Travelers

To say you meet a broad assortment of folks while bicycle touring is an understatement. We were down in Tucson, AZ during Sophie's spring break this year with the intention of putting in some early season miles. While camped down there we met Chris who was doing an out and back overnight bike ride from Tucson and he had mentioned he was actually training to do the Oregon coast in July. We told him we were planning to do the same trip starting  around the 4th of July and he said he was planning about the same time. Way back in February we said we'd keep an eye out for each other on the road, and lo and behold on our second day we saw Chris at the hiker- biker campground. This is Chris's first long distance tour (he's finishing in San Francisco) and he says all his friends and coworkers think he's nuts and can't begin to comprehend what he's really doing. Chris had connected with two other cyclists also riding south. One is a school guidance counselor from California spending his summer riding south from Vancouver. The other is a bloke from Vancouver who used to work in I.T. but gave it up to spend two years cycling and building himself a log cabin somewhere yet to be determined in British Columbia. Rodney, another cyclist we met today introduces himself with a laminated paper that explains he's cycling from Vancouver to Ventura, CA and that he can't talk due to an accident that has left him with a speech impediment. With Rodney it's all about communicating via thumbs up or thumbs down. He's also got a physical handicap so it takes him a little longer to set up camp but see him on the road and he motors right along (that is to say he flys by us like we were standing still). Then there is the young guy named Ritchie from  England who also quit his job as a graphic designer and web developer, sold all his stuff, and bought himself a one-way ticket around the world. He's already cycled all over Europe and is going from Vancouver all the way south to Tijuana. Then he's using that one-way ticket to head to New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, and then Vietnam. He has the interesting habit of not getting started until afternoon so he tends to roll into camp around 7:00 every night. He's blogging about his adventures at "The World Beneath My Wheels" which I'll have to check out when I get somewhere with Internet access.

There are also groups of cyclists traveling the route. One of these groups we keep hopscotching back and forth with is a group of 26 kids, all about 15 years old, who are spending 19 days cycling from Vancouver to San Francisco. Their parents spent about $3,000 each so that their children could roll up and down hills, brave fierce winds and bugs galore, all while carrying all their possessions in fully loaded panniers on their bikes. They have four young adult guides along with them but as a group they are riding fully self-suported. When I was 15 I had no clue that such a trip was even possible - if I had been exposed to something like this at that age who knows where the roads might have taken me? Youth has it's advantage, and they seem to recover more quickly than us adults but  i take comfort in the fact that when they ride into camp at night they appear just as tired as the rest of us. We also met Kim and Kara, two ladies from Calgary who like us started out in Astoria. Our cars are parked side by side in the lot in Astoria but they are going farther each day than us trying to reach Eureka in the same time it takes Sophie, Chinook, and I to reach Crescent City so we haven't seen them since night number two or three. So this is the 'crowd' we are seeing on the road. If we were a day farther ahead, or a day behind, it would be a completely different group of road compadres that we would be seeing at the overlooks, grocery stores and campgrounds as we make our way south. Though to the cars that whiz by these cyclists warrant hardly a passing glance it's reassuring that you are really never alone on the ride, as on any given summer day there are probably many hundreds, if not thousands, of cyclists stretched all along the route from Canada to Mexico.

There are also a lot of hikers along the route we are riding. While some of Highway 101 is actually routed several miles inland the official Pacific Coast Hiking Trail wanders down the actual coast from cape to cape. Many of the folks we see walking along the highway are probably more down on their luck than interested in taking in the summer sights. Some look pretty rough and we purposely don't make much effort to interact with them. But they all seem headed somewhere, with someplace to go in mind. I hope I never meet the ones that don't have a destination of some kind. I'd hazard a guess that on the actual coast hiking trail you'd find a different kind of hiker. While walking along Highway 101 doesn't appear to be much fun it does at least offer a paved surface without unreasonable climbs and descents.

The coast trail where we have seen it seems to have no problem going up, down and over some pretty steep inclines (in Colorado I think this would pass for mountain climbing!) and I'm sure offers many spectacular viewpoints that motorists, and even us cyclists, can only dream about. The roadway also tends to stay at a certain elevation for a while where the hiking trail has no compunction about taking you from a 3-400 foot high cape right back down to the next beach which of course is at sea level and then back up to the next cape just around the corner. We don't see many folks actually using these trails so I'd guess if it's solitude you are really after then the coastal trail is the way to go.