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Had a little free time.. rode to Oregon and back (another first long ride story)
I've been shut out of work since last Tuesday (I'll let you take a wild guess at why that might be), so I decided to take the CB for a little spin up to Oregon to see some family on Thursday. It's 400 miles one way from the Bay Area.
I took a couple of pictures, but didn't get any very good ones.. I will put one from a pit stop along I-5 northbound.
First 100 miles was not too bad. There was a bit of traffic going into SF, but I-80 eastbound was smooth sailing.. not much traffic on the Bay Bridge in that direction, and also very little out to Vacaville. I grabbed my first fill-up, and transferred to 505 NB.
I don't know what happened, there was no wind on 80 at all but as soon as I got onto 505, I ran into the absolute nastiest wind I have ever had to ride in. I couldn't bear to do more than 50 mph with the headwind (windscreen might have helped a little with that?) and I kept getting hit by very short but very hard gusts mainly from the left, I thought I was really about to go down a few times. The front wheel would bounce in one direction, then the other, and then straighten out, all very abruptly. I kept my cool, and stayed as loose as I could. The bike corrected itself when it needed to, and I countersteered against the wind when I needed to, so I managed to survive. Having to go that slow, I was getting passed by all the semi trucks. When they merged back in front of me, I got a real exaggerated taste of "drafting." With all the turbulence, I could strongly feel the pockets of air pushing me toward and away from the trucks a couple hundred feet ahead.. that's much less of a thing when the winds are calm.
After about 40 miles of this I got to I-5, and took the first exit for a little breather, contemplating turning back around as I did not know for how long the nasty wind would continue. I decided to keep on trucking north for a little while and tough it out, which was a good decision. The further north I got, the better it was, and after not long I could tolerate to go 60 or 65 rather than only 50. I was still getting my ass kicked by the wind, but not as bad.
Somewhere along the line, the front zipper on my leather jacket decided to split open in the middle.. the split got wider and wider until it finally reached the bottom, and the jacket flaps became a cape. I pulled off at the next exit, fiddled with the zipper, and kept on going.. this would be a point of drama later on in the trip.
I stopped at Williams for gas and lunch, and marched northward for what seemed like a very long time. Once I got to Red Bluff, the wind was much less of a problem, and I could finally comfortably cruise at almost full speed.
Everything north of Redding is just a fantastically beautiful ride! Great scenery, nice easy turns through the hills. It was a little chilly, so the long johns underneath my gear turned out to be the right choice.
Mount Shasta was a majestic sight, and somehow a bit more "real" than when I did this trip in a cage a few months back.
I took another gas pit stop at the Castle Crags, and a little side trip to try to get a better view of the crags.. so, here's the only picture I shall share with this story:
I tried to get a shot of the bike in front of a piece of the crags, but the lighting and image quality simply did not work out.
I added one layer under the jacket in Yreka in anticipation of Siskiyou Summit possibly being a bit too cold, which also was a pretty good choice. It wasn't super cold, but the downhill portion approaching Ashland and Medford was in the shade, and would have been a bit uncomfortable.
I made the trip back on Tuesday. I had thought about taking the long way around on the trip back.. Highway 199 to Crescent City and then 101 (I really wasn't in any hurry) but wasn't sure how the weather would be along the coast; the forecast I looked at said wind for Crescent City and Eureka, which I wasn't really thrilled about. So I did the "boring" I-5 and 505 route to get back home.
Since I left in the morning, it was quite cold over the summit, and through the first stretch of California where the elevations are pretty high. Here's where the jacket came into play again. I found that if the jacket didn't zip up quite right, I could try zipping it again and if it closed all the way, it would probably stay shut. This worked until Yreka where I made my first gas stop, but then no matter how many times I tried to re-zip, it wouldn't close properly. I finally decided to leave the jacket halfway open with the zipper in the middle. Then if the teeth came apart, the flaps of the jacket would still be held together in the middle instead of the top, and it wouldn't go into cape mode.
That worked as intended, but as I was still on elevations above 3000 feet, it was quite frigid. The further downhill I got, the more it warmed up, and it was almost smooth sailing the rest of the way.
There was a marquee sign at Yreka saying, "Wind advisory... Reduce speed." Damn it! I got a little nervous about that one, but thankfully it was a non-issue the whole way.
The next gas stop, even the above zipper mitigation method almost didn't work, as some teeth got so bent out of place that the zipper would just fall off the track about a quarter of the way up. I fidgeted with them and got the zipper to its middle position one more time, and then resolved not to mess with it for the rest of the trip, meaning no taking the jacket off until I got home. I moved my wallet from my inside pocket to my tail bag and would have to grab it from there next time I needed gas.
As with the trip up, the mountains north of Redding were great, and the rest is pretty flat and boring. Except this time no wind, and I was able to make much better total travel time (almost by an hour and a half!) by doing a small margin above the posted speed limit, wink wink. I didn't try out the bike's speed limiter, but I sure could have with that wide open straight road with almost nobody on it.
The summary.. I survived my first semi-long road trip on the bike, and did just fine! I might have liked a wind screen, cuss bar, and a heated vest, but I managed OK without all those extras.
My back would get a little tired along the way, but a simple 5 minute gas stop took care of me just fine. Aside from that I was comfortable on the bike, it handled fantastically, no crazy cagers tried to kill me, and I had a great ride!
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Had a little free time.. rode to Oregon and back (another first long ride story)
