On Friday, December 13, 2019 at 4:33:33 PM UTC-8, jbeattie wrote:
On Friday, December 13, 2019 at 8:08:10 AM UTC-8, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 2:35:02 PM UTC-8, jbeattie wrote:
On Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 1:20:21 PM UTC-8, sms wrote:
On 12/11/2019 3:15 PM, jbeattie wrote:

snip

Bad news, Tom. Portland is not on the coast. The girls were about 80 miles short of crossing the entire continent. They'll have to start over.

While they didn't cross the entire continent, perhaps they dipped their
wheels into the Columbia River. Close enough. Or perhaps they really did
ride all the way to the Pacific.

Tom says they started in Astoria, which is still not on the coast, but if his wife and kids were on the standard Bikecentennial route, they would have cut over to the coast, gone south and then cut inland south of Tillamook. I came up from SF and rode entirely on the coast up to Florence and then cut inland -- over the spectacular McKenzie Pass and through central Oregon.

You could start the Bikecentennial route from Astoria or scenic Florence, former home of "Lawrence of Florence," a now forgotten roadside camel attraction at the sand dunes. https://traveloregon.com/things-to-d...-oregon-dunes/ I encountered Lawrence on a later ride down the coast with my wife and got the obligatory camel picture. Camels are more fun than the ubiquitous and ornery Roosevelt Elk. https://www.hcn.org/articles/wildlif...ns-north-coast

-- Jay Beattie.

Why would they have to start on the coast when Astoria is mere miles from the coast? The route they took went through Idaho and Montana before heading south. You could also argue that they didn't go all the way to the Atlantic Ocean because they didn't "ride" further than North Bay.

No, AFAIK, the route from Astoria headed south and then across central Oregon. You hit Idaho at the Brownlee Dam/Hells Canyon and then headed north into Montana for a long, gratuitous climb up the Lochsa River to Missoula and the Bikecentennial office to sign The Book. My signature and the signature of my then girlfriend is probably in some dusty storage bin somewhere -- or tossed in the garbage. It was a total waste of time going so far north because you just turned south again and got on a route through the center of the US.

Missoula was wet and cold in June. I remember going to Sam Braxton's bike shop and buying a washer for my Campy NR pedal that was creaking like crazy. I opened up the pedal and found that it was missing a washer and a keyway on the axle, so I filed a keyway with a Swiss Army knife and installed a washer. It quit creaking after that. http://www.classicrendezvous.com/USA/Braxton_Sam.htm It was pretty neat talking with Sam and finding a shop with a Campy small parts box in Montana.


My comment was about not underestimating children and they abilities so of course you have to turn it into something about Bike Centennial which was something that hardly anyone had any interest in.

People who did the transcon trail have a great interest in it. I bought the guide books and did it with my girlfriend in '81. I had been on the trail in '76 as part of a ride to Vancouver, BC, but I didn't do the transcon ride until five years later. This was back when people rode in cut-offs on 5sp low-end junk right off the showroom floor. The studied tourist on a purpose built bike was rare. I was racing and a bike aficionado, so I had a super-groovy, custom built steel touring bike with a Campy triple with a low of 36/28 and NR long reach brakes, which were great. The Rally derailleur sucked as did the bar-end shifters with the porous Suntour SS bare cable housing that let the rain through. It was the stickiest shifting system imaginable. Ah, the good old days when everything was perfect.

-- Jay Beattie.

I don't know what route they took but they went through Idaho and Montana and the conditions and weather was so good they still rave about it and they're in their 40's.

My wife even says that she wouldn't mind moving to Boise but after having lived 3 years in Moses Lake you couldn't get me up there in a million years. What's more the weather has been getting cooler each year since 1910 or so whether Greta Thunberg knows it or not.