Days 71 - 73: Central Oregon

We left Mt. Vernon late in the morning, anticipating a relatively easy 60-mile ride to Mitchell. I'm not sure what, if anything, informed this anticipation, but boy was it misguided. It got hot, and there was this long climb through a canyon that just didn't end. Or rather, we didn't know when it was going to end -- it came as a complete surprise -- so it felt like it just didn't. Also the wind was back. The landscape was great, with these bizarre striated rock shelves jutting out of the earth and a cool, mossy-banked creek tempting us all the while. We were later told that we missed some really cool fossil sites and other geological oddities; this sort of thing seemed to happen more often during the last week or two of the trip, as first crater lake and then the coast were calling to us. Anyway, then we ran out of water (which we had already been drinking sparingly) about an hour from town. With the wind and the heat and the climbing, it just took us a lot longer to get to Mitchell than we had planned for, and consequently there above with the water. I started to get kind of worried, given my previous experience with heat masculinity overload, but then there was this four mile 7% downhill and we made up a lot of time.

"Comfortable Elegance"

We stayed at the Oregon Hotel for $41, and shared the single bathroom on the second floor with the other occupants (there were none). The place was really charming in a threadbare way, and the "continental breakfast" of a muffin and cup of coffee was fantastic. The proprietor invited me into her home (in the hotel) so that I could bleach our water bottles. There was a black cat. Also we had great hamburgers at the Little Pine Cafe.

City Hall in Prineville, OR

The next day there was an even bigger climb, but we knew about it in advance and got out early so it was actually really nice. We rode up into the Ochoco NF and hit the pass at around 5,000 ft. just after we saw a pack of five older guys headed to Maine with one of their wives driving a support vehicle. They were really nice and said that we looked like swimmers, which I think was a compliment. One of them mentioned that they heard we had some pretty big hills out east, and Bonesy and I looked around at the mountains and wondered what the heck they were talking about. From there it was on to Prineville and Redmond, where we stopped for iced tea before riding the last 20 of 83 miles into Bend.

See? Like a swimmer.

In the cafe we stopped at we met two motorcyclists, Sam and Clyde, who were on their way back to Eugene after touring around the desert for a week. We got to talking, asking where each other was going, and it turned out they were headed to Bend and staying in the house of a friend who owned the place and kept in vacant for just such occasions. They invited us to stay with them, so we totally did, and stayed up talking about this thing they do where they go to Mexico and build houses for people without houses. I think one of them was a Quaker. They were incredibly generous and good-hearted, open-minded and honest, and they insisted that we take the bed even though they were old guys. The next morning they took off and we stuck around until two getting breakfast and riding around town. Bend is a neat place that seems to be just all about the recreation. This day probably deserved its own post, because those guys' generosity completely made our day and set the tone for an awesome end of the trip. It's all too fleeting.

Pahoehoe lava south of Bend, OR. Also the Cascades.

That afternoon we rode down route 97 to Crescent, which is not much of anything other than a way point between Bend and Klamath Falls, CA. I guess it was probably a logging town at one point -- you see a lot of that in central Oregon. We saw some lava fields and, at a distance, the Cascades. It was only like 45 or 50 miles, and kind of boring, but we were basically staging the ride to Crater lake. We got into town as it was getting dark, and we almost stayed at this really dirty RV park on the outskirts for $12, but then we rode all the way through and found a much better place (with laundry!) for only $15. Further proof that this section of the ride was somehow blessed: we saw the neon sign glowing through the pines just as we were about to turn around.

Ride on.