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| Day 1 - Santa Clara, CA Day 2 - Eureka, CA Day 3 - Florence, OR Day 4 - Poulsbo, WA Day 5 - Poulsbo, WA Day 6 - Sandpoint, ID Day 7 - Kalispel, MT Day 8 - Sulfer Springs, MT Day 9 - Jackson, WY Day 10 - Orem, UT Day 11- Estes Park, CO Day 12 - High. Ranch, CO Day 13 - High. Ranch, CO Day 14 - Richland, UT Day 15 - Lee Vining, CA EPILOGUE |
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| We leave Eureka about 8:30 a.m. in a cold
and frosty mist. As we leave the motel, I have on two shirts, as
does Linda, but it is still unpleasantly cold. We passed through
some beautiful country on our way to Crescent City, but I’m taking
it easy because the roads are wet, the windscreen is wet, and my face
shield is wet. When you look at those “Best Tours” books, the California
coast almost always makes the list. We’ve been up and down this road
a handful of times in a variety of different vehicles, but it’s still
a treat to be able to do it on a motorcycle. At about 10:15 we pull into Crescent City and stop at “The Apple Peddler” for some breakfast. What a waste of money. Linda’s eggs are cold, the food is poor, and even my pancakes are bad. How can you screw up pancakes? I can’t cook and even I make better pancakes than these. At least the hot tea hits the spot. I must say that this turns out to be the only bad meal of the entire trip to Washington. We should have stopped at the Denny's down the street. Those people specialize in breakfast. We parked our R100RT right next to a nice new R1100RT, light blue with two helmets on the seat. Later we see the owners leave and they are older than we are. There’s hope for us yet. As we start to leave Crescent City, we take a quick run over to one of our favorite attractions, Battery Point Lighthouse, for a quick picture (photo 1). There was no one there to volunteer to take our picture together so I sneak one of Linda and the bike instead. This is a short stop, so we are back on the road and in a few minutes, we enter Oregon (photo 2). Within forty minutes, we pull into the parking lot of the Brookings Marina. This place has great smoked salmon but we have a long way to go and no way to keep it fresh, so no smoked salmon this trip. While Linda looks for a turtleneck sweater, I strike up a conversation with a Bob, a motorcyclist who had just come from Colorado on his Suzuki Marauder 800 cc, traveling by himself. Nice looking bike but I remember going to Los Angeles on my old Triumph and those little seats will numb your ass faster than you can say, “Pass the Novocain, please.” And at 70 mph, the wind starts to make your chest feel like you’re beating it with a hammer. I’m getting real fond of the Beemer’s Corbin seat and Parabelem windscreen. We exchange stories and I find out he lives in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, the same town as my youngest son Steve. At times like this, it does seem like a small world. He was in the middle of a trip that kind of reversed the course we’re taking. He mentioned the fact that he had gotten rained on several times when he was in Montana. Great, I can hardly wait. The air is still nippy and we’re only on the road for another half-hour when Linda needs to pull over and put on more clothing. She’s cold! She puts on my fleece jacket liner, my motorcycle pants and now she’s ready for bear. She’s warm for the rest of the day. The rest of the trip takes us through some fantastic scenery that alternates between ocean vistas, tree lined roads, sand dunes, lakes, streams, bridges, and small towns. What more could a motorcyclist ask for? We stop for the night in Florence, Oregon at the River House Motel, which is, surprise, on the mouth of the river just where it meets the sea. After getting settled in our room with a view of the river (photo 3), we take a walk downtown. We ate at Mo.’s, a small restaurant on the water, which is apparently, one of three such restaurants in Oregon. I have clam chowder (their specialty) and a salad while Linda enjoys their salmon. We share a peach cobbler that is worth the price of admission. The sun has dropped low in the sky by the time we walk back to our room. Two of the most visually interesting times of the day are sunup and sundown. As we sat on the balcony of our room, the dying sun made for some incredibly pleasant shadows, which played over the 1940’s bridge, and the sand dunes across the river, just a quarter mile from our window. The sound of seagulls was nautical music to our ears. Linda likes this place and says she could live here. This has been a most enjoyable day but we both notice that we’re starting to get a little stiff towards day’s end. It makes me wonder how I will hold up towards the end of this two-week trip.
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