One Long Ride

74.5 Miles on a Sunday. Click on the pic for an enlarged view of the route. I started from home in Oak Grove and headed on my normal route towards work, through Milwaukie, Sellwood, and up the Springwater Trail. on the Esplanade, I continued up to the Steel Bridge and instead of crossing to the west side of the river, I went up the ramp and over the UP tracks to Rose Quarter. Then up Interstate Avenue into North Portland and the Kenton neighborhood, through Delta Park and across the Columbia to Jantzen Beach. I crossed the I-5 bridge to Vancouver, then parallelled SR-14 down to the Glenn Jackson bridge (I-205) and across to Portland. I continued down the I-205 bikepath with a short detour to 7-11 at SE Stark and 92nd to meet Tomas. Tomas got a flat while waiting for me, and had forgotten spare tubes, so I continued on. (He was about a mile from his new apartment, and was only going to ride with me a few miles - if I'd gone with him to Performance Bicycle and waited while he took care of the flat, it would have taken us at least 45 minutes)

When the I-205 path met the Springwater Trail, I turned east and headed out to Boring. I got to Boring at 6:15pm and 55 miles on the GPS. The sun had set, so I turned on the trusty Trail Rat and headed back through Gresham. It took me about an hour to ride the 12 miles back to the I-205 trail (2 miles of the trail from Gresham to Boring are unpaved), and I headed south to Hwy 224. A quick jaunt over the 82nd Ave bridge and a turn onto SE Johnson and I was basically home. I timed it pretty good - the Trail Rat's battery died just as I was ascending the final hill on the way home.

Because I had to detour through Vancouver to find batteries for the camera, my 70 mile training ride had nearly 5 miles tacked onto it, but it went well and I didn't have to wuss out and call for a pickup to get home. I *did* walk my bike up the final hill, partially because I didn't take Thiessen and the road I did take turned out to be even steeper. The ride went well - no flats, new places I hadn't been before, a total time of almost 7 hours in the saddle, and I even saw a pair of deer in Gresham. In fact, here's the total of animals I saw:

Deer: 2
Horses: 3
Cats: 5
Dogs: 7
DLOs: 4 (Dog-Like Objects) (really, can you consider a Pomeranian to be a *dog*?)
Rabbits: 11

Most of the rabbits came out after dark - they weren't expecting a nearly-silent "not-car" to come speeding by with a bright light. I also saw numerous birds and heard a couple thousand frogs on the way back. (In fact, in one spot I think half the couple thousand frogs were all in the same 1/4 mile stretch - a cacophany of frogs)

Next weekend, I may try for 90, or do any easy 60. In two weeks I want to try to ride the Pre-Season Century in Bend (Bend to Prineville and back). I don't know how well that'll work since I'm still pretty slow.