Day 3 – June 15, 2015
Portland, Oregon to Fort Stevens
Audrey
Sitting at our campsite in Fort Stevens State Park. Our trip has officially finally started. Today we drove our mini van from Portland to Astoria. In Astoria we shipped the duffle bags we used for the train ride to Washington DC. They should be arriving at Maria’s house in DC in a week or so. That was a bit of an ordeal since no shop, not even the office supply store, had shipping tape. Finally, after an hour or so of shop hopping we coincidentally drove by a Uhaul store. Viola.
Then off to to Hertz to return the van. First my GPS on the phone took us to some residential location. Then we found the “real” Hertz at the airport. Over the sound to the bridge, nope, bridge closed take detour. We found it with about 10 mins to spare tucked away in the little terminal building of the regional puddle jumper airport.
Bikes need some reassembling and packing up. By 6:16pm we were finally off, west to the coast. Fort Stevens was about a 6 mile ride. But, we managed to make it a 7 mile ride because Gregg, eager to get there, rode off not looking back, missing the shortcut turn off.
We arrived to the campsite at about 7pm but we decided to go out to the Pacific to officially start our ride across the country. I planned a little ritual. At the ocean we wanted to dip our rear tires into the ocean. Unfortunately, when we got to the shipwreck just south of the mouth of the mighty Columbia river, the beach was about 300 yards from the end of the road. Gregg waited while I ran down to the ocean and filled a cup full of ocean water. I poured the Pacific ocean water over all 4 tires and we were officially on our trip across the country. Only a little over 3700 miles to go.
By 8pm we got the hiker/biker campsite. Nice site with about 12 different sites. There were about 4 other bicyclist there, a couple, and 2 separate single men. We set up camp got ready to cook and…..Gregg panicked, whoops forgot to buy fuel cans. Of the 3 cans maybe one was a little full. So off he went about 1/2 mile up the road to the KOA store. No fuel cans. The place caters to the RV crowd. So wood it is. Gregg bought some kindling and a 3 hr log, but not enough to cook. Wandering around the campsites he found the camp host who was all closed up but Gregg begged a pleaded with him to sell him a bundle of firewood so we could cook.
Back to the basics we did some fire cooking. This first camp evening I made Lamb curry with steamed broccoli over hash browns. Yummy. Great food again even at 10pm. Oh, and we had a nice bottle of local Columbia River WA – Cabernet.
The next morning we awoke to a bit of a disaster, Gregg’s water bottle opened and spilled all over his bag of electronics including chargers and one of our hard drives. #!xx##! but away he was to rescue what he could, and he did. Nothing damaged.
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