Monday – Corvallis, Oregon
It was my day off today, so I went for a ride 😕 😆
A bit of a sleep in this morning, not much, had some breaky and watched some Iron Butt info as it came in. I got an email from Al, a chap I met at Joshua Tree NP, he is just down the road and was wondering if we could meet up, so we arranged a meet around 11am in town, meanwhile I did some washing, boring stuff eh! So, Chainsaw dragged his Harley out and after fuelling up, we went and met Al and Hubert, another Goldwing friend of Al’s, who had also just come down from Alaska recently.
As it was a bit early for lunch, we discussed going for a ride, and of course we did. After tossing a coin about east or west, east won, we then ended up going west anyway because the roads were twistier 🙂 😕 So we headed off and took a turn up north a bit into winding road country, and it all started out fine .
Then we ran into a few little issues, the first road we were on, that is the first spur on the map just after the small town of Summit, had a big sign up saying road closed 4 miles ahead from specific dates, well, that turned out to be today 😦 So we turned around and headed back to the junction, as I had been following on the way up, I launched it heading back as it was a fun road at speed. Al was not far behind, also having some fun and we ended up having to wait for a short while for Chainsaw and Hubert, they took it easy as a deer had crossed in front of them, hmm, I never saw any, whew!
So, we continued on down another small narrow winding road, nearly cleaning up a tree branch on a blind corner while doing so, but this road petered out into a gravel road, which the wings and HD were not interested in doing. Fair enough though, Chainsaw had not been down this road so did not know how long or bad the dirt went for, so once again we turned back, got onto the main road and headed to the coast!
As we got closer to the coast it became apparent the Wings needed fuel, so we had to make an emergency stop about 14 mile from the coast, as they had only come 40 mile from Eugene this morning and had not intended going for a ride, they had not thought about fuel until the warning lights came on!! Of course, the two aborted little side trips did not help either 🙂 Never mind, we soon arrived at a town called Newport, here we wanted a feed as it was now 2.30pm, a late lunch 🙂 There is a famous place here called Mo’s, so this is where we had some clam chowder and fish and chips(the cooked type) and it was a great feed 🙂
After lunch we headed south down the coast, now one thing I won’t do again, is leave my jacket liners off the bike, it was cold 😦 Brrr, from the mountains to here we lost about 10C, so my airmesh jacket was next to useless, but I guess we only had to go back inland a ways before it would start to warm up, I hoped anyway! The coast was very windy, cool as I said and quite hazy with salt spray and quite busy as well, no speeding around here.
We did not stop as we still had a long way to go, well about 65 miles from the town of Waldport, which is where we turned inland, back through the Cascades and some more fast twisty roads, more fun 🙂
Once back at Corvallis we stopped at Squirrels pub for a few ales, not a bad pub this, I could get used to it 🙂
After this Al and Hubert headed off back south while we went and bought some supplies, well I needed to re-stock the fridge, and had a few beers, it was a good day for a ride, even if it was my day off. 🙂 I had a longish day planned for tomorrow, heading east to Boise Idaho, but I would not have to be there until Wednesday morning. I had been in contact with Happy Trails, they had a fix for my lid seals, so that sounded good 🙂
Day 177 miles and 285 km
Trip – 34,027 miles and 54,761 km
Cheers
TravellingStrom
TravellingStrom 