59.3 mi / 4:17:56 time / 13.8 mph avg. / 3178 ft. climbing
Staying at Umpqua Lighthouse State Park

The 52 degree morning was chilly enough that I wore my pants the first 5 miles into Yachats, where we had our first real breakfast of the trip (the usual of French Toast, sausage, and a large milk for me.)

Today’s ride was truly a coast ride, as we didn’t have many large bays to circle around to pull us inland. So it was just one vista after another of Oregon’s classic rocky coastline, sometimes dropping away hundreds of feet straight down to the inrushing tide, sometimes wreathed in fog, sometimes lit by bright sunshine, and sometimes that beautiful combination of the two where shafts of sun pierce through the pines as the fog rolls down the hill. Every quarter mile was worthy of a photo, but eventually you have to ride.

Well, first we took a short hike down to the tidepools to see all the critters making a living in that environment. My favorites were the fat-ass sea stars, who make no attempt to present themselves in that nicely symmetrical shape you see in a child’s book about animals. It’s nice to have Joel along as a guide, because he’s pretty much seen the entire coast by car, so he knows a lot of cool places to check out, or even local histories.

We had only made it 30 miles by the time we stopped for another fancy lunch at a riverside seafood restaurant in the old downtown of Florence (fish tacos, yay!) Then Joel got fueled up with an espresso at a coffee shop there, and once again pushed by tailwinds, we made really good time for the second half. His knee has been holding up fine, and it seems his concerns about it are fading away, which is cool.  In general, we’ve been working together even better than I thought we would. Sometimes he’s not exactly the most decisive guy in the world, but on this trip he’s definitely taken the lead and I think we’ve hit on a good balance from the get-go.

We did an ice cream and food/beer-for-camp stop in Winchester just before the campground. The ice cream was good for calories and energy, but maybe ill-advised at 62 degrees, except that we had a big hill to climb in the last mile to warm us up again. Samantha from Texas who we met last night made it to the hiker/biker sites just before we did, and then Martin and Pierrette (the Canadians that we again were leapfrogging all day) rolled in. Joel and I took a walk after dinner and found the lighthouse (they don’t build ’em here like they do on the East Coast, I guess because here they have big cliffs to put the stubby things on!) and then got a fire going with Samantha, and were later joined by the Canadians, and finally, a third Canadian (Leslie) rolled in at nightfall to join the party. Okay, not much of a party, but standing around a campfire and sharing travelers’ tales is a pretty exciting evening for touring cyclists, and we were even able to roast some marshmallows that I appropriated from the top of a Rice Krispie Treat I had picked up earlier!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2012 at 1:25 pm and is filed under 2012 Bike Tour, bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.