Mountain Home to the Sea

Day 2 starts off sunny and warm. Mountain Home, which started out as just a small blip on a big map turns out to be a nice not-so-little town complete with the requisite Walmart and all the culinary options we have come to expect and demand. Drive a little further though and you'll experience peaceful tree-lined streets and immaculate green parks. Our stop for the night is at the Mountain Home KOA campground which, due to it's distance from the highway, is on the side of town that time has seemingly passed by. This KOA though offers something that it's bigger and fancier cousins increasingly cannot offer: peace and quiet. It's the kind of quiet where you can hear the gentle summer breeze rustle through the leaves of the majestic cottonwood trees that shade all the sites. This KOA doesn't seem to have changed in decades. No hot tub or miniature golf course and the long gone pool has been filled in and replaced with horseshoe pits. The staff is wonderfully welcoming, the campsites are pristine, and the shower and restroom facilities are immaculate. In short, it's everything we could have hoped for after a long 642 mile jaunt from Rawlins.

Heading north on highway 84 through Idaho farmland the terrain starts to get more interesting as we cross into Oregon. The road snakes through winding canyons and up and over the Blue Mountains where the scent of pine makes me feel as if I'm still in Colorado. The elevation though continues to drop as we proceed toward the coast. Roadsigns tick off the mileage towards The Dalles and Portland, parts of the country I've never seen. We are roughly following the Oregon Trail and I can only imagine what it must have been like to travel this route a hundred and fifty years ago. Roadside memorials attest to the pioneers who explored this country in the late 1800's. To them it must have seemed wilderness in the extreme, but for the local indigenous peoples  who were already here it must have been a beautiful neighborhood as familiar to them as my drive to work is to me. Tonight we'll be in Astoria camping in Fort Stephens State Park before setting out on our bike trip in the morning.

The biggest indication of our drop in elevation is that we've left the cobalt blue skies of the high plains behind. Now the sky appears milky white and the infinite horizon I'm more used to has continued to creep in until I feel I'm in a fishbowl peering out. The mountains in the distance seem to appear out of the fog, though I'd hazard a guess that in the next couple of days as we journey south along the actual coast we'll be treated to fog of the real kind.

I've already mentioned my wife Sophie who is doing the trip with me. A tremendous life partner who keeps me young, she plans these excursions to the nth degree, for which I can't give her enough credit. But there is a third member of our little party. As I write this he's curled up in a ball in the back of the van, eyes closed and dreaming of the next rest area (Next Rest Area 26 Miles!).  His name is Chinook and he's fifty-five pounds of Siberian Husky. This isn't his first bike trip; last summer he tolerated my hauling his furry little hindquarters around in a Burley 'Tail Wagon' dog trailer as we spent two weeks bike touring the Selkirk Loop in northern Idaho and southern British Columbia.  He handled that trip so well we did'nt quite have the heart to leave furball behind for this one. We lost his twin brother Tundra to cancer two years ago, but Chinook is going to be one Colorado canine who will be able to lay claim to having dabbed four paws in the Pacific ocean.