And practicing gratitude… yeah right
We set off at 8:15 this morning knowing that today was going to be a long one. We encountered road construction delay, after road construction delay. A total of nine!
Luckily they only lasted about five to ten minutes each. In between, the road was beautiful. The forests here are so dense. There weren’t too many other cars so we enjoyed the ride in between stops.
We rode into a brief rainstorm.
In Aberdeen it took us thirty minutes to go six blocks due to road work. But, little did we know, this was one of many setbacks.
Washington practices clear cutting their forests as a logging method. We passed scalped landscapes of recently harvested trees and new growth forests.
We stopped in Raymond at the Hungry Heifer for lunch and a Spark.
Back on the road, we headed for Puget Island.
We crossed the bridge onto the island and were the first to get in line for the ferry that takes passengers across the Columbia River into Oregon.
Because the ferry runs once an hour and it had just unloaded, we had some time to kill. We checked out the Lewis and Clark Heritage Site. Apparently, the expedition met some native Cathlemets who had just caught some sturgeon. The expedition offered to buy some of the fish but the tribe wanted too much money. One of the members of expedition did trade for an otter pelt.
We loaded onto the small ferry set off across the Columbia River. The trip took about ten minutes.
Once on the other side, an osprey scolded us for getting too close to its nest which was built on one of the pilings.
We were now in Oregon and headed out on our route to McMinnville.
Having already lost about an hour with traffic delays, we were ready to get to our destination. We turned onto Hwy 47 and noticed a detour sign. We did not give the sign any heed and continued on fifteen miles until we reached a road closure. Dang! We had to turn back and reconfigure our route to McMinnville. The new route took us almost to Portland and added an additional hour of riding to our day.
Even though the ride was beautiful and wound through farmlands and vineyards, we were ready to get off the bike.
We arrived in McMinnville at 6:30pm. Long day. Tom asked how we could stay positive in writing today’s post. Cathy responded that if we had a selfie stick we could pretend to be living our best life and practicing gratitude, just like the commercial.
We were grateful to get our monkeybutts off that bike for the day!
A new practice we will employ is checking Google Maps before taking off each day. Today had its frustrations mixed in with some beauty. That’s life!
Tomorrow we head to Florence, OR where Cathy’s cousin lives. We will meet him and his wife and catch up over dinner.
Here’s our route… hopefully
Today’s barn pic
Monkeybutt Chronicles 