PowerCycle

09/20 Today I had the pleasure of seeing first hand how cordial some of the residents of Oregon are. There’s a fairly long bridge to the north of town that I had to cross this afternoon. I rode up and recognized the 3 guys that were at the campsite last night. They were debating where to stay tonight so I hung out for a minute and then swung back onto the road to start crossing the bridge. There were no cars at the time which was great because there’s also no shoulder on the 2-lane roadway. The sidewalk crossing the bridge was also way too narrow to ride on so cars coming up behind me would just have to wait until the oncoming lane was clear before they could pass if they couldn’t squeeze by me. There wasn’t a lot of traffic so at most they’d have to wait 10 seconds. I’ve crossed dozens of bridges like this one and not once have I had a problem so I wasn’t worried this time. I guess I should have been.

I didn’t make it 30 feet before a car pulled up next to me. The woman had her passenger window down and in a pretty normal tone of voice said something that I couldn’t make out. It was very windy which didn’t help so I asked her to repeat herself but she looked in the rear view mirror at the growing line of cars behind her and sped away. It took about 5 more seconds to figure out what she was saying. A couple cars passed who had queued up because of the first driver and then some woman screamed out, “Hey a$$hole, get on the f’ing sidewalk!”. I didn’t even have time to react because of the next 10 cars that passed more than half of the drivers yelled out something similar.

After that batch of cars passed I was almost 1/3 of the way across before another group of cars started stacking up behind me. Rather than have someone just “brush” into me, causing me to hit the curb and then get run over, I lifted my bike up the 1 foot high curb onto the sidewalk and walked the rest of the way across the bridge. With the high wind and the already close quarters these idiots were going to get me killed. To add to the fun they were also doing construction at the top and had some of the already narrow sidewalk blocked off so then I had to kind of shuffle-step for 100 feet with my hip sticking out into traffic.

Here’s some interesting things I learned after I just called the police (this is a few hours later now). They actually used to have a sign telling cyclists to walk across the bridge but the dispatcher thinks they took it down because of the construction. Because now the sidewalk is too narrow to even walk across!!! Freaking brilliant. There was also no sign on the other side of the bridge for north-bound riders. She’s going to call the ODOT and let them know what happened. She also said road rage isn’t very common around here. Right. In 7800 miles the people in this area showed more road rage then any other I’ve gone through, even Georgia (sorry GA). To all the ignorant morons that yelled at me: You can kiss my ass.

I ended up seeing the 3 other riders in town and they said no one said anything to them and they were on the roadway. Looks like we also have cowardly ignorant morons. Too scared to yell at 3 guys on bikes but a lone rider is fair game.

Other than the fun on the bridge it was a quiet day. Rode alongside the Oregon Sand Dunes which were very impressive. They stretch for 40 miles and are the largest expanse of coastal sand dunes in North America. I tried riding into one of the park areas along the 101 to see them better but I think I was too far south by then. That was a 1.5 mile uphill I would have liked to take back. I think the entire area is open to ATV’s because because on every dune you could see tracks. Almost every truck was towing some kind of off-road vehicle too.

GPX Track