Day 42: Shortcut to Nowhere

This morning was another chilly one.  Fortunately I had a good night!a sleep thanks to the ear plugs.  Also thanks to them I missed the all night rantings of our crazy camping neighbors.  Apparently the couple who hiked out from Bend were fairly unprepared for the cool night and spent the entire night screaming at each other about who's fault it was.  Gladly I missed it but I got the recap from Sarah.  She was up most of the night with a front row seat.

We headed out on the road for the town of Sisters.  This is right in the middle of their Rodeo which is the big event for the year.  The town and all the campgrounds were packed with the rodeo crowd.  It was fortunate that we weren't trying to camp here.

Down the road towards the Sisters

We stopped at a very Oregon coffee shop (beer and coffee) to do some map planning.  Our route over the next several days winds through a bunch of forest service roads on the way to Hood River and continues north from there in the same manner.  With no services for about 150 miles, we were interested in exploring some alternatives.

Oregon

At this point we have decided to head west around Mt. Rainier and go up the west side of the Cascades to the border I stead of going up the east side as originally planned.

Definitely cowboy country

We plotted a route with Google maps that looked like it would shave about 35 miles off our trip to Hood River.  It also way by way of forest roads but would at least be shorter...or so we thought.

We were about ten miles outside Sisters when we turned off down our shortcut.  The riding was really pleasant and the tree lines roads were nice to see.

It seems so peaceful and innocent

After enjoying this for about ten miles we found our turn...onto a dirt road. Sarah took a fall in the first ten yards.  This wasn't looking good.  We went up the road a bit to see if it would improve.  It didn't.

But this is waiting down the road

I flagged down a truck to ask about the road. We learned that our route was mostly dirt road through the hills and an Indian reservation for 60 plus miles.  This wasn't going to work.

We decided to give it up and return to our route.  Not happy campers. Now instead of a 30 mile shortcut we have added 20 miles to our original route.

It was still early afternoon but the next thing would be a big climb followed by not much choice in camping unless we tacked on another 35 miles to our already nearly 50 mile day.  Sarah got almost no sleep last night due to our neighbors so we opted to end the day and set up camp.

We aet up at a forest service campground and i settled in to reading and napping in the tent.  The timing was good as it began to rain lightly (and not so lightly) on and off through the afternoon.  Comfortable and dry in my tent was better than wet and cold on the bike.

It started to rain more heavily so dinner was in the tent also.  I soon went to bed hoping that the rain wouldst up enough for the tent to dry a bit before morning.