August 5, 2019
Day 1: Newberg to Salem
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We set the alarm for 6, hoping to get a jump on the day and avoid some of the forecast heat. The continental breakfast began at 6:30, so that fit the plan well. As free breakfasts in motels go, this one was very respectable. It included microwavable breakfast burritos, yogurt, bagels, apples, bananas, donuts, and suchlike. The lady tending the breakfast was very friendly, asking after where we were from and where we were going. This was great, but making it a little hard to stash some spare food for the road. This turned out to be important, because as it happened there was absolutely no place to resupply, for the duration of the day.
Donald Trump came on the TV in the breakfast room, in the aftermath of mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. The breakfast lady, clearly of Mexican origin, expressed the opinion that the first step would be to abandon racist rhetoric. Trump seemed to have some different proposals.
While turning in our room key, I realized that the man behind the counter was actually the motel owner. I had been apprciating the various touches that made this place perfect, within its genre. For example, in the pool, the brand new life preserver, reaching tools, power chair for lowering disabled people, on deck shower, regulation warning and instruction signs, exercise room, well balanced, clean water, etc. Even though "motel owner" may not seem like a very advanced occupation, I appreciated that he had to attend to bookings, supplies, equipment maintenance, capital and operating costs, parking, payroll, - so many things. We just told him we thought the place was great, but he deserved a lot of respect. He also suggested the best place to stash the van for while we were gone, and he invited us to leave it as long as we liked. He also also took our departing photo! Cool.
We followed our bikemap.net track from Newberg to the start of the Willmette scenic route. bikemap worked well, though there really was not much choice of routes. We were pleased to find a paved shoulders, some with bicycle designation, all the way. Traffic was at times heavy, but with the shoulder, this was more of a noise than a safety issue.
We came quite quickly to Champoeg, which after our own planning and after hearing about the route from several friends, had become a famous name. We did not actually go into the park, but just steamed along the route, which runs along one of the boundaries.
In terms of roads through the day, what we found was just as others had described it to us. Paved shoulders were rare, but there were some. In general we travelled on quiet country roads, and we found all the drivers to be courteous. In fact at several uncontrolled intersections drivers just stopped dead on the highway and waited for us to pass. Many roads had a lot of traffic from single and tandem gravel trucks. Remarkably, many of these just dawdled behind us, waiting for the safest place to pass. Ad in every single case, they gave us a lot of clearance.
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5 years ago
The most remarkable part of the day's experience was the countryside we passed through. Avi and I agree that you could easily call this a crop theme park. Except that there were no signs or narrated tours, the sights came thick and fast enough for this to feel almost planned. We saw huge orchards of hazelnut, shade and ornamental tree nurseries of all types, and acres and acres of hops. Then there were apples, plums, broccoli, strawberries, and blueberries. Blueberries! Oh my, we have never seen such productive bushes.
One of the most fun crops to see was marijuana. It' s quite something to see the bushy plants extending off to the horizon, in neat rows. Clearly their growers are very serious and level headed. Our only prior impression of a dope industry is from the Kootenays in British Columbia, in the old days. Then you would expect little patches cut into the forest, and police searching for them with helicopters. Now the plants just share huge fields with broccoli's or carrots.
To be sure there is a bit of a trick and some confusion to this. One field declared that it was industrial hemp, and not marijuana. Surprisingly, this one field was the only planting surrounded by barbed wire. This possibly could be one that was the real thing, while others could in fact be hemp.
From reading Willamette Week newsletter, we see that there are over 1000 growers of marijuana in Oregon. But we also learned that there truly is a hemp industry as well. Only thing, the hemp growers are not making rope, they are making CBD. Often the authorities can not or do not recognize a difference between that and CBD/THC (psychoactive), and have shut down CBD producers. Meanwhile, there is such a flood of THC producing fields that the price has dropped to less than half, which is a disaster for this agricultural sector.
The temperature went up well beyond the forecast 33, but did not quite hit 40 C. Still, it was quite tiring, and we took a lot of care to keep ourselves and the kids drinking water. We stopped in the shade for a drink opposite one farm house, and had a lady exit with an armful of cold water bottles. That was really kind, and in fact that water made things a lot easier for us. Aside from the courteous car and truck drivers, we only ran into one other resident during the ride. We had stopped by a paddock housing miniature donkeys, just as the farmer passed on the road in his truck. He stopped ad told us about the donkeys. The baby is just one month old. He said his wife had quit raising children and moved to raising donkeys!
The kids had a keen eye for fauna, particularly birds. Many of these shots are theirs.
Feeling that we had lots of time, we left our track and went for a look around Willamette Mission Park. There is not too much there, but we did find a nice and shady picnic table. We hung out in the shade, cooling down, for over an hour. The road in to the park is lined with Marion berry bushes. More accurately, the road cuts through acres and acres of them. The vines all look so healthy and bushy! We always feel inspired in farm country to go home and do better with our meagre plantings.
The route meandered this way and that, and in time seemed never ending. The kids were amazing. They just kept doggedly following Dodie, and never seemed to really tire or complain. Well OK, 18 minutes into the ride Violet did ask are we there yet. But she quickly came to realize that this was to be a long long slog.
Once we were at Salem, we had to leave our Willamette track and make our way to the motel, which we had marked in the GPS, but without a route. Dodie just eyeballed the map and tried to choose good roads to get to the goal. About 2 km away what should happen but a flat in Avi's rear tire!
In the heat, and after a long day, a flat could be exasperating. But to the kids this was an adventure. They wanted to see what it was, how it was, and they wanted to follow or help with every step of the repair. Fortunately, at the last minute before leaving Seattle, we had woken up to the fact that would be travelling with 24" bikes, with nuts and not quick releases, and in an environment where flats were likely. We had quickly bolstered our repair capability with an adjustable wrench, patches, and a spare tube. So ha ha, this flat was just part of the fun, rather than any sort of real frustration. Violet was the main illustrator of the flat scene:
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With a Rohloff on a Thorn bike the chain tension is set via an eccentric bottom bracket which only needs adjustment after the chain wears so:
Set gear in 1 or 14
Unscrew thumb screw and remove external shift box
Undo quick release
Drop wheel out of vertical dropouts
To replace wheel reverse procedure, the only trap for young players is to ensure that your shifter is back in 1 or 14 because it can and does rotate freely as all indexing takes place jnside the hub.
Once you have done this once or twice it is a lot easier than working your way around a derailleur.
5 years ago
Tonight's motel is a Howard Johnson, and while not quite up to last night's standard, is still super - with fridge and coffee maker, and space to easily swallow our bikes. The pool, outdoor this time, and not quite so clean, was still cool and much appreciated by the kids and us too. Around the corner was a selection of fast food type restaurants. We chose a Mexican one, and were pleased to hear our order called out to the kitchen staff in Spanish. What came is pretty normal for Mexican food, but it really hit the spot - fresh, wholesome, tasty. Just so great after a long hot cycle.
Tomorrow's distance promises to be just like today's. So we will again wake up early, hope for an edible breakfast, grab some extra bananas, and go for it. This time we have a new found confidence in the endurance of the kids. It should be swell.
Two final impressionistic shots from Avi:
Today's ride: 75 km (47 miles)
Total: 160 km (99 miles)
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