Adventioneering

I slabbed I-5 down to Eugene yesterday, and then cut across to Florence OR via Hwy-126 (which is a pretty ride). Florence has some nice beaches, and I got a cheap hotel room and sat on the beach until I got hungry and headed off into town for Dinner. BJ’s ice cream leads to the humorous “BJ parking” sign in the back of the establishment.

The next morning I woke up and it looked like it was thinking about raining, and I was worried about being cold as I rode up the coast, but it cleared up and turned out to be a beautiful day. HWY 101 through Oregon is what I remembered, the snatches of amazing strung together with long strings of pretty.

I had the most amazing crab omlet (the special) in one of the anonymous little towns on the way up the coast. The poor waitress had just destroyed her eighth! cell phone by pouring dr. pepper on it; she apparently can go through these things faster than Victoria can go through nav units.

Riding into Astoria one of the local cops had the traffic blocked off; curiously and friendly enough he was asking everyone if they knew where they were going. They had some sort of festival thing going on, and everyone seems to mess up the 30/101 interchange anyways even though its obvious, so why not have an official town welcome I guess? Beats a ticket any day of the week.

I was happy to be in Astoria again with some free time to check off something I’d wanted to do since I was a kid; checkout the Goonie’s house. It is indeed still there and looking fairly bright and freshly painted. There were several other groups of people checking it out as well, so I wonder what it’s like to live in a place where people are constantly walking by. The owners must love the attention though, as they seem very friendly towards it.

From the house I could hear the strangest noise, which turned out to be a ton of Sea Lions that had invaded some local commercial docks. It was quite the sight; I had never seen them in the wild before although I understand it’s fairly common. If I could see some seals next, that’d be great.

I got lost heading back; I wanted to go up to Bremerton via 4/107/whatever and ended up taking 4 east to I-5 instead. This was a blessing in disguise, as 4 seems freshly paved and is an absolute godsend of a motorcycle road, bouts of twisties linked with long generous sweepers and sparse traffic. It runs along a river valley, linking the water with the coastal range mountains.

The bike performed flawlessly, no problems. I found that I could ride between 50 to 75 miles comfortably before I needed to rest for 10 or fifteen minutes; I rode a 150 mile leg towards the end on the way back and I really regretted it, my shoulders and neck are still on fire. All told I think the trip was somewhere between 800 and 900 miles. My best tank was 2.2 gallons into 120 miles, or 54MPG.

Photos.