may's a-flurry

home-to-home!
i left oakland on sunday night, after two weeks of preparation--bike building (spend FOUR HOURS tuning my front derailleur and now it mostly works but of course when you load a bike up with like 50 lbs of shit everything is a little different), packing, repacking, saying goodbye, sweeping my room so someone else can live there and call it theirs. i kept telling teresino they could move stuff in while i was still there but i think they needed to wait until i left, until the room was really empty...but they still came by every day to water plants and give me a big hug. we had a kind of thing but it was all very ambiguous and so when we said goodbye they gave me some quizzical looks but i'm never sure how much to make a summary story and how much to leave things open-ended, allow our stories to develop separately...
anyway,
after my goodbye party friday night (packets of stuff in tin foil in a fire, hella drunk kids from fancy house) i kinda disappeared, running around and helping build a chicken coop and celebratory beers for everything.
sunday i got an amtrak up to eugene
kevin helped me pack up my bike at the station, hung out on the tracks talking about hot mess and dreams and travelling and king cobra
i slept most of the way and felt bad about it cause the view was so beautiful--the starlight line i think--ate hummus and that funny gjetoast scandanavian cheese
woke up in eugene, packed up & took off!
i rode about 50 miles that day, starting around 1:30 and through lots of little towns and big fields...i managed to get lost only in the small cities (eugene then albany then hella lost in the outskirts of pdx)
constantly amazed that my bike was holding up, heavy as fuck with all of these things i thought i'd need
thrilled at first to have occasion to be eating granola bars and wheat gluten jerky and emergen-c for every meal
mostly excited to be on the open road
i biked around albany like 4 times and a cute girl at a coffee shop gave me a consolatory italian soda while i looked for the way out. finally found the bridge out of town and contemplated pitching my tent on the golf course, then instead asked some folks if i could camp in their yard and got 2 compassionate "no's" before someone said "yes."
hunkered down with "the some of parts" by t.cooper and a black butte porter...
after i was asleep some cops showed up with shiny lights and inquisitive faces asking what i was doing there; after i said i had permission they proceeded to ask where i was going, coming from, how long since i'd left pennsylvania, if i went to school, if i finished school, what i studied, where i'd lived...what what what. i was still mostly asleep and confused but eventually they left.
next morning (yesterday) started out at 7, biked about 110 miles! thought it was supposed to be only 90 but i got lost in lake oswego (wow i hate suburbs and cars wowow). the hills got worse (literally, topographically) as i got tireder and the worst stretch was near wilsonville, probably 60 miles in, 20 miles on a curvy road with lots of speeding cars and NO SHOULDER. once some bros in a car swerved and screamed "get the fuck off the road" and that shook me up, made me want to write "share the road - i don't want to die" on the back of my panniers. or i dunno, put up some guerrilla signs or something. such entitlement.
so! i made it to pdx exhausted, displeased with the city after arriving through its suburbs, now up in the north-northeast with bernard and c80 and other folks in a sleepy smoky beautiful house for a couple days till i head up to washington. i'm excited to get back on my bike and feel that freedom of movement.
love to all!