Blackrock: Whistler Warm-up

Road gap after the Salad Tosser

Blackrock is one of North America’s premier freeride destinations. Go to Salem, turn west to a small town called Falls City. Here hokey and pokey combine. There are a number of shops in town but at 12:30 on a Monday afternoon, when Fiona and Symi had a wander around, only one was open. We went looking for bread – we had already dismissed the possibility of decent and were just concentrating on the bread part.

McKenzie River: Home of America’s favourite MTB trail! (and hot springs)

Blue Pool: It's cold and deep. You can cliff jump here if you want to freeze

McKenzie River is not far north of the Willamette River but is way more popular.  The drive from Bend was spectacular with open views of the Sisters Mountains, Mt Bachelor, Mt Washington and Mt Hood, all still covered in snow. After Sisters (a town) it was very quickly back to the lush green scenery. You are spoilt for choice for accommodation with cabins and campgrounds all along the river. Paradise Campground had been recommended to us but we couldn’t go past Belknap Springs with its two hot spring fed pools, Rob feeling the need to soak a tired body. Our campsite was opposite a large area of lawn, perfect for soccer and Frisbee, and the McKenzie River Trail (MRT) was 30 seconds ride away.

Bend: Named the best mountain bike town in the USA

Bend is only a 100 mile drive from Oakridge but a world away. It’s over the Cascade Mountains and on the Columbia plateau at 4000 ft elevation, hence classified as high desert. Due to this, the rainfall is much less than the west side of the Cascades. Bend has been one of the most successful towns in Oregon in the last 10 years and is a popular place to live, due to the low rainfall and many outdoor activities, there are snow sports very near town. The town itself looks prosperous with trendy shops and a micro-brewery for every day of the fortnight. The picturesque Deschutes River runs through town and has great rapids if that’s your thing. Unfortunately the camping here is limited to RV parks, the one we stayed in was between two major roads and relatively noisy compared with the solitude of Oakridge.

Deschute River Trail

Oakridge: Mountain Bike Mecca?

Meadow, top of Alpine

I had heard about the mountain biking in Oakridge from a number of sources, so it would be rude not to go for a look. It was an easy drive up the i5, where we discovered that it’s illegal to fill you own petrol in Oregon. After filling with gas, Simone wanted to put some music on and we continued our usual system of playing songs alphabetically, choose a song and off you go. Today she randomly started with The Angel’s, Am I Ever Going to See You Face Again (studio version!), that evening I read in the paper Doc Neeson had passed away!

Four Months in an RV in the USA

So, how are we going after four months of RV living? Very well thank you. Buying and registering the RV was achieved in a couple of weeks - we will write more detail about this in a post later on.

High Desert Museum

Today the whole school (me) went on an excursion to the High Desert Museum. I was extremely excited to go to the museum because there were live animals like owls, otters and fish. After we ate our delicious breakfast of tomato with avocados on olive bread, we made our way to the museum.

Porcupine

The first show we attended was the desert dwellers show about animals. It was fascinating. They showed us three real live animals and told us all about them. The first one was a skunk and they explained how they spray their predators with a terrible smelling liquid to scare them away. Next up was the badger, they showed an excellent demonstration of how badgers digs, it was cool. Lastly there was the porcupine, I was stunned to discover that porcupines ate and climbed trees!!!!

Northern California Redwoods

Replicas of Indian houses at Patrick's Point

The redwoods on the California coast are taller than their inland cousins but with a smaller diameter. The northern Californian coast is a confusion of National and State Parks that contain 45% of the remaining coastal redwoods, 39 000 acres compared with the more than 2 million that existed in 1850. Summer brings the fog which supplies half the water supply that allows the coastal redwoods to survive, a tall redwood requires 500 gallons of water per day!

King Range: The lost coast

We heard about the King Range National Conservation Area and Tolken Bike Park from Canadian friends. It's on the Lost Coast near Shelter Cove. The coast here is the most isolated in mainland USA. Tolken sits 2000ft above the ocean and only 2 miles away, the hills are steep. We drove up the US101 from San Francisco and at Garberville turned towards the coast for the 26 miles to the campground. This was one slow road in an RV, near the turn into Tolken the road was so steep we wondered if the RV would make it up. At one point the speed was below 10mph. We finally turned into King Peak Rd which was dirt, narrow and again very steep in sections. Tolken campground only has limited spaces available, the thought of there not being a spare camp space was not a happy one at this time. Luckily the campground had cleared out after the Memorial Day long weekend, relief!

San Francisco

After spending a good deal of the day driving across California from Yosemite we reached San Francisco Bay. Crossing the San Francisco-San Rafael Bridge into Marin County (where mountain biking began) we passed the San Quentin prison. We had booked a place in an RV Park in Greenbrae as it evidently had easy access to a ferry to San Francisco.

Golden Gate Bridge with just a touch of fog.

Once we had booked in our minds turned to the necessary tasks to complete before beginning exploring the city. For Fiona this was the washing, for Rob (who admittedly had been driving all day) it was mountain biking. For those of you who notice details the last time Rob did any “proper” mountain biking was back in Colorado and withdrawal symptoms were well and truly set in.

Riding the ferry to the big smoke

Next morning we were up and on the ferry to San Francisco (our first city in three months). The ferry ride was great with views of Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge and the city itself. Arriving at the ferry terminal we were greeted with a huge farmers market. 

Lots of lovely food.

We spent a lovely time wandering around tasting amazing stone fruit, cheeses, bread etc. One man was giving out samples of sun dried fruit. It tasted so much better than any dried fruit we have tasted before. Luckily we had a backpack with us so were able to stock up on goodies. We had allocated 2 days to the city so decided to spend our first day on foot.

We had a great time touring around the harbor area with the highlight for Symi being the sea lions which lounge around on the jetties. We did take the opportunity of a quick coffee in the sunshine as well.

Sea Lions at pier 39

Not RV friendly

Then it was on to tackle climbing some of the city’s steep hills. We of course visited the most crooked street in the world. Glad we did not bring the RV as it would have found the corners challenging.

By this time it was late in the afternoon and well past lunch time. China town was just around the corner. It is huge. We found a dim sum place and settled in for lunch. We spent a bit more time wandering around looking at houses, cable cars and trams and then decided to call it a day and take the ferry back.

Later in the evening we decided on a picnic dinner of local buys (evidently this makes us locivores!). Fortunately we had bought some local county wine so we were able to accompany our picnic with a glass of red.

Next day we decided to bus in over the Golden Gate Bridge. We were lucky with the weather on our stay as there was only fog over the bridge in the afternoon of our second day. That said, the temperatures in the city were decidedly cooler than if you went inland a little. Today was to be the day of the cable car. We purchased our day passes and were confronted with an hour long line to board a cable car.

We waited about 10 mins and decided that there must be shorter cues elsewhere. We hopped on a bus and rode around for a bit then found a queue of only a few people on the cable car that crosses the financial district. We waited about 10 minutes and then got an outside seat where Symi and Rob were able to stand out on the step. Symi was well pleased about this. Hitting the bottom of the financial district we decided to try out the rail system and head over to Castro district for lunch. We got off the train and saw a retro looking diner which looked good.

Lunch was good and made more enjoyable by the very gay owner who went out of his way to look after and entertain us.

Staying on theme we then headed up for a walk through Haight-Ashbury and down to the golden gate park.

The rest of the afternoon was spent on public transport. We rode on a great retro tram - San Francisco seems to obtain from other cities – the one we were on was from Chicago. We followed this up with more cable car rides and then a ferry ride back home. 

The verdict? We loved San Francisco our first city in over three months but don’t think we could spend long periods of time doing city tourism on this trip. Strangely a day walking around a city is more tiring in many ways than a 20k walk. The other reason would be that we could never afford it. We still have a few cities on our to do list but will definitely be spending the majority of our time exploring the natural wonders of this country (+ the man made single track). 

Yosemite National Park SAR Presentation

When we were at Yosemite National Park we went to a SAR presentation at the Yosemite Theatre. SAR means Search and Rescue. The talk was very interesting with a few scary stories.

The man talked about swift water and how dangerous it is. People drown every year and it is the most common cause of death. Stay out of swift water.

The scariest thing he talked about is how they have to rescue rock climbers off the cliffs from their injuries. They got them out with stretchers and lifted them in to helicopters. It was scary.

When I got back I made a Lego stretcher for all my toys. Now I play rescue games with all my toys. Some of the stories scared me but I learnt lots.