Tuesday - 53 miles - Day 3 of Tour

***Sara's comment's in BOLD face type--and a qualifier: I tend to spend a good bit of our limited evening room time talking to Mr. Northcut, so my thanks to Dave for taking the lead on our updates! I do play editor-in-chief, as well as commentator however. And all the smiley faces are mine as well, shocker.)

Greetings all. Before I begin our daily recap of the day, I will just say that tonight's posting will be significantly shorter than our previously verbose posts for a couple of reasons. After 59 miles of riding, one is significantly more tired than on other rides, and we have an opportunity to sleep in tomorrow, so the chance of getting some much needed rest is a priority. Also, I have caught a bit of a cold over the past day that I am trying to fight off, so again rest will play a major part in the overall enjoyment of the trip and in our ability to then relay our wonderful experiences back to our friends and fam. :) We really concentrated on cycling today, so our picture taking was limited, plus we thought the camera battery was about to die.

Last night we spent the night in Tillamook, a big dairy farming area. Now for those of you who realize that milk has many steps before you pick it up from the grocery store, you would quickly realize that 'dairy farm area' will bring thoughts of certain.... aromas shall we say. So we quickly learned how to breathe out of our mouths and headed out of town, post haste!! Though only after a seriously kickin' breakfast at 7am. Omlettes were the order of the day for us both--mine with spinach, tomatoes, and Gruyere, David's with ham, mushrooms and cheddar--all cheese from the local dairy farm that we'd visited the day before. Hashbrown cassrole was perfect accompaniment to cheesy eggs and toast! Mmmmm. Eating might be my favorite activity, second only to cycling of course, on this trip. Well, and sleep.

In our morning 'route talk' Johnny told us that today was going to be the most difficult day of riding on the trip, and he was right!! At mile 8 we had a SERIOUS 2-mile steep climb up to a state park viewing area. Since it was cold and I was fighting back the sniffles, I decided to save my energy for the miles yet to come in the day as it warmed up a bit, so I took the van up the 2 mile hill while Sara chugged out the hill in the saddle.... (and was first of the group to make it to the top, ahe, ahe). Now for those of you calling me a wuss, don't worry I made up for it later.

The viewing area at the top of the hill again gave us some wonderful views looking out over the cliffs. The cliffs literally fall off into the ocean. Cliffs that were 100-200 feet STRAIGHT UP!!! The park area also had a tree that Johnny called the "octopus tree" It was crazy!!!! 8 or more limbs that are as big around as most regular trees.

After the views we took off for a 30 mile ride before lunch through all sorts of, yet again, beautiful country, though not without a good bit of difficult terrain that fully initiated us into the cycling community. Sara and I commented that we can no longer say that "we are just getting into cycling." We're into it, and it's SO MUCH FUN!!!!

There were some fairly difficult climbs, and wonderful declines, which I'm thinking may have led to a bit of my sniffles. You really work up a sweat climbing the hills, then the wind is almost cold as it blasts by you on the way down.

A lot of the morning ride was along the Pacific coast, which made for great distraction from what work was going on from the torso down..... (don't even go there, you know what I mean)

We had a great pub-fare lunch at the Pelican Pub in Pacific City, right on the beach with volleyball players (yeah, Brad!), kite fliers and other people out enjoying a Tuesday afternoon. (where and when do THEY work?? I want to fly a kite and play beach volleyball on Tuesdays at 1:00pm. WTF???)

Anyway we headed out for a 20+ ride in the afternoon with yet more challenging terrain, including some climbs that elicited a few "COME ON DAVE" blurts from me. When we did have some flats Sara and I always took advantage of the chance to get some quality brother/sister talk time. On one such occasion, as we were chatting away, we were also quickly approaching our tour van that was parked along the side with other cyclists hanging around. We figured they were all just getting things on their bikes checked or what not... so we hollered, waved, and subsequently whizzed by them, heading for the gargantuan hill looming in front of us. It looked like a big guy, so we tried to gain as much momentum as possible at the bottom to help us on the climb to the top. Did I mention already that this was a tough hill? Well, we were really concentrating on keeping efficient pedal strokes and attacking this hill with all we had in us. I mean, the sooner you get to the top, the sooner you down the other side. We got probably about a mile up the hill, when we heard "Hey!!!!.......SARA!!!......HEY!!!!!!!.......TURN AROUND!!!!!!" coming from behind us. Steve, another cyclist in our group, had chased us up this HUGE hill to tell us that... we were going in the wrong direction, slump! Sure enough, we were supposed to turn left at the van, and had been told at the route talk that "if you find yourself going up hue-!*#$*@#$, long hill.... you're going in the wrong direction" WHOOPS!!!!

So when we finally got back down to where we supposed to turn, my odometer matched exactly with were our course chart matched up with that directive. So any of the mileage lost by taking the van the first time... I made it up, SEE!!! THERE! Right. navigator extraordinaire. Did he mention who is the one keeping track of directions for us as we ride. Uh, huh. I'll give you a clue. It's not me. :)

But nonetheless, we got going in the right direction again, and promised Steve that we would buy our rescue ranger beers at dinner. And so we carried on. Finally, we entered another state park, where the climb lasted FOREVER!!! A solid 8 miles of gut-check climbing. When we at last reached the top, we both expressed sighs of great accomplishment. To the tune of savage crys of joy let loos acorss the mountain top. Followed by belting out lines from some of our songs of the day. We then met up with our group outside of the Otis Cafe in Otis, and hopped in the van to our hotel for the night.

Dinner was our "nice dinner" of the trip so we all donned our semi-dressy-yet-rugged-reflective apparel and headed out for another surf-and-turf dinner. The food was wonderful, again with a spectacular view, yet the creeping exhaustion still came over us, and we were 'thinking kindly of our beds.'


Today sets up to be a relaxing day, with a short ride and time to hangout around Newport, will be ready for a little respite and recharge.



Songs for the day
Carry on My wayward son - Kansas
Crosstown Traffic - Jimi Hendrix
Ride - G. Love
Let it Ride - Ryan Adams