I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but please bear with me. I have heard women say that if they remembered how unpleasant childbirth was, they’d only have one child. I felt kind of like this today.
I’ve heard a lot about how awesome riding US 101 can be, but I wasn’t feeling that way for most of the day. The traffic was heavy, the shoulder often non-existent, and the drivers impatient.
Today marks the first time on this journey that I yelled at a driver, and it happened more than once. One time, a UPS van made what was probably an illegal U-turn in one of the towns I passed through, and almost took me out. Even some pedestrians yelled obscenities at him when they saw this close call. He didn’t even wave an apology. Another time, a pickup truck “rolled coal” and tried to envelop me in diesel smoke, but, thankfully, wind cleared it quickly. And the logging trucks…
BUT! When I pulled into Cannon Beach (my destination), I forgot all that. I couldn’t stop grinning. The coast is beautiful, I had a gentle tailwind for the second half of the ride, and I am just about 31 miles from Astoria – the end of the TransAm (albeit not the end of my journey).
I can’t think of a single bad day, or even a bad moment, of this trip that hasn’t left me with a warm feeling of deep happiness and contentment.
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