We camped at this nice little RV park very close to the dam. The weather cooled off just enough to be comfortable. In the camping area we had as a neighbor this nice young family who shared their firewood and sweets with us, all while playing bluegrass music which we all happened to really like. So it was a really pleasant camp. We dragged a picnic table over to our campsite and started working on dinner. Dave and I had each pre-made dinner the night before and so we just had to re-heat. Bill made up some soup and Tim had a freeze-dried meal.
That night we had no clouds and no light pollution so we had a great night of star-gazing. My brother Dave has this really cool app on his iPhone called SkyView which I could have played with all night. You get it set up so it knows its location in the hemisphere and then as you hold it up to the sky, it shows the constellations - even below the horizon. Very geeky, but super cool! So aside from playing with that, we had a great evening of sitting around the fire chatting about the day's ride as well as tomorrows and all sorts of other subjects.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
The next morning, Dan Schneider whom I had met at a previous Fastlane Kamiah weekend joined us for that day and the next. Dan rides a BMW GS1200 and had ridden with Bill last year on a cross-country trip to North Carolina and back. We made breakfast, then cleaned up, packed the bikes and left the RV park. We headed over to to town to top up on gas and got on the road a little before 10am.
This was going to be an awesome day of riding. Bill had routed this trip completely different from the previous years Oregon trip. We left Heppner via 207 heading toward Spray, riding through Hardman, past Anson Wright Park, eventually T-ing into 19 which starts heading east. The 207 road was pretty much deserted and the pavement clean with lots of good twists and some hairpins. Turning left onto 19 we entered another great twisting road as it follows the John Day River. But we didn't follow it for too long. About 10 miles down the road, we turned left onto the Old West Scenic Bikeway. This ended up being a really nice road, though we were unsure of the pavement quality. It was about 35 miles with the countryside pretty barren and dry, but was still lots of fun.
Tom Clark
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Intellitect, living in Spokane, Washington. I also do a little development work on the side. And I love riding motorcycles all over the country with my friends.
