Date: Friday, August 20, 2010
Start: 0930ish (0600 Wake-up)
Finish: 2300
Travel Time: 13.5 hrs
Distance: 528 miles
Total Distance Covered: 1004 miles
So we totally re-evaluated our route. Yesterday's trip put the today's journey (650 miles) into perspective. We decided to head towards Bend instead of Portland. This would knock off over 100 miles from our destination and Bend ain't a bad place to reroute through. After Bend we'd try to get to Spokane tomorrow and then get to the trail the following day. We both had sore shoulders and back from what had been the longest day either of us have ever spent straddling a moto. I was waaay too tense on the ride into SF last night and my wrists and hands were paying for it this morning. Today's mission: 650 miles to Portland, OR, our longest mileage day of the trip. Again we woke up with good intentions of hitting the road early, but felt we should fuel up the tummies for the mission. We found a cafe with some guhhhoooood n dope bacon and eggs sandwiched between some classic SF sourdough. We tooled around some of the back side streets in SF and stumbled upon Hyde St. and its 27% grade made us feel like we were going up the first hill of a roller coaster. We weren't far from the Golden Gate and eventually made our way across. The fog hadn't lifted yet, but we still had a good view of one of America's most iconic landmarks.
We worked our way through Napa Valley and ran into some strip malls, so we thought it would be a good time to hit up a Best Buy and try to transfer the GPS data from Yobo's device to mine. When I started unpacking I realized I had actually lost all of the memory cards for my helmet cam. This hurt because Best Buy was charging almost twice what I paid for them...bahhhhh. We worked our way over to the Geek Squad counter to see how they could help two guys dressed like storm troopers in critical need of an electronic data transfer for the success of their mission. Turns out, Best Buy didn't think this was as critical as we did. At least within a reasonable time and cost. We'd have to pay over $300 and he couldn't even get to it right away. We could have built a new PC for that money and time. We left dejected but with a micro-SD reader that we could hopefully utilize to complete our transfer, at a hotel down the road. On our way out, we realized it wasn't a straight-forward entrance back onto Route 5 so we asked what looked to be an older couple. They were cute and argued a bit about which way was best.
The ride up Rt 5 wasn't the most exciting and we ran into some traffic. We made a mid-afternoon pit-stop at a diner. Traffic eventually cleared up and we approached the mountains around Mt. Shasta. We fueled up and got a little extra energy boost from Shasta peering over us. We rode some goofy circles in the rear lot of the gas station and were on the road again. We hopped off Rt 5 and got on Rt 97. Turns out Rt 97...is a pretty nice road and offered a great change of scenery. The sun was starting to set as we made our way to Klamath Falls. Our meals were all out of wack so we had ice cream for dinner. As we sat on the curb, one of the local mom's started to ask about our trip and warned us of the "Midgies" as we rode around Upper Klamath Lake. Apparently these bugs could take over and make a mess out of the highways and windshields. We were lucky and didn't have that bad of an experience. Again, the scenery was totally unexpected and the sunset over Upper Klamath Lake was nice and good and red and orange and pretty.
The miles and fatigue kicked in as we entered our last stretch to Bend. You wouldn't think you could doze off on the motorcycle, but when your head starts to drop and eyes close, that means it's time to do something. We stopped for some Red Bull to get me through the last couple miles. The last stretch was kinda nuts because it was the darkest road we'd ever ridden. We hopped in the draft of a tractor trailer so he could clear the way of any rogue deer that tried to cross the highway. As we got closer the white lines went away and there were lots of cones and reflectors and it totally felt like some space highway video game. Well guess what? We totally got the high score, cuz we rolled into Bend just after 1100. Crazy long day. We parked our bikes to find some eats and lodging and got approached by some Bendly friendlies. From then on they would be known as "The Mayors of Bend" cuz it seemed like they owned the place. They recommended McMinimans for some late night grub and we hopped on it. Our server Ginger had some extra energy and was super nice. We scarfed down our dinner just after midnight and found a cheap hotel to rest our weary bodies.
So our vow yesterday to not ride late night lasted...well...it didn't. It was nice to survive today.
/s/ Goda
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