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Bill  On The Road

 by: Bill Oetinger  9/1/2000

It's always better on a bike

I just returned from a wonderful one-week bike tour that meandered across the northwest corner of California. I came home in a state of high exaltation, reveling in a warm glow of delight and fulfillment. The tour was as good as any I've ever done...and I've done some marvelous tours. It just couldn't have turned out much better. And what makes this especially satisfying for me is that I had begun the tour without any sense of pleasurable anticipation. I had a serious case of the blahs...a feeling that it really wasn't going to be all that great...perhaps even a bit tedious and boring. Boy, was I wrong...

This was the 2000 edition of the Santa Rosa Cycling Club's annual summer tour. There were about four dozen riders and support personnel on this trip, and I was the tour leader, having laid out all the routes a couple of years ago on a flying three-day run through the area in my car.

We called this journey the Bigfoot Tour in honor of the legendary sasquatch, whose woods would be our home for most of the week. We began in Yreka, on Interstate-5, just south of the Oregon border, and we ended up, 460 miles and seven days later, at the south end of the Avenue of the Giants, on Hwy 101, just north of the Mendocino County line. In between, we rode along the banks of several wild and scenic rivers--the Klamath, Scott, Salmon, Van Duzen, Mattole, and Eel, among others--and we clambered up and down over the shoulders of the Marble Mountains, the Trinity Alps, and the Coast Range.

We crossed paths with the Pacific Crest Trail up near the timberline on at least three occasions. We wiggled our toes in the beach sand at Cape Mendocino on the Unknown Coast. We pottered about in little picture-postcard pioneer towns like Weaverville and Ferndale. We dove into deep, clear swimming holes on several different rivers. We lounged around a series of pleasant camps, packing away good food and drink, and socializing with our fellow travelers. And most of all, best of all, we rode on delightful little backroads through some of the most remote and peaceful wilderness one could ever envision, almost always with hardly a car to be seen all day. Afterward, I think everyone agreed the trip was a winner.

So if this tour was so great, why did I feel so uneasy about it beforehand? For months leading up to the tour, I had been beset by the worry that it wouldn't measure up to the high standards we had set on previous club tours...that my assembled participants would be disappointed. I shared my concerns with a few of my club mates who were involved with me in the planning of the tour, and they generally looked at me like I had a few slates loose, and suggested I keep my gloomy maunderings to myself. Which I tried hard to do. As the tour drew near and those signed up to ride began peppering me with eager little questions about the routes, I tried to be chipper and upbeat, not passing on to them the contagion of my misgivings.

I did occasionally falter in my resolve to be positive. While talking with one participant, a week before the trip, I made some mild disclaimer about how the trip might not be all that great. His response: "Hey, let me get this straight: I get to take a week off work, and all I have to do all week is ride my bike along new roads I've never seen before, right? So what's the problem?" Put like that, I couldn't mount much of a rebuttal, so I resolved to get over my self-imposed malaise and let the tour be whatever it would be.

And what it turned out to be was fantastic...better than I could have ever hoped for. Every last one of my worries evaporated in the face of each new day's adventures. Some of those worries were of a more substantive sort, and while the concerns may have been legitimate, in the end, they worked out okay. For instance, I worried that it might be too hot. Some of the inland portions of this route can be very hot in July--well over 110°--but the week we did it, we hit a "cooling trend" that kept the highs in the high 80s and low 90s. (Just to prove that my worrying was not entirely without merit, it did in fact hit 110° exactly one week later.) I worried that some of the campgrounds might be overcrowded or substandard, but all of them turned out to be just fine.

But aside from those practical concerns, my deeper feelings of ennui about the tour were the ones that really had me in a funk, and those are the ones most thoroughly blown away by actually getting out there and riding the roads. In the end it comes back to that old truism that things are always better on the bike. Remember, I had laid this tour out on a flying run through the region in my car. I had surveyed the first three stages on a Friday, the next two and a half stages on Saturday, and the final day and a half on my way home on Sunday. I was able to record all the salient data that way--mileage and at least approximate elevation gain, and also points of interest--but doing it in a car, in a hurry, just cannot prepare one for the reality of being out there on the bike.

The smells, the carress of the wind, the vagaries of the weather, the 360° all-encompassing panoramas...the dynamic of riding with others, in smoothly rotating pacelines, in diving, dipping dances on the downhills, in quiet, companionable labor on the climbs. All of it was special. I didn't ever think the whole trip would be dull. I knew there were some really exciting sections out there--like the Salmon River gorge and the Unknown Coast--but the exquisite beauty and grandeur of those sections was so much more intensely felt than I imagined it would be. Even more impressive though was how the sections I had imagined would be dull turned out to be delightful. There really wasn't a lame mile on the entire tour, and most of them were superb...and the magic that infused them all was provided almost entirely by the simple expedient of experiencing them from the front row seat of my own bike.

This may seem like a "well, duh!" observation to most cyclists. I know I've written other essays on exactly this same point. You'd think it would be obvious to me by now. But the misgivings I had about the Bigfoot Tour ahead of time, and how wrong they turned out to be reminds me once again how easy it is to forget this simple, seemingly obvious fact.

My wife and I are off next weekend to the mountains of Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties to lay out some of the final stages of the Condor Country Tour...next year's proposed club tour. As I drive those backroads, I will tell myself over and over again--whenever I begin to feel bored--that what I'm seeing and experiencing from inside a car will be amplified and intensified many times over when we ride it next June on our bikes.

Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net



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