After passing through Idaho we entered Oregon and looked in Nyssa for a place to take a shower and do laundry. Ryan asked about these services at a gas station the attendant looked a little puzzled and said there was a place laundry mat, but there is no place to take a shower she could recollect. This is a blink town she said. A place where you could just blink as you drive through and never even know it existed. After a couple days in eastern Oregon I tried it – I kept blinking, sometimes closing my eyes for longer periods of time hoping that it would just go away, but I forgot that bicycles don't move as fast as cars and riding with my eyes closed is almost as irresponsible as text messaging while driving.

This is not the Vale Laundry Mat...just next to it

It was not that eastern Oregon was any worse than other places we had been to, it was that it kept reminding me of places and frustrations of our past. Ryan talked in a previous post about our trip being like a videogame – how you pick up equipment, lose equipment, and learn from your experiences to face challenges to come. This has been a large chunk of our Oregon experience.

After striking out in Nyssa, we decided to look for a place to shower and wash clothes in Vale. The going rate for a shower at both RV parks was a mind blowing $10 each (to camp the night was only $20) and the local pool was closed. I decided the reasonable thing to do was to fill my Camelbak with water, sling it over the top of the handicapped stall in the Vale town park, disrobe myself, and take a full shower in a bathroom stall – soaping, scrubbing, rinsing, and all. After showering we finally found the laundry mat and cleaned our sullied clothes.

We were fresh and off once again towards Burns, OR, but before we reached it we would ascend our 1^st of 5 mountain passes in Oregon to reach the coast. It was a simple 600 foot ascent over a couple miles before we dipped into a valley near Harper, OR. We were deep in a moist canyon – green farmlands being flooded by irrigation all around us. It was a beautiful afternoon when my tire went flat. I pulled over to see the valve stem from the flat I fixed the day before had a hole torn in it. This would be the 2^nd of 5 flats I would get in 5 days. While I stripped the bags from my bike and flipped it over we noticed the mosquitoes were out and they were hungry. I quickly changed the tire and we were rolling again – trying to outrun the mosquitoes drafting behind and beside our bikes and bodies. Eventually we made it out of the canyon and set up our tent in the beautifully dry and brown desert – just like home. I was assessing my wounds when Ryan showed me the mass of mosquito bites on his ankle – in a two inch diameter there was at around a dozen.

After the night in the desert we had a couple more summits to climb. The first was Drinkwater Pass at 4200 feet. It was a descent huff to the top, but we made it knowing that Stinkwater Pass was only 15 miles away and 600 feet higher. After climbing Drinkwater we rushed downhill for three miles – dropping over 1000 feet. So, now instead of facing a 600 foot climb over 15 miles it was going to be a 1600 foot climb over 12 miles. With this in mind Oregon was shaping up to remind us of our past – the sparse facilities of Wyoming, the mosquitoes of Ontario, hills of Pennsylvania, and as we approached the Stinkwater summit we were reminded of the kindness of Gary, Indiana.

About 8 miles from the summit a tan pickup truck passed by and instantly something exploded on my handlebars. We had no clue what happened momentarily until I realized I was nearly Keystoned to death. A full can of Keystone Light beer was thrown at me, grazing my shirt at the elbow at 60+ mph and exploding in a foaming mess of aluminum shrapnel. My rage burned under the skin like battery acid. I was pumped and just praying that the drunk assholes flipped their truck a mile down the road, so I could finish off what the accident didn't. This is not the first time that beer has been thrown at us though. Not even a mile after passing “The Citizens of Gary Welcome You” sign in Gary, Indiana a black SUV chucked a full can of Coors Light out the window, but it was so far from hitting us we just laughed in utter amazement at those drunk assholes. These drunk assholes on the other hand made my blood boil. Needless to say the rage in my body made the 1600 foot ascent a bump in the road. I was a hunter – tracking rednecked beasts through the desert – eyeballing each new blue empty can of Keystone Light glittering in the side of the highway as the sun died. They were hiding somewhere in Burns, and while I slept on a sand dune outside the city limits I dreamed of people dying of alcohol poisoning and waking up in time to urinate on grave stones.

Our stay in Burns was uneventful and I never saw the tan pickup, so after fueling up on pancakes and coffee the next morning we struck out west. This part of Oregon would be our reminder of the endless Wyoming construction work and blustering South Dakota headwinds. Out of Burns there was a 45 mile long construction zone of freshly tared roads that choked the lungs and soft shoulders that choked the tires. The shoulders wouldn't have really been much of a problem except the 20+ mph headwinds we rode into would sometimes gust us off the road – stopping us dead in our tracks. Despite all of this we pushed through knowing that soon enough things would have to give, and that to stop wouldn't get us any closer to our goal. Again we found a great place to camp in the high desert of Oregon just before the sunset. We were sheltered between giant sage brush on a flat piece of caked alkaline dirt.

With 58 miles until we reached Bend, Oregon we rode and rode the next morning – only stopping twice to urinate. We made it to Bend a little after noon and found a place to eat lunch. It became apparent as soon as we entered the city that we had reached a different part of Oregon. This was no longer the arid east, but the beginning of the Cascade mountains – central Oregon. A place of more people. A land overflowing with trailheads, Subaru's, and Patagonia fleeces, recreational bicyclists, RVs towing convertibles, and smiles. Middle-class America enjoying themselves on Labor Day. Ryan and I debated who was going to have the most fun as all the RVs passed us by. But when a bus-sized RV pulling a helicopter passed by we decided they slightly beat out the Ford truck with the motor boat on top of it pulling the trailer home with two bikes strapped to the back for most fun Labor Day weekend award. Unfortunately fun and miles per gallon do not always equate, but that is part of the great American vacation. Love it or not; it is what it is.

Again we hit the coffee hard at lunch, getting so “jackeled” (as my friends Evan and Mandy would say) off the beans that the summit of McKenzie pass only 35 miles away from Bend looked like a cakewalk. We headed towards the town of Sister, heads down, teeth glaring, and snarling like wolverines at over-sized motorhomes encroaching onto the shoulder of the narrow two-lane highway. We stopped to take urinate again at the gas station in town, because all the beans we drank made us not only as juiced but as filled with piss as race horses. I ate 5 granola bars in the parking lot, and we started the trek up to the top of McKenzie pass on State Highway 262. It was a winding, wild climb to the summit. We twisted around curves going up and up. There was no shoulder on the highway, but luckily hardly anyone took this road. It was too slow for impatient motorists. After 15 miles we reached the observatory at the summit. I wanted to stomp around and let out a glorious cry, but I was afraid to startle the Korean tourists snapping photos and the two hippie girls doing yoga on the lava rocks. I just threw down my helmet and ate 5 more granola bars; letting out a muffled coyote's yelp between unwrapping my bars. On top of the summit we met a hiker just about to break his 2000^th mile on the Pacific Coast Trail. His name was Little Buddha. We swapped stories about our travels and while he filled our heads with longing to go on a long multi-month hike we filled his with longings to go on a multi-month cross-country bike tour. The sun was getting low on the summit and at that height the temperature felt like it was dropping faster, so we set up camp a few miles from the summit knowing that the next day would be a quick descent down the Cascades hugging the McKenzie river as we approached Eugene, OR.

A couple of the Sister peaks

Unfortunately the cold didn't wake up and leave the mountains as early as we did. The descent down to State Highway 126 junction was a 3000 foot over 15 mile twisting corridor of switch backs and hairpin turns deep in the shade of the sheltering forest. I had on gloves, but their thinness required me to try and pull over my riding jersey which didn't work to well when I tried to brake around the turns. I had a choice between braking safely and my hands staying warm. I chose warmth. It was one of the most beautiful descents we have had down a mountain range, and the cold was the only thing I would have changed. I felt amazingly in tune with the landscape, and while I dethawed my digits at the junction I thought about how despite all the shit we had been through in the last couple days we had seen some of the most beautiful land this country has to offer.

We expected to make it to Eugene by 1 or 2 pm, but eventually or plans changed as the landscape did. After jumping back onto Highway 126 it became clear that the landscape was edible. And I am not talking about Wonkaland Snozberry wallpaper, but that there were way too many wild blackberries growing on the side of the road and way too few stinkbugs, ants, and other insects to devour all that fruit. We couldn't let it rot, so we pulled over and picked pounds of them; filling our empty water bottles and a plastic bag; snagging our pants and shirts on the thorns as we liberated the berries. Despite our detours (we actually stopped multiple times because they were just too abundant) we still made it to Eugene and the doorstep of our friends Mandy and Evan before rush hour. That night we presented our bounty of berries and baked a mountain blackberry pie (it sounds way better than a roadside blackberry pie), and took our first showers since Vale's town park bathroom.

The break in Eugene felt much needed. Since leaving Chicago we had ridden over 2200 miles in less than a month. At times I feel like it is difficult dealing with Ryan and I when we visit people we know. People want to know what we want to do and see, but a lot of times it feels great just to take an evening or two off and sit inside an actual house, watch movies, drink beer, eat massive amounts of popcorn, and fall asleep in a warm and drunken stupor. Eugene felt like a finish line crossed. It really has changed the dynamic of our trip, because staying with Mandy and Evan was our first time seeing familiar faces in thousands of miles. We are now on the Pacific coast making our way south. We are close to home but still have much farther to go. Nearly 2000 miles still stands between us and the finish of what we started.