On markets

Day 15: Touring on bike, you find yourself with few expectations. You've never heard of the towns you'll bike through nor the one you're hoping to end up in for the night. You've no idea what the road will be like - traffic, road texture, hills, views - so you take it as it comes. One exception, I'm finding, are roadside markets. I am consistently dissapointed by markets. We go through many little towns where the only business is a little market and they seem to have signed a pact to only sell god-awful food. This is probably particularly acute for me as my stomach will churn for hours if I eat anything with dairy or soy. (If ever you want a small challenge try to find processed foods without dairy and soy.) Hungry, tired, in recent days sopping wet. Candy bars have milk. Chips have soybean oil. Muffins have soy flour. We've found a few ways around this. The man who warned us of the cougar (see earlier entry) sold us a can of refried beans and some salsa. Not bad on an open porch. These markets are the center of town and the company and sightseeing they afford sometimes make up for their complete lack of edible food. Today was a case of this. Sandlake, Oregon. Small wooden building: home, market, car repair shop all rolled into one. Three ladies sitting out on the porch with room to spare. Todd and I pull up just having conquered our longest, steepest hill yet - in the pouring rain. We are drenched. Chilled from coming down the other side. One lady - girl really - squirts us out two tall styrofoam cups of coffee (coffee? warm and brownish atleast - "delightfully terrible" Todd recently called this) and Todd and I found our places on the porch to listen to the no-good, very-bad, terrible, awful year they were having. The porch was covered, the liquid hot, and the ladies seemed to almost have a perfected performance for their biker guests. I'm not convinced the coffee was worth a buck, but the company and shelter sure were. We biked through a few more hours of rain after that until somehow, halleluyah, the sun begin poking through the clouds around 6:30 just as we turned off 101 onto "old scenic 101." Old growth forest, audibly dripping. Road slowly meandering uphill, not enough to even downshift into our lowest front gear. Not a car to be found (one solo female bike tourer). Heaven. Rather than dissapointment about the rain (you weren't expecting sun, so how can you be dissapointed by rain?) you're only surprised and grateful for the sunset. You loved the misty, fog-covered road that kept you from seeing the ocean, but now you're shocked at the vastness of it, and the fact that it has been right alongside you this whole time. We pulled into Lincoln City around 8:30 or 9. We would have made it earlier but the forest, sun and ocean were so breathtaking that we had to stop every minute or so to take another picture. Our motel sits in front of the ocean with an outdoor spa. Better sign off.