Home: Rose River Inn Bed & Breakfast

Weather along the Pacific Northwest coast is nearly rain-free for the entire month of August, and mostly clear through September. But October is the month where everything falls off the cliff, with rain being near constant by the end of the month. So we have a strong motivation to get south as quickly as we can, especially because we started two weeks later than our planned Labor Day departure.

On the other hand, it’s “only” 1500 miles to San Diego, and we could get there by Christmas averaging only 20 miles per day. So we also have a strong motivation to take our time, see the sights, relax, and take random offshoots. This no-pressure slow-going is theoretically one of the major benefits of this nomad life vs. the “must be back at work by date X” of all our previous bike tours.

In a confusing attempt to reconcile these two competing forces, we decided to spend three nights in Astoria. Significant rain was forecast for those days, followed by a stretch of clear weather forecast to open October, so we could hopefully avoid riding in no-fun conditions, keep moving south while the weather is good, and learn about a new place.

We’ll tell you later how the decision to pause our southward march pans out, but the immediate decision was a great success! We got our bodies restored at the welcoming Rose River Inn Bed and Breakfast, got to explore most of the really cool town of Astoria, and were able to spend a day with family, as my brother and sister-in-law came up from Portland to hang out (ironically, our decision to head to Astoria rather than our original plan of Portland was due to the “get south as fast as possible” force winning at the moment of that decision).

Rett got to see a bunch of movie history (most notably, ‘Goonies’ locations), the dog-like sea lions, we drank a bunch of good beer and whiskey, ate a bunch of good food, did an unexpected amount of hiking up the giant hill of the Astoria headland, while admiring the endless old, stylish, and mostly in-shape houses rising up the hill like stadium seating.

For our wrecked tire, while we weren’t able to get our preferred tire (Schwalbe Marathon Supreme) shipped during our stay, we figured out how to get a pair sent from Amazon to an Amazon Hub several days down the road where we’d be able to pick them up (in general, “mail” is something that needs some careful planning for nomad-life). In the meantime, I went to Bikes and Beyond to buy a temporary tire, but they sent three employees searching and came up with a used tire that filled the job perfectly, and would accept no money for it.

I was also able to do some additional deferred maintenance on my bike, and catch up on a bunch of other “real life” work that we didn’t get a chance to wrap up before leaving (including, setting  up this blog!) So while expensive in both time and money, it was a worthwhile pause.