Whoa There
OK, so I didn't go 34 miles to the spectacular dune place, I went 16 miles to a fairly nice hiker/biker site a little north of Heceta Head, at the Carl G. Washburn Memorial State Park. Who was Carl G. Washburn? I don't know, but it's the nicest hiker/biker site I've been in for awhile, so he must've been a good guy. I was getting tired of hearing the traffic on 101 at night. Here, all I can hear is the ocean, about a half mile away through the forest. Cell signal here is weak, but my kung-fu is strong, so I'll be able to post.
Not that there's much to tell. I woke up this morning with a bit of a sore throat, which could have just been from the cold night air, but I was also feeling a bit blah and tired, so I decided to halve my mileage. It's a good thing I did, because my body is threatening a walkout if I don't give it a rest day, and this is a good site to take one in. So I will.
This morning I discovered that my first tube patching job was not, in fact, inadequate, because there was another pinhole in the tube, onto which I slapped another patch (Remo Tip-Top touring patches, for those who want to know...anything else is a waste of time, especially those puny self-adhesive laughable pseudo-patches, feh). I also put bits of electrical tape over the rough places on the inside of the tire surface that were wearing holes in the tube. Kevlar is tough, but the shoulders here are so covered with gravel and other bits of assorted pointiness that even the miracle fiber sometimes snaps under the impacts, creating little rough spots that work their way into soft inner tube material over time.
I had a good climb over Cape Perpetua, where the road winds up along a mountainous shoreline, offering views of rocky coast and spuming white waves crashing in the sun. Those are the kind of sights that make me laugh out loud as I pedal, because they're so wondrous and it's so absurd that I'm looking at them from the cockpit of my five-wheeled freakmobile with its banners crackling in the breeze on the side of a mountain.
Before I got to the park, I decided that I would cook breakfast for dinner: pancakes, bacon, and OJ, and damn the sloppy KP afterwards. The little RV park grocery in Searose Beach had all the ingredients: a box of Bisquick, a small package of bacon (the last one!), a little bottle of OJ. I stashed the bacon in the Bug next to the laptop and made the five miles to camp before it thawed, and after my traditional welcome shower fried up the whole lot, and ate it all with four fat Bisquick pancakes. Yes! Now I am tired and a little chilly, but full of camp-style breakfast food, and I just realized that if I put my socks on I will be warm, so that's something.
And now: rocks and water in a pleasing arrangement.
