New Roads New Places Day 3

211 miles today from McCall, ID to Lewiston, ID.  McCall is a prosperous looking little resort town in some beautiful country, but brags of having the highest snowfall of any city in Idaho......not my choice for winter living.  Here is a cute sculpture we saw in McCall:

The titlel of the sculpture is "Bearing Wall". 

Did your mother ever tell you "don't just sit there like a bump on a log"?  Well, here it is:

Bump on a Log

Riding up hwy 95 towards Lewiston, we came upon the neatest road except for one flaw.....nearly invisible gravel in the turns.  It was old hwy 95, and it has only "intermittant maintainence"  What I think is happening is the pavement is just deteriorating so the "gravel" is just bits of pavement on the surface.  At any rate, the first turn resulted in a major slip that startled both of us and from then on I was paranoid.  Here are some shots of the Zumo screen on that road:

It was like an European alpine pass road.

Later on, while riding my motorcycle along the Salmon river, we came upon these rafters and I thought to myself, why would anyone do something so dangerous?

You just can't go through Lewiston, Idaho wihout riding the Spiral Highway. 

Here is a video I made on the way down it:

What is really shameful about this video is that it shows the dork riding the motorcycle made the novice mistake of leaving his turn signal on.  Oh well, pass it off as too much excitement to notice.

We got to the motel fairly early and did a long walk along the Clearwater river on a bicycle trail:

It also had some fitness equipment along the way so I got some upper body workout:

We saw a thermometer in town that showed it was 95 degrees.  The end of day cold beer was really welcomed.  

New Roads New Places Day 2

273 miles today, but still it was a long day due to stopping at the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center near Baker City for a couple of hours.  It also got pretty hot at times but not for too long. 

So how was the "Oregon Dragon"?  I took a couple of videos on the road, but the wifi at this motel is slooooow and I will have to post them later.  As a tease, here is a picture of the Zumo on the way to hwy 245:

The only fly in the ointment was that the road had tar snakes!  Not bad ones.....they mostly ran across the road, not along it, and they were not wide, but still I don't relish the little wiggle they cause at times. 

Actually, a better road, and completely unexpected, was the section of hwy 71 in Idaho between Oxbow dam and Brownlee dam.  Better pavement and better sight lines around the curves, but I had taken the video cam off the bike. 

The Oregon Trail Interpretive Center was not a planned stop, but we thought we had all kinds of time so decided to give it a look. 

We spent most of the time there watching a show by a man and a woman dressed in period costume who told stories about life on the trail and sang songs and played numerous instruments that the pioneers carried.  They were good.  The displays were also top notch and we could have spent a lot more time there.  Here are a couple of shots of the displays:







The parking lot was kind of soft asphalt in the heat and I worried about the bike sidestand sinking into the pavement,  so I did a little "dumpster diving" to find some help:

No aluminum cans, but found a plastic pop bottle:

It did the job and there were no tipovers.

Today seemed to be a day of following beautiful creeks and rivers through green valleys surrounded by parched brown hills.  Here is a typical scene:

With a time change in Idaho, we didn't get to McCall until after 6:30, and by the time we got settled in and had dinner it was too late to explore the town, so we are going to do that tomorrow morning. 

Here are some shots of contented riders at the end of the day:



 

New Roads, New Places

DAY 1

It's getting harder to find new roads and places I haven't ridden in the Northwest.  I had that problem after I lived in California for 30 years, but being retired, it's happening sooner in the Northwest.  Nevertheless, I came up with a ride plan for Carolyn and I that would get us to some of both (new roads and places).  The original plan was to visit Patrick and see how he is doing.  Remember we stayed over in their area near Boise for a week last winter to help them move into their new house after Patrick broke his feet in an accident.  We heard he is up and walking now, but the timing for a visit didn't work out.  Patrick and his family are in Texas visiting Tracy's mom. 

So, let's just do the new roads and places and have a ride together, just Carolyn and I.  The new road was to be Oregon hwy 245, over in eastern Oregon.  This road is also called the Dooley Mountain road, and also called "Oregon's Dragon" after the famous "Tail of the Dragon" in North Carolina that I rode last year on my Grand Tour. With a nickname like that it just had to be curvy.   But first we had to get there, so we just finished a 307 mile day to John Day. 

It's always nice to have my co-rider with me.  The pace is slower and the level of caution is higher, but that is made up for with chit-chat, getting a chance to check out the scenery, and nights not spent alone.  Here she is ready to ride:

We traveled mostly on hwy 26 from west of Sandy, and passed through Prineville, where we saw this old ivy covered courthouse

Here is sort of what it looks like when riding, from Carolyn's point of view:

It's early summer and the bugs are out in force.  Here I am cleaning my face shield during a break:



One of the very cruious sights we saw along the way was this "shoe tree" that was at least 50 miles from any town:







This tree was tall, too.  It would be very difficult to throw the shoes up to the higher branches.  Maybe they had some kind of man-lift like the utility companies use.  Strange stuff, and not just in Portlandia. 

We took a break and had a drink at Dayville.  This is the place where I finally got gas and got my bike running again last year after my problems on the first day of my Grand Tour.  No problems with the bike now.  The new fuel pump cured the ills.

Tonight we are staying in the John Day Best Western......not where I stayed last year.  Carolyn and I have a deal when we travel.  I buy the gas and food and she buys the lodging.  That way she doesn't have to stay in the kind of dumps I choose.  A win-win for sure.

Dalles Dual Sport

Orv and I trucked the KLXs over to the Dalles in the Columbia Gorge to do some dual sport riding with Dave B.  Dave used to live in Portland and at one time belonged to the same motorcycle club as Orv (Lobos, MC), where they met and became long time friends.  Here's Dave:

Dave is pointing to a road I had asked him to lead us on.  I had seen a video of it on some website and it looked pretty interesting.  Here you can see it heading down toward the river:

This is an old road that led to a bridge that used to cross the Deshutes river below.  There was no toll on the bridge so it was called Freebridge Road, or maybe it was called Rattlesnake Grade, I forget which.  Anyway, there was another bridge not too far away that did charge a toll, and Dave said that one day the free bridge mysteriously blew up. 

The road is now barely passable by 4WD vehicles and motorcycles because it is narrow, rocky and rutted.  I made the following video on our ride back up the road.  It seemed a lot more gnarly than how it looks in the video.  I guess the rocks and ruts don't show up so well, or else my definition of gnarly is pretty lame. 

After the Freebridge road we explored a lot of ranch land that apparently had a lot higher population at some time in the past.  Dave showed us a couple of abandoned school houses out in the middle of nowhere.  Here is one:

And here is another one:

Dave has studied the history of the area and said the kids only went to school four hours per day because they had so far to travel to get to the school, and it was usually on horseback.  It had to have been some cold windy rides during the winter in this windswept country.  The early pioneers valued  education.   Usually one of the first buildings they erected (after saloons) throughout the west was a school and a church. 

But they also had fun.  Dave knew where there was an old dance hall so we went by there.  Like everything else, it seemed to be out in the middle of vast open country with no other buildings around.:



There was a stage:

And a sort of kitchen in the basement:

And we even found the remnants of an old piano:

I bet there were some high times in that old place.  I figured the building was from the early 20th century, but we found some rigid electrical conduit with junction boxes pretty similar to what we use now.  I don't know when that began to be used, but maybe in the 50's. 

We rode almost exactly 100 miles and I have no idea where we went as I was just following Dave and Orv, but it was perfect dual sport exploring on roads that are seldom traveled.  Just what I hoped to do when I bought the KLX. 

Snow Check

I did a little solo ride on the KLX today to see where the snow level is in the local mountains.  I need to be able to get over some passes that are at least 4,000 feet high.  At 3500 feet I ran into this:

I think I could have got around that on the left, but just a little way up the road was this:

No getting around that.  Looks like it is going to be sometime in July again, like last year, before we get over the mountains.

Mustang When New

Brian found a couple of pictures of the Mustang when we (the Mustang and I) were relatively new to the world.  The first one shows the car outside of our apartment in Corona, and the car had to be really new because we bought a house within the first year after we moved to California.  It's significant that a new college graduate could afford to buy a new car and a house (making payments, of course) within a year of getting a job.  I don't think that is possible under the present economy.  The Mustang cost $2850 as I remember, and the house was only $19,500.  But then, my starting salary was less that $8,000 per year. 

This next picture was taken at our house in Corona and shows me with our new German Shepard puppy "Bonnie".  That dog used to love going places in the car, especially if it was up in the mountains.  She would lay between the front seats on the transmission tunnel and get all excited as we climbed higher into the mountains. 

Once we had children, though, the dog became pretty low priority, which is  typical, I guess.