Rails to Trails and a View with a Room in Everyday Ramblings

This is also from our hike on Saturday. Just look at the way this house is sited! Wow. I love this picture. It has that windswept forlorn feel but with a big city vibe. It also reminds me a bit of a freezing but magical house we rented out on the windswept point in West Seattle when I was a kid, a much more modest domain than this.

We entered a record-breaking heat wave today. I took the day off work ( I so enjoyed that!) and Most Honorable and I were planning a hike up in the Gorge like we often do at least once during the summer.

There was a trail closure and some fires and it was really really hot so Most Honorable suggested an alternative, a bike ride on a Rails to Trails conversion between Portland and the Coast.

We were out there hiking on my birthday about six years ago. It was an okay hike, lots of railroad history and we enjoyed it but he had his eye on a bike trip even then, for Kes and him and me. In time he ended up going out and doing a 46-mile loop mostly on the trail by himself.

I am not an experienced bike rider as an adult and have struggled riding around here. Today I found out why. There is a lot of elevation around here! See picture above. :)

The Vernonia to Banks multi-use trail has an amazingly steady 2% grade. It is awesome and achievable even for someone like me who has completely different muscles built up from walking so much and yoga.

We took Kes’s bike for me. It is easier to shift. And the whole front end is a bit different from my bike. I admit we realized when we stopped for lunch that I had my gloves on, well, wrong. Duh. I feel like I should get bonus points for finding my gloves and my helmet, and appropriate shorts and…

For someone who is not bike conditioned I thought I did well. We rode out about an hour at that grade and lo and behold, much to my surprise and delight it was downhill almost the whole way back! There was one stretch in particular where it was basically impossible not to go fast.

Fun! Summer fun!

The traffic was pretty intense getting back into Portland but I still had time to hustle down to the outpatient pharmacy and pick up the meds for my surgery on Thursday and then get to the hair salon for a haircut. Man it was hot.

Blast furnace hot. It takes it out of one.

But now (this is a flex day for the power company so I am sitting in the dark typing this on my laptop on battery power) the cats and I are chilling (so to speak) waiting to be able to turn the fan back on in a half hour.

Tomorrow is an office and a studio day and so the real concern is getting there and back. I can always take a bus or hire a car if the heat is really bad. It is shaping up to to be an extraordinary three hot hot days .

That just must sound so strange to you all in the depths of winter.

Last updated August 02, 2017