After a lovely breakfast out on the patio this morning, we put the bike together right in the living room! All went well until we got to the rohloff part and then we had the usual issues with losing gears. Finally decided to just finish up assembly and go for a ride since we had 12 out of 14 gears working. Hmmmm, Tom looks a tad fed up here
We headed off with directions to a nice ride in a nature refuge. The skies opened about 5 minutes after we left and it just poured on us as we biked down Ainsworth. We hung in there and eventually were rewarded with some blue sky and sunshine.
Hard to tell in this picture but Tom was real wet
We made the turn onto Willamette Rd (so far so good) and in about a half mile hit this detour. Uh oh. It was a bad omen. It sure looked ok at the time since bikes were allowed on the closed road
In hindsight, however, this is where we probably started to lose it. Not long after the detour we saw a trail through an Audobon park, consulted google maps and decided we could take that trail on the way to the nature refuge. It looked really nice
and it was really nice. Weird for us to see people living in tents and under tarps along the trail but apparently this is a growing problem in Portland and I’m sure a controversial one. This is not a political commentary blog so we will move on to the adventure. We had seen a mostly “green” road on google that led to the nature refuge. Note the use of mostly please. At one point we found ourselves in a heavily trafficed industrial area with a fairly small shoulder and lots of semis whizzing by. It was not at all fun and Tom pulled over expecting to see that this was the “not green” road on the map. Nope. No such luck. The not green road was still to come and it looked like the I5 entrances were right ahead of us. I was peeing my pants too much to even take a picture so we scrambled across the road as best you can scramble with a huge bike and turned right around to get the hell out of there.
We stopped for a breather and a view shot when we got back to the very peaceful Williamette Rd.
Here’s what was parked a few doors down from Elizabeth and Bob’s and our blog post title was set
Great evening with fantastic grilled salmon by Bob, lime tarts by Elizabeth and a special steak grilled for Hilary.