Yesterday evening ended up being not very relaxing. We got to our hotel in Astoria at 8pm. I’d been driving/dealing with the rental car for about 4 hours at this point, on very little sleep, so I was pretty tired. Unfortunately, the rest of the evening was spent assisting my dad in putting his bike back together. His bike is some carbon fiber fancy thing that has a bunch of proprietary/weird parts, so nothing was intuitive. It didn’t help that he hadn't really done it before. Anyways, I went to bed somewhere around 1:30 in the morning.

At least we had some aggressively OK Mexican food for dinner


I was up at 7:30 this morning for complimentary breakfast, which got the job done. Then I returned the car at 9, and did some quick final reorganizing of my cargo. Somehow, “quick” ended up taking 2 hours, so we officially set off close to noon.



I proceeded to plan a route towards Barview Jetty County Campground. Unfortunately, I’ve never done route planning on mobile using RWGPS. I ended up with a route that immediately took us straight up an extremely steep hill, rather than along the coast. At one point my Garmin said the grade was 20%.

From then onwards was much more enjoyable. We had rolling hills until Seaside, with a few climbs but nothing particularly notable. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my saddle to feel quite right. Before I left Berkeley, I’d moved the saddle back in an effort to reduce wrist pain, but in the process I fudged the angle. Brooks B17s are notorious for having an upwards angle at the nose, and I probably didn’t angle it high enough. I was sliding around and generally uncomfortable. This meant I was constantly starting and stopping to adjust the angle. As a result, by ~3pm we’d already been on the road for 3.5 hours, while only 2 of those were spent riding. We hadn’t even reached 20 miles - far short of the 60 it would take to reach the campground. We also didn’t have any camp fuel.

The point is, we aborted that plan, and just booked a hotel in Seaside instead. We’re staying at the Ebb-Tide Oceanfront Inn, with no complaints. I hear there’s free breakfast too. Dinner was fish n chips, chowder, and an IPA from Sam’s Seaside Cafe - would recommend!




I hope I can properly catch up on sleep tonight; tomorrow should be better, if we can get an early start. Alright, cya.