Thursday, August 13, 2009

Day 59: Vale, OR to John Day, OR

Today was one of the days we'd been worried about for a while. We'd first started talking seriously about it in Nampa. It was nearly 115 miles from Vale to John Day, which seemed to have the most hotels. There was nothing in between. We started very early.

We also started with a stop at a gas station for breakfast. I thought we were fortunate just to have something open. We headed North out of town, following US-26. There wasn't much to see aside from a headwind, blowing down off the passes ahead.

A few miles in we came to Willow Creek, where we found a general store. Jillian really wanted to use a bathroom, but the store wasn't going to open for another half hour. I stayed with the bike while Jillian went across the street to the Willow Creek School, where the secretary was kind enough to let her use the bathroom.

We tried to stop again in Jamison, specifically to see if the Post Office people would unlock their port-a-potty for us, but the building was rather closed.

Then we rode on to Brogan, all in a punishing headwind. We stopped there at a store - apparently the last one for the next forty miles. We had some more to eat, in addition to checking out their Rattlesnake Contest:

We also met a cyclist on a recumbent who was heading from Portland to Boise. Specifically, he said there was "No way at all [we] are going to make it all the way to John Day." Unfortunate, because we had a hotel reservation and no backup plan.

Out of Brogan we had our first climb of the day, to almost 4000 feet.

There was no downhill on the top of Brogan - just miles and miles of flat, high desert. Nothing to keep us away from the headwind.

We did pass one more important sign though:

Then it was time for another climb, this time to only about 4400 feet. We were, curiously enough, in some sort of preserved forest land.

Next stop was in Unity, which was the little store the woman in Brogan had been referring to. There wasn't much here, and the clerk, noting that by now it was late in the afternoon, suggested we camp. There was a hotel, but it wasn't much, and neither of us wanted to spend the night there only to face more nothingness the next day. Outside the store was a sign charging people extra money to use the store outside normal business hours, which I found amusing. After having more to eat and drink we got back on the road, with a renewed mission of making it as far as possible before dark.

Then it was time for Blue Mountain Pass, at just over 5000 feet. It was a long, long climb. But at least we were out of the desert.

One advantage of Forest lands is the regular campgrounds. They were all empty, but it meant bathrooms we could use. It was getting cold, and the bathrooms were pretty large. Neither of us much cared of the idea of another 60 miles - as many miles as we'd done the day before - in the dark. I seriously considered just setting up our emergency shelter in the bathroom. We decided not to though, not sure of how cold it was going to get.

Not too far out past the campgrounds I spotted some bright green eyes on the side of the road. They were both forward facing, not opposite each other like you'd expect on deer. Furthermore, when they moved, they moved perfectly level to the ground, not bouncing up and down like a deer's. I kept my headlight on them for a while, and Jillian and I kept up very loud conversation, and they slid off into the woods. Jillian wondered why I was pedaling a lot harder than normal, but didn't question it too much. I didn't tell her about the eyes at all.

After we crested the hill we absolutely froze on the downhill. Jillian, as the wind break, had it a lot worse than me. But as I shivered the whole bike would shake. Not much we could do though - the downhills were our only chance to move more than six or seven miles an hour.

At the bottom of this pass was Austin Junction. I'd been hoping for a little 24 hour store or something there, but all we found was a closed store and DOT site. We stayed outside the DOT site, with its lights, and tried to warm up a little bit. But it was rather eerie, and our recent encounter with green eyes had left me a little jumpy. The shooting stars were fantastic, but we got back on the road quickly.

We had one more pass to climb before we'd be able to ride down into the valley and follow a stream to John Day. This pass was just over 5200 feet high, making it our longest climb. It was after 11 when we came to a construction site.

Construction sites are mixed blessings - sometimes they're awful, because the road is bad. Sometimes they're nice, because they slow traffic down and sometimes you can ride in closed lanes. But mostly they're good, because there's port-a-pottys. This one was no exception, and we stopped to use their port-a-potty. Jillian went first, but when she got near the door she turned to me and said "I think there's someone in there."

Ha. Funny, Jillian. We're 30 miles from the nearest house and you think there's someone using a port-a-potty in the middle of the woods?

"I heard a noise! It's shaking!"

Then a man walked out of the port-a-potty. Apparently it was his job to babysit the job site all night, to make sure the traffic signal was still working right. He gave us some cokes, which we gladly took.

Not too long after we crested the pass and had a marvelous downhill back toward civilization. Well, would have been marvelous if it hadn't been so cold. I couldn't stop shaking the entire way down. But the site of city lights in the distance was promising. We rode downhill nearly nine miles to Prairie City, where we'd originally considered spending the night. I was glad we'd changed our minds though. We would have been arriving at a B&B at after midnight, long after everyone had gone to bed.

The ride to John Day was uneventful, with nearly empty roads with beautiful stars overhead.

Finally arriving in John Day, we pulled in to an America's Best Value Inn. There was a sign, saying to ring a bell if you were a late check-in. As it was nearly 1 in the morning, we most certainly were a late check-in. We rang the bell, tried the phones, etc for a half hour. Finally a very sleepy looking woman appeared and very apologetically checked us in. She even gave us an extra day free.

Now in our rooms, we had to find some food. There was nothing open, of course, so we were once again stuck with the little snacks we had. It might not have been all bad, but the soda machine ate the first soda we tried to buy. Ultimately though, none of it mattered. We were so exhausted that food didn't really matter.

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