Wednesday June 10, 2015

It was sad to leave Portland and our new friends, Lauren and David.

The people we met in Portland were very friendly and kind. We followed bike routes all the way out of Portland, it was so safe and easy. We crossed the Hawthorne Bridge and then followed the river route out of downtown Portland and away. We used the Hawthorne Bridge because it has a counter showing the number of cyclists that have crossed that day and up to date this year. We were the 2187 and 2188 cyclist to cross the bridge that morning and it was only 9:15 am.!! To date there has been over 200,000 cyclists cross that bridge.

There are four bicycle friendly bridges in Portland and a couple more that cyclists can use but do not have cycle lanes. Stephen our dinner companion on Sunday night said that there were between 10,000 and 12,000 cyclists cycling to work every day using those.

We had a lovely ride to St. Helens for lunch. The route was primarily farmland with some hilly views thrown in for good measure, it was a nice easy, flat ride.

I knew it was going to be close to 90 kms not including the ride out of Portland and to our hosts house in Longview. It was a long ride for us.

After lunch we called Art, our host for tonight, who was going to cycle out to meet us and show us the way to his home.

We met Art about 15 kms outside of Longview, he told us at this park area there used to be nuclear plant – the pond is probably toxic.

Art chatted as we cycled until we got closer to Longview. He stopped at this lookout point to give us a quick history of Longview – the timber capital of Washington.

You can just make out in this picture the different coloured water. The grey silty colour at the back is that colour because of the run-off from Mount St. Helens.

Mount St. Helens blew its top in 1980 (actually it blew the side of the mountain). They had very little warning that it was going to happen, it was terrifying for them.

He warned us about the bridge that we were about to cross., the Longview Bridge.

Although it had a good shoulder, it was full of debris and sometimes you just had to run over it as a logging truck was right next to you and you could not go into the roadway.

I am so glad Art came out to meet us and also to warn us about the bridge, the shoulder was wide which is better than most of the bridges that we have crossed in Oregon, but the debris was horrendous.

This was the only \”Welcome to Washington\” sign and I couldn\’t climb up the bridge to stand next to it.

We had a great evening with Art chatting about the area and the problems with the local Council. They want to continue with the heavy industry even though it may only add a dozen jobs. Currently, the Council are in negotiations to bring in coal from Wyoming and ship it to China, they want to be the largest shipping port to ship Wyoming coal to China. The port would be close to the current Weyerhauser plant, which could be cut-off 10 times a day when these mile long trains come into the area just below the bridge we crossed.  The bridge is busy enough taking the logs from the Oregon side to the Washington side.  Effectively backing up traffic across the bridge and no access to the Weyerhauser plant in the event of an emergency. Art is not in favour of this idea as not only will it create mayhem in the bridge area it will only create 12 new jobs.

At one point Art said that he knew I had things to do on the computer and although he was enjoying the conversation he would understand if I went to update the blog. As is often the case when we are with warmshowers, it is more important to have human contact, than to spend time updating the blog. I might get a bit behind because of this, but I really enjoy chatting to our warmshowers hosts and getting to know more about the area we are staying and the people we are staying with.