This is what the landscape looked like when I woke up.
This is what it looked like when I finished.
Now that's something.
למרות השוני הטיול שלך מעורר בי זיכרונות.
טיולי אופניים לפני 70 שנה.
כדרכם של סיפורי סבתא נתחיל בלספר שהכל היה אז אחרת: לאופניים שלנו לא היו הילוכים ולא היו שבילי אופניים אבל היו הרבה פחות מכוניות והיה הרבה יותר קל לרכב על הכביש. תיקי צד לאופניים כבר היו אז, קצת פחות משוכללים אבל עשו את העבודה.
GPS אף מילה על טלפונים ניידים ו.
?מי חלם על זה בכלל
להרפתקה הגדולה יצאנו ארבע בנות: אסתר, מילי, אמילי ואני. נסענו מניו יורק לאולבני ברכבת. מאולבני יצאנו למסלול סיבובי שכלל שבע מדינות - ניו יורק, ורמונט, ניו המפשייר, מיין, מסצ'וסטס, רוד איילנד וקונטיקט.
את מסלול הטיול קבענו לפי המקומות היפים אותם רצינו לראות ולפי האכסניות שלמזלינו היו סמוכות לאותם מקומות. הטיול היה בסתיו, עם השלכת והעלים האדומים המפורסמים של ניו אינגלנד.
ארבע בנות צעירות נוסעות לבדן נראו כנראה טרף קל ומושך ומהר מאוד הצטרפו אלינו שני בחורים נלהבים. אנחנו התלהבנו פחות. לקח לנו חמישה ימים להתפטר מהם וכפי שאסתר סיכמה - חברת ההדברה התפטרה משני יתושים.
בתמונות המצורפות מצולמות ארבע הבנות בתמונה השניה מופיע גם אחד הבחורים. השני צילם. גם סלפי עוד לא היה אז.
Even though much is different, your trip fills me with memories.
Bike trips 70 years ago.
As is the way for old wives tales, let us start by saying that everything was different back then: Our bikes had no gears and there were no bike trails, yet there were much fewer cars and it was much easier to ride on the road. Side bags already existed, a little less fancy, yet they did their job.
Not a word about mobile phones and GPS. Who would have even dreamed?
Us four girls left for the big adventure: Esther, Mily, Emily, and myself. We took the train from New York to Albany. From Albany we left for a loop through seven states: New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
We fixed our path by the beautiful places we wanted to visit and by the hostels which luckily were adjacent to these places. The trip was in the fall, surrounded by the famous New England red foliage.
Four young girls riding alone must have seemed like easy and attractive prey and very quickly two enthusiastic guys had joined us. We were less enthusiastic. It took us five days to get rid of them, and Esther summarised: The exterminators dispensed with two bugs.
The photos show the four girls. The second photo also shows one of the guys. The other one was taking it. Selfies also didn't yet exist back then.
This morning, I woke up at 5:00am, with the hopes of beating the wind. From the second I left my tent, I knew it was a hopeless endeavour. I rushed to put my things away, go to the bathroom, almost forgot my tent stakes, was out of the campground by 5:30, and started swimming through 25km/h headwinds. My goal for today was Hood River, and once I hit the winds, I was glad I started early. As expected, it was going to be a long day of slow progress.
The highway would alternate between being flush to the cliffs, and running along either an old railway bed, or a dirt bed made especially for the road through the water. The water sections were always windy, with strong gusts, and the land sections were sometimes windless, if the road would wind behind a big rock or into a small bay that would provide temporary wind shelter.
After two hours of biking, I got to The Dalles, and had some choices to make. I could continue on the 84 highway, bike into The Dalles, and hang out there for a bit. I could also cross the bridge to Washington, and bike along the Lewis and Clark Highway for a bit before going back to Oregon. I decided to stop by McDonald's to grab breakfast and think about my options. I ate two breakfast sandwiches, some pies, and got caffeinated on coke and sweet tea. I was surprised at how vegetarian-friendly breakfast was. As I left, I had still not made a decision, and so, on a whim, I turned left and was on my way to Washington.
Boy oh boy was the wind strong. At some point, I paused to take a picture, and a gust of wind toppled my bike over. Luckily, it was away from traffic, but I learned to hold the wheel straight next time. The road was hillier than the 84 highway, and was going a bit inland, where I really started questioning the name "Evergreen State"
My first stop in Washington was Lyle, a small town with a post office, where I spent almost an hour buying stamps, and filling out customs forms for two cloth pot holders I needed to send someone. Who knew that sending something is so hard without a U.S mailing address? No, I can't use a university mailing address. Anyway, I just plugged in Ethan's address as the return address, so Ethan, if you get a package that looks like it's been through a lot, and has my name on it, it's mine.
After getting stamps, and chatting with my aunt and grandma, and convincing my grandma to write a guest post for the blog (see above), it was 10:30, I put on sunscreen, and headed out into the wind again. Given my tan, I now only start putting on sunscreen at around 10:00am, or, after an hour and a bit in the sun. I've become sloppy with my sunscreen habits, but then again, I was quite religious about them earlier. Too much so, apparently.
At no point today did I feel like I was behind schedule. I knew the wind was delaying me, and I knew that I would finish it in good time. I woke up early, and had all the time in the world to enjoy my day. And I did just that.
I was planning to bike back to Oregon along the Hood River bridge, but when I got to it, there was a sign barring bicycles. I've been known to ignore these things, but this one time, I decided that I actually liked the Washington side of things, and that I was going to push way past Hood River anyways. Things were getting greener. I started seeing trees.
Big trees, and large hills on the Oregon side of the river, just covered in them. Tired of the barren hills from earlier in the day, I wanted to continue to enjoy the views across the river without the controlled-exit restrictions of the freeway. At the end of the day, other roads are oftentimes more interesting than the freeways.
Then, as a car seemed to be pulling into a roadside turnaround, and I motioned with my head for it to go ahead in front of me, the door opened and out came my dad. I guess the GPS tracker works.
There really was nothing there at the place we met, so I kept biking, and he went exploring Eastwards. Two windy hours later, I was crossing the Bridge of the Gods on my way back to Oregon.
The bridge is a steel truss cantilever bridge (according to Wikipedia, look all it means is that the bridge surface looks and feels like a rigid chain-link fence), which spanned the Columbia river at a height of 43m. The views of the gorge were gorgeous. I made the mistake of looking down. I zoomed past the toll booth as the cars stood in line; bikes and pedestrians go for free, and got off at the landind, where I vaguely coordinated to meet back with my dad.
I found a fruit stand, a shaded bench, and spent the next hour eating cherries, talking to Sarah, and enjoying the shade of a gift shop porch. As my dad pulled in, knowing where I was from the GPS, the gift shop was closing. We grabbed a room at a motel down the street, and had dinner. He was very proud of the fact that I looked completely unpresentable.
Today I got around to implementing some safety ideas I've had about wind. I've had some pretty awful visions of how I die while biking, and most of them involve an uncontrollable action that thrusts me into traffic. I used to be scared of flats because of how they destabilize the bike at high speeds. I'm still scared of going down hills fast in case I hit some bump. But my biggest fear today was a sudden, 50km/h gust of wind from the side that would just push me into a truck. And so, I started thinking about things I could do that might let me live another day.
The first thing I think about when biking on windy days is the choice of road. I think about exposure to gusts, and manoeuvering room (ie, shoulder width). The speed limit is irrelevant, since people ignore it regardless. When it comes to exposure, the freeway is the worst possible option, since there's no trees or structures around. On the other hand, if there's no trees of structures anywhere, then the freeway is better than other roads because of the built-in bike lanes. Ok, not officially built in, but freeways have wide shoulders.
The manoeuvering room is important. Since the wind is nonconstant, the forces on the bike are always coming in unpredictable directions. If the winds are strong, then these forces can be as strong as a person coming and giving a push to the bike. In some cases, the wind is so strong that it can even stop the bike, in which case the rider needs to be good at balancing at very low speeds. I'm not good at this, and I, personally, need the space to move my handlebars back and forth and try to keep upright.
Every time a gust of wind would come, I would go through my top priorities: stay on the bike, don't fall off the road, and, most importantly, don't fly into traffic. Staying on the bike was done by tensing up all of my muscles, holding the bike tight, moving to the lowest gear, and bending down to avoid being a human sail. If the gust gets stronger, and I'm stuck on high gear, there's a risk that I just won't be able to turn the pedals at all, and then I'll fall.
Staying in lane was tricky, and depended a lot on the situation. In many cases, if it was particularly windy, I would purposefully weave into and out of the car lane, or at the very least, within my own lane. My hopes are that this would clue in cars behind me that I'm prone to gusts, or, at least might make them think that I'm some irrational drunk, and that I'm best to be avoided. It's deceptive, and I don't like playing chicken with trucks, but at the end of the day, it always works. If a car sees me weaving into its lane from 300m away, it always gives me space. I should remark that I only do this when I see a car approaching, but not close yet.
The other trick I have, and this one is for getting good clearance in general, and I might start using it in cities, is to just bike in the middle of the lane. I don't do this on freeways, but when there's no shoulder, or when the shoulder is really narrow, I bike in the center of the lane, and then when a car comes behind me, I pull over to the right a bit to let them pass. More often than not, they will pass with more clearance than if I was just biking on the shoulder.
So to summarize, on windy days, I bike on the shoulder of the freeways, and when I see a truck coming, I weave in and out of its lane like a drunk. Safety.
Today I biked for almost 100km over the course of seven hours. My average speed was 13.5km/h, and I had a surprisingly high 740m of uphill (going in and out of the gorge I guess).