Wednesday June 3, 2015

Once again I woke up to the sound of rain, oh well, we are going to get wet today. However, by the time we were ready to leave, it had stopped raining.

Chris lives about 7 kms outside of Florence, in a lovely wooded and lake area.

The bridge going into Florence was a little narrow, but we did manage to cycle across it without incident.

We were hoping to meet up with Christine and her riding partner Jayde today, but didn’t know if we could arrange a place to have coffee or just meet up on the side of the road.

Leaving Florence, the ride was quite hilly and my worst fear was that we would see Christine hurtling down a hill or even worse struggling to get up a hill and no place to stop to chat.

It was a foggy ride for the first half of the ride, and we had a slight headwind.

I thought if it was wet, we were supposed to have a tail-wind.

Apparently, if the sun comes out you get a headwind.

We were really fortunate, we had just passed the seal caves when we spotted Christine, she saw us and we indicated for her to pull in to a small viewpoint.

Jayde followed and we were able to have a good chat with them, safely out of the way of traffic and at the top of a hill. She is doing really well and for the most part enjoying the ride. It was really nice to see her again. Jayde asked about food, we told them about our supplies at Safeway, and the sandwiches we usually buy. I totally forgot that Christine is gluten intolerant, they couldn’t get the deals we get on the sandwiches.

Jayde asked why Ralf has the riding crop on his bike. We both responded (straight faced) that he used it to “encourage” me to get up a hill. Then Ralf added that sometimes it gets a bit kinky in the tent!! After the initial shock we were all laughing.

We stopped in at Yachats and had lunch, a nice sandwich with chocolate milk, kept me going for a while.

We then carried on to Waldport, and stopped in at the Green Bike Co-op.

I surprised the owner by asking him if he was looking forward to going to India. Janet and Stephen were chatting to them when they cycled through and mentioned it on her blog. It was really funny to see the look on his face, we told him he was infamous.

Although Waldport looked like a nice tourist coastal Town, we learned from the Green Bike Co-op that there is 60% of the area youth live in economically disadvantages homes. Green Bike Co-op is a place where youth from the community can learn a valuable trade. Green Bike Co-Op paint bikes green and leave them around the community so that people can use them – similar to the Bike Programs adopted by big cities except these are all free. You can pick up a bike cycle, wherever and then leave it. If you are using a bike there is a yellow rope tied on the bike that indicates it is in use.

From Yachats to Newport the road had a good shoulder and we were quite close to the coastline, it was very pretty.

We had been warned about the Newport Bridge and had decided to walk the bikes over on the side walk.

Ralf went to get supplies and took this great photo of the Bridge.

We are staying in a cheap motel tonight, as we are still trying to get a warmshowers in Portland.  We need the internet to do this. There are hundreds of hosts in Portland but like we have found with most big cities they often do not update their profiles when they are not available. I have sent a dozen requests and five responses – not available. The hostels do not have availability on Saturday, we may be sleeping on a park bench.

Ralf spotted this great quote today:

“Whenever I see someone biking faster than me I assume they are not going as far”