So this year I'm making another May ride where I meet Jenny near where we met last year in the foothills of the northern Sierras. I'm at the end of the first day and I'm staying in Klamath Falls, Oregon after riding 395 miles. I rode quite a few miles extra because I wanted to check out a road I hadn't ridden before. It is the Crooked River Highway out of Prineville, OR. It follows along the Crooked River and is truly a crooked (good) road, even if it is not very long.
I attempted to update this blog while on the ride, but the first day, when I posted the above text, did not go well with my portable keyboard and tablet set-up. Maybe because of slow internet at the motel, but whatever is was, I spent at least an hour on those two paragraphs and I decided to write this blog after the trip, rather than during it.
This ride was notable for some strange GPS problems. The first occurred when looking for my motel in Klamath Falls, where my Garmin Zumo led me to a parking lot of a construction equipment company. I ended up using my phone to navigate to the motel and discovered the phone would bluetooth the directions to my helmet intercom, which was pretty convenient. The next day I was planning on spending the night at a camp ground and lodge a few miles from Portola, CA. I entered the address, which was on hwy 70 that I was riding on, into the gps and when I got to what it said was my destination there was nothing. I went further on and stopped at another lodge and asked the desk clerk about the location of the "Dreamcatcher Lodge and Campground". She had never heard of it. So, I used the phone to navigate me back, and when I got to what it said was my destination there was only an un-named jeep trail that I rode down a short ways until it ended. I attempted to call the place, but nobody answered. At a loss for what to do next, I left a message to cancel the reservation and rode back to Portola where I found a motel available for only slightly more money. The owner of the Dreamcatcher Lodge returned my call later and apologized, said I would not be charged, and also acknowledged that others had had problems finding the place using gps. I think what they need is a sign on the highway.
The next day I arranged to meet Jenny at the Auburn, CA library, where I ended up walking the last 100 yards to the library because the gps had led me to a gated driveway nearby. And yes, my gps maps are updated to a 2017 edition. Jenny and I then rode on to Pollack Pines, CA where we stayed for two days before heading further south for more riding out of Sonora, CA.
On our initial meeting we had some problems with getting our helmet intercoms to work. They would pair up okay, but Jenny could not hear me. Eventually they started working somewhat intermittently, but at the beginning of the next day the same problem returned and did not look like it was going to go away. It seemed that the microphone on her intercom was not working. I had a spare controller for it, but not the microphone. It's remarkable how, once you have experienced the ability to talk to other riders, you cannot live without it. Even my riding buddies, who were initially reluctant to get intercoms, now must have them even though it is often difficult to get four of them paired up. So Jenny and I got desperate. The solution was to order another complete unit from Amazon and have it one-day delivered to the next day's motel in Sonora. Naturally, shortly after we did that, her intercom started working and was trouble free for the rest of the day.
I had been planning this ride for weeks during the winter, but as California was experiencing an extremely wet year I became concerned that some of the higher elevation routes I had planned were not going to be snow free by the time of our ride. I made some contingency plans for lower elevation routes and it was a good thing because we came upon this sign;
But I had to see for myself, and sure enough, there was snow:
I asked Jenny to lay in the snow and make a snow angel, but this is as close as she would get.
There had been predictions of thunder showers during the day so we took rain gear along with us, but experienced only a few drops during the ride. However, when we got back to the motel and were having our post-ride beer and snack at a picnic table on the motel grounds, there were some black clouds and thunder and then this (complete with beer belch at end):
This gives you and idea of the size of the hail. We were under an umbrella, so did not get hit with it, and like most hail storms, it was over in minutes. .
A few times my planned route turned out to be an un-paved road. When I am planning the routes I sometimes use Google Maps Satellite view to see if a road is paved our not, but it's a tedious process because I have to zoom in all the way and can only see a small portion of the road. If I see grey pavement with a line down the middle, I know I'm looking at a paved road. A brown road with no line is probably a dirt road. The difficulty is distinguishing between a single lane paved road and a gravel road made with grey gravel. We came on one gravel road that I could have determined was not paved because the gravel was brown, but I had not looked at it. It was pretty smooth so we rode it until we go back on pavement.
Between this and other problems of dead end or flooded roads, I was often working with my gps to figure out an alternate route. Jenny took this picture on her phone because she said this was my typical appearance during this ride:
The best part of the ride was on the morning of our first day riding out of Sonora. We had to leave the motel before 8:30 because there was going to be the annual Mother's Day parade down the main street that our motel was on, followed by a rodeo later. Maybe because of these two events, the roads outside of town were relatively empty, and we had a fantastic morning ride over the following route:
Much of this part of the ride was in a pretty high elevation forest that had been burned over several years before. This sort of destroyed the looks of the forest, but it made the riding better as it was possible to see around curves that would normally have been blocked from view by trees. You can see the road off in the distance in this picture:
This part of the ride made the whole trip worthwhile. It was fantastic!
The whole day's route looked like this:
Notice that section of hwy 49 that I planned to use going to and coming from the lower loop. It turned out hwy 49 was closed somewhere along there. The only alternative was to make a 40 mile detour out to the west both coming and going. This added a lot of miles to an already long day. It was made somewhat shorter by the fact that part of the lower loop turned out to be an impassible (to us} jeep road that had a name that had made me expect it to be paved. I tried to find a different way back, but the only alternative would have been to go through Yosemite valley, and that would have been a nightmare of motor homes and slow going.
On Sunday morning, the 12th of May, Jenny and I headed for home. For her it was a 130 mile ride to San Francisco, and for me it was another two days and 804 miles. My total miles for the ride was 2,724. The weather was perfect, my partner was fun to ride with, and there were a heap of Good Roads.
