Today was the last big day of my trip riding 91 miles to Eugene and summitting the Mckenzie pass at 5325 feet along the way. Throughout my trip I would tell myself at the end of long days that if I could get to the last 10 miles I could do them standing on my head. It just meant that no matter what condition I was in I would make my destination for the night. Well, today I could have done the ride with one leg, riding backward on my head. I hit the climb in the beginning of my ride and when i stopped to take a picture of Mount Washington and the seven sister peaks i belated realized i had already summitted the peak.
At the apex is a cool lava field which cooled as it was still flowing some 1600 years ago, leaving behing a river of black angular rock reaching all the way back to the peaks of mount Washington. Some of the narrow twisting roadway cuts through the rock itself giving the feeling of passing along stone hedgerows.
I started a long 3000 foot decsent outpacing at least one vehicle along the way. The road snaked around the side of the mountian presenting one hairpin turn after another. I passed new elevation signs every thousand vertical feet. At the bottom I lifted my arms of the bars and felt aches in my muscels from being on a technical decsent for a half hour.
The rest of the ride was along rout 126, a narrow no shoulder road on a slight downgrade all the way to Eugene. A pretty good headwind eliminated my ability to coast at any point. I just started to ride as if I were going up another climb, turning the cranks pretty quickly and making good time into town.
Along the way I saw the sun shining through the trees of a yard with a wooden fence and a house tucked away not to far from the road and I had he sensation that I was riding along a road from my childhood, almost a deja vu feeling.
Sue, the person I arranged to stay with through warm showers was waiting outside her two bedroom condo for me as I rolled up the street. She is one of the best of hosts I've had the good luck to encounter along my trip. She offered a multitude of information about Eugene and a set of keys to come and go as I please. We had dinner along the willamette river and then headed over to an outdoor short film festival in Alton Baker park.
"Tell everyone it rains all the time, we don't want the secret to get out." Sue told me. The secret is that during the summer Eugene is an Eden of dry sunny days and cool clear nights. It's what some locals call "their second paycheck."
Eugene is a college town with old hippies looking to hang on and new ones being minted every year on the University of Oregon campus. I have to believe there are more VW vans per capita here than anywhere else in the world. The town also has an inordinate amount of modern day hobos, young dirty kids with backpacks and sleepig bags traipsing about town. They are probably not much different from the tramps riding frieght trains in the 30s, albeit less easy to romanticize.
Sue was kind enough to put me up for another night so i could rest up an enjoy the city some more. I went to the Saturday market in the morning, a mix of food an craft vendors selling there goods downtown, had a fantastic dinner at Papa's, a soul food restaurant and did a little bit of early celebrating over a trio of noise rock bands at Sam Bonds, a popular music venue as I toyed with the surreal notion that I would hit the pacific ocean tomorrow.
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