Two Grads and a Dad Bike Across the USA: Day 1

Mileage: 38.5
From: Newport, OR
To: Carl G. Washburne State Park

We finished our first real day! Tonight is our first night really camping, and we’re in Carl Washburne’s State Park. The campsites on the Oregon coast are amazing. We have a nice fire, and we heated boxed Stagg chili in a pot of water in the fire because we don’t have any stove fuel yet. It’s a little bit chilly, and I’m worried I’ll be too cold when we hit real cold weather. Right now it feels a lot like fall on the east coast, so it’s kind of difficult to beat!

The bikes needed a lot of adjusting today, so we took a lot of breaks tweaking things. We got into some hills at the end of the day, and the extra weight didn’t seem too bad. When we get to the Rockies we’ll probably start chucking stuff.

So far we’ve been really lucky with food. We ate at a great seafood place in Waldport. Oysters on the west coast are amazing, although that sounds a little sacrilegious coming from a Chesapeake-bay-er. We’re loving the seafood on the coast in general.

The coast of Oregon is absolutely beautiful. However, taking the bikes on the beach may have been a mistake. It was the biggest ordeal thus far. We didn’t even ride the bikes on the beach, but sand got EVERYWHERE and really gunked things up. Plus the bikes were incredibly hard to push in dry sand when they were loaded down with gear. It took a great deal of cleaning to get things functional again, but hopefully we got some good pictures out of it!

Oregon is pretty biker-friendly, but we have been yelled at by drivers a couple of times. Restaurant/business owners are pretty understanding. This morning we met a guy at the rental car company who did the TransAm in the seventies. The coolest bike-friendly thing was a bridge without a shoulder that had a button you could push that made a sign flash to tell drivers there were bikes on the bridge.