Astoria, Oregon

Thursday 23 July

Hardware on the street at Sisters

Bit of a quiet day today. Pattern we're settling into is up and ready to roll early,

find a rural diner 20-40mls out of town for breakfast. Today's was at a town called Sisters. We pulled up to start with, to watch a family of deer walk across the side-street, behind a shop then across the main road, halting traffic both ways.

Today i got poached eggs, real pan fried hash brown, toast, and a 5 rasher bacon serve for US$8.45. Coffee's free, but awful, and you tend to have too much because they keep filling you up.

Over the Cascade Ranges

Over the Cascade Ranges, not ranges like Tararuas, but big hills, the road topping out around 4000', going down the other side at 65mph i got a roar at my left shoulder and turned to see a woman blatting past on her Harley, nazi helmet, and thin strap top.

People who wear armoured jackets round here are pussies. Most of the blokes are in T's. This is the land of the free after all.

Still, looks like traffic settles at 5mph above the speed limit, wherever. I get left behind most of the time, and spend most of the day on my own, which i'm pretty comfortable with. The bike’s going OK, the noise happens when it gets hot, i need to keep the speed up in the heat for better cooling. 97degF did i mention, yesterday? The tacho's red-lined at 8500 to 10000rpm. The bike does 80mh at 4200, to show you how restrained i'm being. Done 1500km so far, and i'm impressed how little it has cost for gas.

Detroit Lake

At the gas station further on at Detroit Lake, the woman at the till eyed me up with a smile and said you're too good looking to be a biker. Detroit Lake is a dam, about 5-10mls long. When summer's done, they drain it out, and it fills with snow over winter.

So, as we got lower, the redwoods gave way to sycamore-dappled highway

with red and blue wild pea flower along the verges, into Salem, Oregon

skip over Interstate-5, keep heading west toward the coast.

On the way to Tillamook

The farming’s a heap more serious here - 5 International header harvesters working in a line, stubble straw pressed and on the move, crops in the sun  ready for harvest.

At Tillamook, an old airforce base, stopped for the Blimp Museum -

during the war a base for blimps used for Pacific coast and fleet escort submarine patrol. There's only one hangar left now, the other burned down in 1992 - 1072' long, 15 stories high, 296' wide, 7acres in area the guide said,

built totally of wood, douglas fir milled locally, first one took a year, the second, 27 days! 

There are 6 doors at each end, each door weighing 30 tons rolling on railway lines. In the cafe there's a photo of the day some clever dick flew a plane through doors open each end. There's several oddity planes, but most memorable is a Grumman Tomcat, the swing-wing carrier jet retired from duty in 2006, it required 50 man hours maintenance for every 1 hour in flight service. The swing wings were computer controlled, out as the plane slowed down, and in as it speeded up.

Dairy farming district here.

Long time since breakfast - just had a 14oz rib-eye, best steak i've ever tasted

at a rather odd karaoke bar just up the corner. Have put in the hotel view off our room deck. The accommodation's been great. Ken says the difference between digs like this and winging it day to day between camping and motelling, if you can find them this time of year not booked out, is only about $1000 on a tour of this duration. The strain on relationships within the tour group arguing about where to camp, or try for accommodation, isn’t worth the saving. 

Snippets from the local rag:

Oregon state governor has just ratified the buckshee installation of power generating small windmill, solar heating, home insulation, and double-glazing to home-owners, the cost to be capitalised out on the monthly utilities account. How forward thinking is that! It’s not just the power and generation resource saving - there's the stimulus to related manufacturing industry.

The local environmental agency is mounting an investigation into how they can reduce soil nitrate contamination from urban septic tank systems...

alleluia...... an urban body putting the blame where it belongs, not dumping it on the farming community

That's it..

back home we have power companies who were so supportive at the start, they refused to credit for reverse metering.