Saturday, July 31, 2010

Newport to Gold Beach and beyond



After recharging our batteries, we had two hard days from Newport to Ophir where our friends Ned and Su have an amazing house/yurt with a spectacular ocean view.
The first day of Newport to Lakeside was very scenic, going through Yachats and Florence where it was nice and sunny into the area of the Oregon Dunes where it got cloudy and misty again. Stayed at Lakeside, a small town on a lake and woke up to see a wet parking lot in the morning and a wet mist that was with us most of the way until we got to Port Orford. The most memorable part of the day was going off the 101 on a road called Seven Devils Rd. Not surprisingly there were 7 stinky steep hills, and a bonus one marked on the road as double 7 by a tired cyclist most likely. We saw several touring people along the way, most of them carrying their own gear, one couple had a great arrangement, he hauled a trailer with everything and she rode ahead on her road bike with no extra weight! A family of 5 had the mother driving a VW van as a sag vehicle while the father and kids rode their road bikes. After 8 hours of riding, over 86 miles and over 4000 feet of climbing we arrived at sunny Ophir and stayed in the brand new yurt that Ned and Su built in the past year.
Today we stayed until 11 in Ophir and decided to have a short day, after going down to Gold beach from Ophir there is nothing flat so again today we did quite a bit of climbing with 40 miles and 1900 feet of climbing. I will be so ready for Mount Lemmon when I get back to Tucson! The scenery has been fantastic, blue ocean, big rocks, amazing bridges, and the best a very strong tail wind for the past three days.
Tomorrow we will enter California, and we will have a chance to climb even bigger hills.

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