Oregon Ospitality

So here's a fact for you: wind rolls down from a mountain. From the top, all the way down to the bottom. So when you are climbing a mountain, say ... on a bike, and the wind is in your face and you think "ah life's going to be better behind this hairpin curve", forget it. You will be even more miserable cause the actual curves seem always just that little bit grade-increased and the wind is still there. And cycling, the wind is there all the time, you know that, and you learned to accept it, to get over it. Though climbing, steep climbing, you can appreciate all the support there is, and not the kind that hits you in the face. It hurts. My feelings in the first place, my little fire lungs in the next.

Next to brutal headwinds, winter conditions didn't lift our spirits either. One time we had a pity party, sheltering behind a bridge column for wind gusts, when Lauren, determined to take the high way out of despair, decided to give her hitchhiking skills a first-time-ever try. I'm still debating whether it's naïve inexperience or just sheer beginners luck when she managed to flag down the, rather uptight, county sheriff who kindly but firm reminded us that his vehicle is "emergency use only" and that hitchhiking is illegal in the state of Oregon. Oops. Back on the bike.

Idaho as well as Oregon has the right cycling mentality so we pretty much WarmShowered our way through this whole stretch. Which is awesome. We stayed with so many nice and interesting people, all involved in a variety of hobbies and projects. We cannot do more than express our inexpressible gratitude and act as polite as possible (turning their kitchen floor into a murder scene by bleeding blisters, Fien, not cool).
Something else that's not cool is finally crossing into Oregon-bike-loving-state-of-America expecting to get a lot of love but instead getting flipped off the road, yelled off the road, honked off the road and get half a full beer can thrown at us out of a moving vehicle, missing us by an inch, which, I assume, pretty much is a summary-action off all the above. Hey Oregon, what's up? So we are very much working on our karma these days.
And I think it's working cause after summer disappeared for a good 5 days (but came back around after), one night we got, drenched and cold, very last minute saved from overnight-hypothermia by a very flexible WarmShowers host (thank you).

And so we are all nearing the end of our trip. We climbed more long, big passes, held euphoric scream-parties on nearly all of them, had a first glimpse on the Cascades and eventually enjoyed a long ways down towards the ocean (I did a record 108 mile day).
Vancouver, j'arrive!