree stands. It was certainly unlike any place I've ever been to. On the flip side of the coin, there were a lot of odd things going on in those woods. We rode though some fairly remote sections of the forest and I saw a truck that had recently been obliterated by shotgun fire, dead animal skins on the side of the road that had obviously been skinned by human hands, and tons of heavily gated properties – which from what I could see were usually little more than a shack, a trailer or two on blocks and ALWAYS a rusted out old VW microbus in the weeds. I'm not sure how active the hippie weed growing core still is, but we saw a number of 'hydroponic and gardening' supply shops. One other thing of note: in the 18-35-year-old male demographic there were two extremes with almost no permutation. 1) Most guys drove full sized, often Diesel, pickup trucks with huge mudder tires on them, (although there was little evidence that anyone needed them). In this day of high gas prices it was no small wonder that anyone, much less almost every young guy would drive these things, or 2) Dreadlocked and/or overalled hemp patchuli -smelling guy who drives an old Mercedes diesel, (converted to bio-diesel now). No in between that I saw......

We've decided to make a break eastward toward Eugene once we get to Florence, OR, about 175 miles north of here. The headwinds have been fairly brutal and we both figured we'd have a better time riding when the winds are helping up going east as opposed to hindering us going north. The new route will take us to Missoula, MT, were we'll head a little further north to hook up with our original route. The new maps should be in Florence for us to pick on Friday.

Some German tourists are trying to ask me something. I have to go....