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I do’t like freeways nor congested cities, well I got my fill going through Vancouver and down to the border, into the US, strangely enough no major questions asked by the lass in the border control, it must be my good looks and impeccable dress and spotlessly clean motor bike.
I stay in yet another motel around Bellingham as my plans were to visit the Boeing factory.
Quite interesting but I would have liked more technology.
So then I went up to the Olympic(?) peninsula and followed the coast aiming for Aberdeen, it looked good on the map but reality was another thing.
The sun had chosen to go away as well as the fog rolled in from the ocean it got cold or at least cool.
They've got rain forests out there, some people call it the North Wet instead of the North West, so I’ve seen that as well, rain forests that far north.
Much of it is a National Park and it has some mighty trees to put it mildly, a couple of those would be enough to build a house.
I ended up in Raymond, some little one horse town
in yet another dingy motel, but when you’re you’re tired you're not picky and the bed was good enough.
The local inn had a choice between hamburgers and hamburgers and split pea soup.
So yet another hamburger, luckily enough I’d spotted a Vietnamese restaurant earlier on and had a nice meal there, the best so far on this trip.
That Vietnamese place saved my day.
No breakfast included in the, for the place it was, high price, so I waited until 8 o’clock and went down High Street and got standard Yankee fare, eggs, hash brown and toast.
Luckily enough for me and my waist it did not float around in a sea of grease.
The coffee , as per standard, was like having sex in a canoe, fucking close to water.
Further south in the nice town of Astoria I got a map of Oregon as as of then the sate of Washington was history.
According to the nice ladies at the visitor’s centre I was the first guy who got the new motor cyclist’s guide to Oregon.
The map come with the very good idea of wearing protection while
you ride, preferably ATGATT, all the gear all the time.
No beanie helmets, nor shorts nor flip-flops.
A lot of the locals don’t follow these recommendations, the Harley crowd aka Pirates prefer ass lees chaps and a beanie helmet and hope that their chrome and God will protect them-
God must be around because I’ve never seen so many different churches and chapels as in the US.
So I followed the map and went into the Columbia river gorge and even crossed the ”Bridge of God”.
The yanks tend to dramatise things a bit, it was puny little bridge.
A bit like the ” Top of the world highway” that goes from Alaska to the Yukon via Chicken, it’s highest point would be regarded as a minor bump on the high planes of Bolivia and Peru.
I started to look for somewhere to stay but at it was the first of July everything was sold out, or closed or were just imaginations by Mssrs Garmin.
I turned south in Hood river and rode upwards towards Mount Hood who had the good manners of being totally free of clouds.
A lot of
hours later, already having had enough of the green tunnel, a brazilian,, no an zillion fir trees later I ended up in Detroit.
The road was nice enough but there was nothing more to see than trees and more trees and yet more again, it got rather boring after a few hours of that.
I did not see one single animal of any kind, how very different from the Yukon that abounded with wild life.
Next town from Detroit was 150 km away and everything was booked out, big red sigs with ”No Vacancy” shone at both inns.
So I had to camp, good job that I brought the gear
I got to camp for free in the motel garden and a couple riding a tandem bicycle up and down the hills of Oregon helped me put up the tent.
I’ve never liked to camp and I’ll never like to camp, the epitome of discomfort in my point of view, it was cheap though.
I shared beers. tales of traveling and dinner, surprise surprise, another burger, with the American couple and watched a very nice show of fire works over the lake.
Then I crawled into my home away from home, and spent a good part of the evening listening to the people in the RV park getting drunk and shouting.
There was no comfort to be found after hours of twisting and turning I fell asleep and woke up felling as I had spent the night wrestling with a Grizzly.
So a plate of eggs, hash brown and toast later I went back to the coast aiming to get to Highway 101 again and follow it don to LA.
The imagined fight with the grizzly made me stop in Florence and get a room in a very posh and very many dollars B&B.
One free night and one expensive, and they serve sherry and cakes at 5.30 pm so I’ll nip down now and have a glass or three, hopefully it’ll be a dry sherry.
Well it wasn't dry but quite drinkable.
Got myself a good night's sleep and headed down south following the highway 101 south and hustled down to Fort Bragg.
Doing that I passed though one of the marvels on this trip, the Redwood forests and it's tiny trees, for those
of you who have read Tolkien's Ring saga I'll just say that the Ent's probably had the redwood trees as a model.
Absolutely magnificent and a magic place to boot.
From Fort Bragg I took the famous California highway 1 south, it actually starts in Legett but who cares, it's motor biker's paradise and the weather gods were with me, sunshine the whole way bar the few occasions when the fog rolled in from the cold Pacific.
Enough curves to make you happy and feeling like a king.
If there had been less cars on the road....
Stop over in San Fransisco and I walked around there for the rest of the day playing tourist, in many places very dirty and a lot of homeless people and drug deals going down in broad daylight.
The only reason I stopped there was to get a new rear tyre, the coarse roads up north had taken their toll as expected.
I got invited to stay over in the house of a fellow adventure rider in San Luis Obispo, as the highway 1 south of SF has suffered a few landslides it was not possible to
follow the coast.
In land the temperature went up to well over 40C, not so much fun when your all dressed up in black riding gear, it was so hot that the engine temp went up at freeway speeds, a phenomenon I've never seen before.
California was dry as a bone and only the irrigated fields were green, I almost missed the rain ;-).
Going through LA to get to the place where I was going to store the bike was no fun, terrible traffic that was on full at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
So 30 hours later I sat on my own couch drinking wine with my dear wife.
Conclusions: the best bang for the bucks was definitely the Icefield Parkway in Canada, the Redwood forest and the bears.
The only things that sucked big time was the rain and the coffee, one was cold and the other weak, not much off a difference between them really.
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