The People You Meet Along the Road

We started staying in the hiker/biker campsites of state parks halfway down the Oregon coast. For $5 you get a picnic table for cooking, a place to put up your tent, and a warm shower. If you're lucky, you also get to meet a gaggle of other bikers who are also pedaling their way along the same stretch of highway, who you don't necessarily see during the day as everyone is travelling different distances, at different speeds, starting at different places each day. At Honeyman State Park we had a reunion of sorts - we reconnected with some guys we'd seen a few days before and met some new folks - and we stayed up late chatting by the campfire about life and biking. We got a group shot before we left to mark the moment. Some of the people we've met along the road include Aaron and Neda, our current gang (shown here excited about Neda's BioLite stove cranking out heat and charge at full capacity), Kish and Omar who are biking from the US border with Canada to the border with Mexico, Graeme a sailrigger and sailor from Vancouver (in hi-vis yellow in the group photo), and the fat biker is Matt, a guy from Florence we met at Safeway and chatted with about the beach and desert fat biking scene - Karl was stoked to connect and talk about fat bikes, since his is currently lonely during prime fat biking season.Read more