Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
To wit: I haven't gotten anywhere yet. In fact, I've traveled one hundred miles in the
wrong direction.
On Monday morning—jeez, was that only yesterday?—I picked up my bike from Erik
Tonkin, who owns Sellwood Cycle Repair in Portland. A former racer who, like a lot of
cycle shop owners (and like a lot of people who work in or just hang around in cycle
shops) he is a promoter of bicycling in any form. Bicycling accommodates a subculture
of true believers, that's for sure, and Erik was a warm and enthusiastic counterbalance
with me from the shop along the Springwater bike trail on the Willamette River. They
led me over the Hawthorne Bridge and deposited me downtown where, for the first time,
I was left alone, thousands of miles from home, on my new bicycle. I was sorry to see
them go.
Since then I've done some shopping; I bought a tent and a sleeping bag at the local
REI, things I hadn't bought (or owned) in years. I've never been especially good at the
minutiae of camping, which includes matching tent pegs to eyelets, but I'd assumed that
during the time since I'd last tried to put up a tent on my own, the ingenuity of tent-
makers had solved the ineptitude problem embodied by the likes of me and that you
could pretty much just snap your fingers and the thing would stand up by itself, with
the tent flap invitingly unzipped and maybe a wood-burning fire cozily ablaze inside.
Not so, it turns out. I tried setting up the new tent in my hotel room last night, and
a Chaplinesque scene unspooled. At one point I managed to catch a tent peg in the lamp
cord and pull out the plug. At another I snagged my foot on a tent flap and tumbled over
the back of the sofa. After an hour or so I finally got the thing erect, with the rain tarp
slung over it and my new sleeping bag inside, though, alarmingly, there was a collapsible
pole with an elastic band strung through it lying extraneously on the bed. Yet another
reason to hope I never have to sleep on the ground.
This morning I packed and repacked my panniers and shipped home some clothes I
already knew I wouldn't need, or at least wouldn't miss. And then I loaded up the bike
and rode around town for a couple of hours, getting used to handling the extra weight,
maybe thirty-five pounds, on the rear. It was raining, and the road surfaces were slick. I
was a little wobbly. Gulp.
I knew before I arrived, of course, that Portland is about a hundred miles inland from
the Pacific coast, and that Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River, is a traditional
launching site for cross-country cyclists. But for reasons I'm not sure of, I didn't do much
