Lee Hart's Web Site

Monday, 1/19/1998

Well I didn't leave until 1:20 but I started out making good time. Due to a washout on US-101 in northwest Oregon I decided to take I-5 south to Portland and then head west on 26, eventually making my way to US-101 on the coast. I got to Portland in a reasonable 2 1/2 hours. Then I headed towards the coast. I hit a little Portland commute traffic but it didn't last that long. I had dinner in Tillamook at around 5:30, left around 6:40, and then continued south on US-101 in heavy rain.

Riding in heavy rain on a poorly marked road at night sucks. I really wished I had a set of high-powered lights to be able to see the road. My visor fogged up more than usual which only made things worse. After a short while I decided to pull over at the next reasonable town. This ended up being Lincoln City. Unfortunately when I checked into my motel I discovered that my new fanny pack with my Compaq Handheld PC Companion and checkbook had fallen off. What disturbed me the most was not the checkbook or the H/PC itself but some data on the H/PC. My sister (Alicia) is a teacher and one of her class projects was sending paper cutouts of each child on to various people, asking them to keep a log of what the "flat child" did for a week. My log for Flat Jessica was on my H/PC. In an act that would later seem prescient I had removed most of the personal material from my checkbook/wallet. At the time I was just trying to save any space I could.

Another reason that I was less concerned about the checkbook is that I'm a pepper head. I love hot and spicy foods and I normally carry either ground Habanero pepper or some new hot sauce with me. In this fanny sack was a test tube (factory packaging( of Doc MacNeil's Last Experiment, a hot sauce I had recently started using. If the fall to the ground didn't break the test tube then the first car ran over it certainly would have make the whole mess fairly toxic. In any case I was not going to go back over ~30-40 miles of roads at night in the rain to try to find a black fanny sack on the road or in a ditch. Instead I unloaded my bike and was fully in my room around 8 PM.

It was only 300 miles; I'd done longer trips before, both on my K12 and on my Monster. Except for the heavy rain at night it went pretty well. There was a little numbness in my legs. I hit the gym at the hotel and didn't have any further problems with that on the trip. I think part of it was just getting used to the saddle; I get similar results when I ride my bicycle after not riding it for a long time. The Gerbing heated jacket liner was really nice. After dinner I forgot to hook it up to the controller Velcro'd to the outside of my Aerostich. I stopped about 20 minutes later because my hands were getting sluggish. (I think this may be where the fanny sack fell off since I had to loosen it to get inside my Aerostitch). What a difference those 77 watts make. I expect I should be able to make the bay area Tuesday night. This should put me in Vegas on Thursday. A little time to play and to find a place to park my bike.