After my joyous dash across the sand in Cannon Beach, I packed up and rolled South again. The day held a couple of pleasant surprises...First, just a short distance south from Cannon Beach I rolled past a sign advertising Kelly's Brighton Marina, an RV campground and marina selling fresh crab. The two Canadian women that hosted me at their campsite in Washington had told me about this place: they had ended up looking for a campsite late at night, and begrudgingly ended up staying at this place. The said it looked funky, and that there was a guy wearing a crab shaped hat on his head who ran the place, but they ended up having one of the best nights of their trip at the marina. I had to pull in and check it out, and smiled when I saw the tall guy in a crab hat and an out of place snack shop with big water troughs full of live crabs and other shell fish. It was just as the women described, and that was fun to see.
After a brief self-guided tour of the marina and an ice cream bar, I headed down the road again. I hadn't gone more than a dozen miles when I cruised by a car waiting at a stop sign to get on the 101. As I rode by, I distinctly heard somebody shout my name, "Chandler!"
I looked closer. It was the couple from Gnat Creek! The folks I'd stayed up late chatting with two nights before. They pulled up next to me and we exchanged a couple sentences before traffic pressured them to move on. What fun to share the route South with some people I'd met before.
When I arrived in Tillamook, I stopped off at a fish and chips shack across the street from the cheese factory to get my first taste of fresh tuna (or at least tuna that didn't come from a can). I was sitting outside eating when a big truck pulling a camper parked at the shack. The retirement age couple got out of the truck and sat down at the table adjacent to mine after ordering their food. They saw my grungy clothing and touring bicycle and started to ask me questions: "Where'd you start?"
"Alaska," I replied. "I'm headed to San Fransisco."
"You're crazy," came the response. We chatted a bit more, and I got the impression that the couple found me crazy like a high school kid that refuses to wear a helmet to be tough, rather than crazy like a person worthy of admiration. Soon their food came, the couple ate quickly and then got back in their truck. As they started to pull away, the man stuck his head out of the window. "By the way," he said, "I paid for your lunch."
No way! I thought.
"Thank you!" I exclaimed, and the coupled disappeared headed north. The fish and chips that I had found disappointingly dry and flaky before suddenly tasted much better after that.
When I finished eating I pedaled over to the cheese factory. I spent an unreasonable amount of time there, but it fascinated me: enormous blocks of cheese rolling down shiny conveyor belts, everything appearing to be carefully thought out, constructed, and precisely engineered. It reminded me of the physics lab I used to work in as an undergrad.
From the cheese factory, I pedaled on to Cape Lookout State Park to spend the night. Here, for the first time, I met cyclists my own age headed down the coast. There was a British man learning to juggle seven balls at once, two peace corps Volunteers that met each other while working in Panama and a man from Southern California that worked for the Catholic church (in fact, he worked for a specific person in the church--maybe a bishop?--and he reported that this person occasionally performed exorcisms when doctors failed to diagnose patients... part of the cyclist's job was to screen calls from people seeking exorcisms that did not need them. I didn't even know exorcisms still officially happened!). We sat around a campfire that night, swapping stories and learning about each other. It felt good to hang out with my peers again.
I appreciated the beach at Cape Lookout too. I arrived, ate and set up camp and still had time before sunset, so I went down to the beach and swam in the waves. The water was cold and I'm really skinny, so I couldn't stay in long. But I enjoyed being in the Pacific briefly and feeling the power of the surf as I let it carry me back to shore. In the morning, I got up and went down to the beach again. I took off my shoes and socks, but didn't run much; my calves were a bit sore from the previous day's barefoot run. Instead I stretched as the sun came up and appreciated the clean sand and booming surf. Eventually satisfied, I packed up and headed South again.
No comments:
Post a Comment