Sunday, June 29, 2008 OK, we are total, total wimps. You may have noticed we're not in a park in West Roosevelt. Well, last night as we checked today's route again and I was fussing about the 55 miles in 100+ heat and chance of thunderstorms and lots of hills ending up with tenting in a town park with no facilities, Pat noticed that there was a little town across the river from West Roosevelt and wondered why we couldn't just stay in Oregon on I-84 again today and stop there. We found a motel in town and they had an opening so here we are! About half the climb and we are in an air-conditioned motel room with a restaurant right next door (I just heard the first thunderclap). This change makes tomorrow's route shorter, too, since we would have been in Washington all day, popping back into Oregon for our motel. This way, we'll stay in Oregon, mostly on I-84 and then on 730 which heads straight into Umatilla. We started out early this morning, leaving The Dalles at 7 am, and got to Arlington at 1:45, so we weren't out in the worst part of the heat for long. Tomorrow, we hope to do the same, and with only 48 miles to go, we should make it in even earlier. The next two days after that, though, are both 75 mile days and there's not much we can do about that, so we're hoping the temperatures cool off some by then. So, today we were on I-84 all day, right next to the Columbia River on the Oregon side. The Washington side was pretty spectacular, mostly huge, brown grass-covered hills that seemed to go right down to the river. Somehow they carved out a railroad track close to the river and we saw lots of trains going by. Hwy. 14 (the one we were supposed to be on) also runs along there, higher up in the hills. We rarely saw cars and trucks going by there and often couldn't even tell where the road could be. We took lots of pictures of the Washington hills because they were so impressive, and a few have trains or trucks going by to try to give a sense of the scale. You'll probably have a hard time seeing them, they look miniscule. The Oregon side was equally impressive, mainly for the basalt cliffs that were still prevalent. There were a few places, especially toward the end of the day, where the hills were rounded, brown grassy slopes like Washington's, but mostly it was very rocky. We saw a deer, a blue heron, a hawk and lots of smaller birds and squirrels. We hope you're not getting tired of hills and river, because that's mostly what we have again in today's pictures. We also saw a few interesting bridges across the river, and a couple of large dams, as well as some side rivers and channels. We're still finding it fascinating so we hope you do too. We ended the day at a little under 54-1/2 miles in slightly over 5 hours of bike time, certainly a lot better than we could have done on the Washington side. And it's raining and very windy out at the moment. |