"If you live in a car......"

"If you live in a car, you're homeless.
But if you live on a motorcycle, you're Free!"
From the column "How To Disappear Completely",
By Mark Hoyer, Editor-in-Chief, Cycle World Magazine

The shipper showed up a day late, just in time for the rain to start. Within an hour Ray and I had ourselves sorted out, wrapped ourselves in our rainsuits, and headed for the border. The rain continued off and on for the next 5 hours. It began in earnest about an hour before we finally had a chance to turn east to run through the Cascade Mountain Range to escape it. There was one problem with that plan however: before it could get any better, it had to get a hell of a lot worse. The higher and higher we went up the pass the harder and harder it rained. Then we started to see snow up on the mountains beside us, then on the shoulder of the road, and in just a few minutes we were riding past snow drifts 20 feet tall. I was wearing most of the warm clothing I had brought, my grip heaters were on full, my visor was almost completely fogged over and the temperature was still dropping. We got over the high point of the pass and I was just starting to think that we might survive this when we passed a bunch of guys at the side of the road unloading their snowmobiles. I couldn't decide if I should laugh or cry. But the weather gods must have decided to show us some mercy as a few minutes later through the rain I spied a thin wedge of blue sky far down the pass. Minutes later we were tearing along in bright sunlight next to the Columbia river, passing packs of kayakers braving the frigid melt-water and rapids.

All that rain did serve one purpose though, as soon as we'd started that morning it became clear that there was a problem with my front brakes. Over the winter I'd changed out the regular brake lines for braided stainless steel ones that should have given me much more solid braking. But despite the fact that the lever felt good and solid I had to squeeze the lever with almost all my strength to get the bike to slow down, the pads just weren't grabbing the rotors. I probably spilled some brake fluid onto the rotors or pads when I changed the lines. But all it took was a few hours of pouring rain and heavy braking going down a snow covered mountain pass and they were as good as new! However I wouldn't recommend that process to anyone looking to solve that problem in the future.

The cold must have caused hallucinations, as somewhere along there we both thought we'd passed through some bizarre satirical parody of a Bavarian Village. Imagine a Starbucks done up with gingerbread and cartoon people wearing lederhosen painted on it's windows. The McDonald's was beyond description and is probably going to give me nightmares for weeks.

We had dinner that night at a restaurant in Wenatchee that had the best steaks in town. We know it did because it said so in letters 4 feet tall across the side of the building, right underneath "Breakfast Served All Day" The only redeeming qualities the place had was that it was next door to our hotel, and had karaoke. If you've never been treated to atrociously bad red-neck karaoke in a dive bar in some backwater hell hole you've missed out on one of the most important lessons anybody can ever learn: Alcohol can lead otherwise reasonable people into thinking that everybody is laughing with them.

Day 2
The sun was shining, the temperature was above freezing, (barely), and by 8:20 we were belting along through another mountain pass at a dangerous and unsafe speed, heading for The Dalles in Oregon. We went from tree covered mountains to barren plains then rolling hills so many times I couldn't count. At any given time if somebody told me we were in either central Arizona, Montana, or southern California, I'd have believed it. We'd be weaving back and forth for mile after mile while climbing up out of a valley, make a short run across a plateau, then long sweepers as we carved our way down into another  valley. The plan was to cross the Columbia river and circle around to run a road one of our travel guides claimed was "The Best Motorcycle Road In the Pacific Northwest". The middle third was nice but nothing special, but the last third lived up to it's billing so well that we're going to go run it again tomorrow going the opposite direction. It was the perfect mix of tight twisties, long sweepers, straight-aways, elevation changes, spectacular vistas, and faultless pavement.

Late in the day as we finally began to close on the Columbia River Gorge we could see a series of showers threatening to cut us off and soak us before we could get to our hotel, and the race was on! We covered the last 60 miles at 75-85 miles an hour, angling along in front of the rain. Every time the road turned west we'd be in the leading edge, the rain slowly getting stronger, then the road would turn east and we'd come out of it only to have the highway turn back west and it would start again. it was a near thing, but in the end we won, and were only slightly damp when we rolled up to our hotel beneath a rainbow that stretched from one horizon to the other.

Again we had dinner at the place next to our hotel, but this time it was at a fantastic brew pub complete with great service and wonderful food. That is exactly the sort of place we both love to trip over when on a road trip.

It's only the second day, we've already covered 700 miles and hit a bunch of the points we wanted to pass through if we got the chance. We've thoroughly checked the weather and have come up with a plan: tomorrow we're doing a big loop back through that valley to visit The Painted Hills and re-do Hwy 197, (even faster this time!) before heading to Mount St. Helens and the Oregon coast on Tuesday.

This is exactly what we had in mind when we started planning this trip: lots of miles, fun roads, great scenery - We're Free!