Day 2: Cascade Locks-Umatilla

Aug
1
Submitted by XL-Network on Mon, 2011-08-01 06:57

The last couple of days I didn't manage to update my blog. So now there will be three posts coming at once. Enough for everyone to read! Anyway, here comes the report of the second day.

The alarm clock was set to 6 AM. We had a long and hard day ahead of us. When I was finished packing my stuff I was missing the battery of my photo camera. I had been charing it in Mike's RV (also a ROAM rider). After unpacking everything and not finding it I packed my stuff back up again because I had to get going. Maybe it will turn up later, so no pictures today.

Today was another day with a lot of interstates. The most annoying thing about this is the junk on the shoulder (where we drive) and the rumble strip. If you ride on them at high speed the rear wheel is going to drift. When we left the camp ground we saw a lot of bikers going the same direction we were going. Nice, a little fun! Apparently they were doing a big ride because there were a lot of them. And they to were taking the interstate. When I overtook one of them I had to cross the rumble strip and that's when the bike started to drift violently. Luckily it went well, but things don't always. Jim rolled over and his bike suffered damage to the nose and hump of his bike. He had some minor scratches on his arms and a bump on his head. I guess he took 'Roll over America' a bit to seriously.

Josef told us the night before how we should handle law enforcement. Guess what… today was our lucky day. When we got of the exit a officer had just pulled over a car. When we passed he told us to stop further ahead. He just wanted a look and told us to be careful.

Just before the lunch stop there was a really big hill. It was hot that day (about 40+ degrees celsius) which didn't help. I really got hammered. But a little water over your head and a cold bottle of Gatorade (thanks SAG team) did the trick. The lunch stop wasn't that far away. I didn't want to eat a greasy burger so I ordered the Chicken Salad with honey mustard dressing. I don't really like salad, so that shows how bad it was.

The SAG team picked up a lot of people. I counted at least five bikes on the back of the truck. I hope people don't drop out even more the couple of days, because the SAGers are going to get busy. And about the battery of my photo camera… it was just in my inflatable pillow. Accidentally fell in there when packing stuff.