Kiki Holl, a web designer in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, is currently on a three-month bicycle trek across the country. Follow Kiki’s trip on her blog, where she details each day’s events, mishaps, riding conditions and posts photos. Subscribe to her feed and follow a GOOGLE map that shows you her real time location. Holl recently checked in with CHSS as she reached Portland.
Here's what she had to say:
Greetings all,
Just thought I'd drop an email to you all from Portland. Today I found myself finally reaching Portland, but unfortunately having to cheat a bit and hitch-hike in as the winds down the Columbia River Gorge are seriously dangerous and awful. We started to feel the winds 200 miles away from Portland and managed to pedal through 100+ miles with the winds (headwinds) ... where times you were blown all over the road. And mind you, I am riding with 100+ pounds of weight plus myself, and I was still being blown over the road.
Apparently, the Columbia River Gorge is known worldwide for its windsurfing -- somehow, no one clued us in on this until it was too late. So, we figured it'd be best to do as much as we could with the wind, but to hitchhike into Portland instead of sit on our bikes fighting for two or three more days to get to Portland, only then to not have any time to spend in Portland.
Chase, my riding buddy from Texas, is flying home Tuesday and it'll be sad as part II of my adventures will be coming to an end when I finish the ride to the coast with him. Then I'll take on part III of the ride across the country by biking down the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco.
So stay tuned as the ride's not over yet - I still have something like 800 to 900 more miles ahead of me until I reach my ultimate and final destination. Some of those miles may however be by boat if I can find a way -- as I think it'd definitely be cool to do part of the coast by boat. To date, I have ridden just about 3,500 miles (pedaled) and hitchhiked somewhere in the ballpark range of 1,000 miles now.
I've covered quite a bit of ground and have been through 12 states now (VA, KY, IL, MO, KS, CO, UT, WY, ID, MT, WA, and OR) and have only California left to reach! Pretty amazing, if I may say so myself.
And I couldn't be happier about our decision to relocate north to do the northern route (Transamerican Route) rather than the desert through Utah and Nevada. We still had a good bit of heat (heat wave up here the past week), and times with no services for many miles 60 to 83 miles without any services...but we've fared well and are in good spirits especially knowing we're able to relax a day or few before pedaling to the coast!
Hope life back home is going well and see you all again in September!