Less than 25 miles in the last 4 hours. Well, I did spend a fair amount of time at the Cape Perpetua visitors center. A neat place - could have spent all day. I spent last night at a park beach just outside of Florence in sort of a depression fairly well sheltered from the wind, which I expected might let up during the night. It didn't. In fact, it may even be stronger today than yesterday! To try to avoid it, I'm going to head inland and brave the 80 degree heat there in favor of less wind. It may be more mountainous, but at least some of the time I'll be able to coast. Cape Perpetua has a plastic relief topo map of all the area I expect to be going over, so I have some idea of what to expect.

I don't have my map with me, so I can't tell you the route, but I'll be taking route 34? from here.

Not sure what happened to my watch yesterday, but after beating on it a little and manually winding it, it has been behaving itself since.

Guess I'll try finding a phone and try calling you.

1974: It must have been this day, but that night near the beach was one of the most miserable of the trip. I didn't set up the tent, I just had the sleeping bag on top of a thick mat of vegetation. Wind gusts would come through every couple of minutes and blow out all the warm air. After a couple hours of that I just took my jacket, which had been in use as a pillow, and put it over my head and that end of the sleeping bag. That worked well - the wind still forced enough air exchange so it wasn't stuffy, and I stayed warm enough to sleep.

Bicycling into the headwind was also really miserable. There were some downhill stretches where I had to keep pedaling to make any progress. It's quite amazing how little wind it takes to make for a substantial change in bicycling speed, comfort, and mood. Unfortunately, if most of your rides are in a loop, you will likely spend more time bicycling into the wind than downwind even though you may spend equal distance in each.

I'm surprised I didn't mention those in the letter, perhaps I expected to talk about them on the phone.

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Written 2024 June 5, last updated 2024 June 5.