Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
than I usually would. (I'm not the most intrepid downhill rider in the world under any
circumstances.) My behind got good and sore. The last couple of hours, I watched my
odometer obsessively. Before I left, when people asked if I was in shape for a cross-coun-
try trip, I blithely said I'd be in better shape for it after two weeks. I certainly hope I was
right.
I met the Harts for dinner at a restaurant across the road from our motel. They were
taking the night off from canned and freeze-dried food and from sleeping on the ground.
Naturally I asked them the question that I'm constantly asking myself. They didn't have
any better explanation than I did.
“We just had a wild hair to do this,” Kevin said.
They don't have unlimited time; they'll stop in Crescent City, in northern California,
several days from now, rent a car, and drive home, but they're already planning to return
by car to Crescent City next year and complete the southward journey to Mexico.
“Then we'll do what you're doing,” Jennifer said to me, with what sounded like com-
plete conviction.
“What?” her husband said.
Thursday, July 21, McMinnville, Oregon
Jan is nine time zones away, so figuring out how to communicate with her is one of my
unanticipated problems. I'd like to call her now, but it's 5:00 a.m. in Paris, and I'll be
asleep by the time she gets up in an hour. She says I can wake her up anytime, but I find
I can't do that just to say “Hey, I'm lonely” or “Hey, what have I gotten myself into?”
This was a tough day, my second day. It rained all morning and I got soaked, first as
the Harts and I continued south on U.S. 101, and then, after fifteen miles, when I said
good-bye to them and turned east toward New York for the first time on the Nestucca
River road, a route suggested to me by Erik Tonkin, the bike store owner in Portland. It
was stunningly pretty, a winding path through the forest that, during the intervals the
rain wasn't falling, was shrouded in mist.
In the early afternoon, the sun came out, but I hit a couple of climbs that defeated
me—long but otherwise endurable slopes that tilted up suddenly and severely in the
last quarter mile, as though the road graders had miscalculated and realized at the last
minute that at the angle they'd laid out the road wouldn't reach the top. I had to dis-
mount a couple of times, sit down on a rock, catch my breath, and wait for my thighs
to stop quivering; the second one found me pushing the bike for a couple of hundred
yards, up over the summit. Damn.
Now, here's something I already knew. Part of long-distance cycling, a big part, ac-
tually, and a rewarding, even pleasurable part, has to do with enduring discomfort and
