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Stage 4: ‘Urting legs of Rubber. Florence OR

So our ‘sunny day’ was overcast, and like all the other days, we had wet roads most of the time. After breakfast with a guy who we concluded must be an escaped con, we got on the road ‘an hour late’ and started south. The first 30 miles rocked by quickly. Dr Evil hooked up the bob again on the run into lunch, and was confronted by a 3.5 mile climb. I spent my time taking photo’s and having pee breaks.

After some Mexican food, we decided we’d better get on with covering the next 75 miles of the day’s ride. Eventually our climbing for the day reached the 4000 foot mark, and we stopped and saw some stunning vistas.

Yesterday morning in the dark we passed a few guys doing a ‘low’ tech tour. K-Way rain gear pulling a trailer with a rubber maid, though the thing that impressed me most was that they were each wearing Teva Sandals in the rain. Today we saw the other end of the spectrum, when we passed a couple who were heading out on a 3 year tour with a budget of $20 a day and planning on ‘becoming as skinny as you two fellows’. They had some impressive gear, including a custom tandem recumbent tricycle with internal gearing, and full tenting gear.

Oregon has a coastal bike route marked, which means that when there are quieter (and usually longer) routes beside the 101 they’re marked, so that navigation is almost fool proof. It did mean that we rode 135 miles for a 125 net gain.

So far we’ve been pretty lucky on our wait staff, but tonight we had Chinese food and our waitress was a very talkative lady who’d played internationally for the Chinese volleyball team. No mean feat, and as well as making fun of me from the get go, she had some great stories, even if we didn’t always quite understand each other.

For those of you keeping tabs on past entries, after 5 weeks of training I managed to eek out 53 pushups back in Late September, thus regaining my lost ‘manhood’. Mother was greatly relieved to say the least, though she only counted 52.