First day of bike traveling

Wednesday, May 18th. 
Portland, OR to Salem, OR

This morning I woke up at a nature park, on the ground behind the restroom.

I laid my bedding on the stone ground and slept there like a homeless person with my blue tarp hiding me and my bags.





The neighborhood seemed wealthy. No one came to lock the restroom doors at night. The gates closed automatically at sundown. They opened automatically when a car drove up to leave.

I heard noises all night. Car doors opening and closing. Trucks idling. Strange motions on the roof. Animal sounds. There were crushed slugs and bugs that I had to wash out of my blankets. A spider begun to spin a web in the webbing of my handlebar bag.


When I woke up, I felt so proud of myself. I did it! I slept through the night. I broke that barrier that the middle class fear to fall beyond.

I showed that I could sleep outside on the street. That means my bike and I can go anywhere.

Road into Salem

What did I do today?

I don't remember.

Let's start backwards.

I'm in the Salem, Oregon public library.

I'm looking at my bicycle through the window outside, locked securely like a good girl with U-bar through the front, rear tire chained to the lock, and undressed of its saddle bags.

There's a netting holding blankets, a tee-shirt, and my hoodie to the rear rack. That stuff makes my bike look like a homeless person's. I like it. Less likely to be stolen.

Front handlebar has a pouch with nothing valuable inside. The first thing when you open it up is a 99 cent can opener. It does have tools in it to unscrew the bolts on my bike, though. That would suck if a thief came by, and I handed him the tools to steal my bike. >_<

Ulix and I resting at the Salem public library.
He been wanting to wear my hat all day

It's nice having e'rthang in saddle bags with me. I wanted to change out of my wet tee-shirt and thought, 'Shoot, I forgot to take a dry shirt out of my pack. I'm already inside the building, so I won't be able to unless I go back outside with all my stuff and get ...'

Then I realized I was stupid, because my pack was with me. I had that genius moment again looking for my flip-flops.

I took off my sneakers under the table and swapped for a pair of flip-flops. If you're in flip-flops it's no different really from being barefoot.

At downtown Colorado Springs library, where lots of homeless people camp, I took off my sneakers once so I could put my knees up in a reading space and the librarian told me having shoes off was not allowed. So now I use flip-flops.


Today, I biked 50 miles from Portland, OR to Salem, OR. It took me about six hours with rests. From 7 am to 1:30 pm.

Then I had a huge buffet lunch in Salem and went practically comatose in the parking lot until the blood going to my stomach returned to my brain.

I ate a mountain of rice for carbohydrates. Soft serve vanilla ice cream combined with canned pineapple tastes like Pina Colada. :^)

Got rice?

That's why scrawny senior Chinese farmers can do so much labor, carbs from rice. Obese Americans in their twenties load up on fats and sweets. Can't lift themselves off their butt much less pull a farming hoe. And then they go on low-carb diets. What a fitness disaster.

Ulix giving me his best
 'Curious George' impersonation

On the road, I kept thinking about the dirty, skinny old Chinese men pedaling their bicycle carts up and down the city blocks. When I'd see their bicycles hauling a trailer in the past, it wouldn't occur to me that it was heavy.

But now I know. Because my pack feels heavy. I wonder if the people who look at me, frantically spinning on gear 1-2 up a hill with loaded saddle bags in the rear... if they too just see me as a dirty old Chinaman, unaware of the weight I am carrying.

(Homework assignment: write a 10-page thesis on how 'weight' is metaphorical. Extra credit: make your argument have nothing to do at all with the original writing.)

The bicycle lane symbol is a guy riding a bicycle wearing a helmet. I like how for political correctness reasons on safety, the guy is required to be drawn wearing a helmet.

If the helmet is too small, the paint gets faded after time and you can no longer see he's wearing a helmet. So sometimes they draw the helmet really wide, and it looks like a Chinaman with his rice paddy hat riding a bicycle.

Maybe it means the bicycle lane is for Chinese only. Maybe it means Chinese are only allowed to ride bicycles, and not drive cars. Because maybe twenty years ago, everywhere in China you'd see 1,000,000 bicycles on the road for every car.

That, or it's Amish country.

Cool front yard topiary
Clackamas, OR

Optimus Clackamas would be a cool Transformer robot. Ulix's warcry is a cross between a 'meow' and a 'roar'.

The soft rim of my fishing hat flips up in the wind when I bike. I guess it's better than a hard rim that will lift my hat off my head.

I clipped my toenails in that parking lot in the back of the buffet restaurant. I picked out these bazooka shell looking plant things that stuck into my socks, my shoes, my bike. My knees are sunburned but my calves remain pasty pale.

There was an intersection onto the freeway just outside of Portland with no shoulder and a lot of car traffic. I was supposed to cross the intersection and bike up a hill in a narrow single lane where cars were zooming past at 50 mph. Naw, I don't feel creating a three car pile-up on my first day out of town, I thought prudently.

So, I walked my bike facing incoming traffic in a thickly vegetated ditch. The bike did fine. I came out of it with a few bleeding scratches and host of those plant nettles that I picked out of my socks in the parking lot. It was a tough advance.

When I got to the top of the hill, I noticed to my left there was an adjoining road, with no cars and a huge shoulder that could fit my dick across a hundred times over. I coulda taken that route easily had I known about it.

Google bike navigation thought I would enjoy the ditch better. That freeway by the ditch did have a shoulder shortly after the intersection - likely the reason why navigation thought it'd be a fine route. It probably had no way to tell that the intersection itself was very dangerous to cross.

Other than the ditch, Google bike navigation was very good. It kept me on roads with light car traffic, bike lanes whenever available, and often with serviceable shoulders. I'm guessing the traffic data Google collects helps it determine which roads have light, low-speed traffic that is optimal for biking. Or maybe that's over-thinking a problem that has a simpler solution. Maybe it just imports bike maps created by a human.

I stopped by an airplane factory to fill my water bottles. They build do-it-yourself kits that you order and put together yourself. That's right, you build your own airplane. Most seat two people, some up to four. I watched three land in the small adjacent airport. I wouldn't fly an airplane I built myself. I'd install the wings upside down and fall to the ground.

50 miles doesn't seem like a lot. It does look like a decent distance on the map. I'm already a quarter of the way down Oregon, maybe?

Oregon isn't a big state like California or Texas, but I feel like at this pace, I'll be done traveling a lot sooner than I anticipated. Maybe I should slow down.

1,200 miles to San Diego from here. At 50 miles a day, that's 24 days of traveling. Actually, that's long enough. Maybe I should upgrade my physical fitness.

The distance I go will also vary based on the road conditions. I don't expect to have nice bike lanes and wide shoulders away from the city.


From San Diego, it's over 2,400 miles to Jacksonville, FL. That's a lot longer. Fuck.

Look how flat it is to travel the southern border. That's one of the big pros of the route. When I'm traveling flat terrain, the weight of my bags is negligible and cars can see me from miles away.

Hills, no matter up or down are a pain in the ass. Even when I'm going downhill, I have to watch that my pack stays balanced.

The bike tends to sway and I got to be careful nothing falls off - either myself or my bags.

Curving hilly roads with blind turns are the most dangerous and physically demanding to bike.

Jacksonville, FL to Fairfax, VA is only 800 miles. If there were no hills on the way, that'd be easy peezy.

It's set to rain tonight in Salem. The trees are flailing their fingers to warn me. I hope I'll have my shelter prepared before the storm.

I don't feel like leaving the library right now. This library is warm, dry, with power and WiFi. The sky outside is drab, blustery, and looks wet.

I hope if I leave at 8 pm, I'll have enough time before it rains. It's too early now anyway to camp. I'll probably be pushing my bicycle in the rain when the library closes at 9 pm.