This Map is a summary only. Diaries Maps are zoomable and accurate.
The Large Ball of String in Burns, Oregon, is about 300 miles from my home in Portland. It is not a candidate for a Guinness record by any conceivable measure and visitor comments on the web tend to be rather sardonic: ‘County Museum. They possess a large ball of string. I don’t know why’.
The Worst Strip Club in Oregon is even further away. This club just might get into Guinness for having such utterly dismal reviews: ‘ The best you can say is that the dancers are alive and naked.’ … ’A dim dingy dated dive with no standards at all’ … ‘I’ll never go back. It was horrible’ .
Riding hundreds of miles in a car on a pilgrimage to a second-string tourist attraction or to patronize a strip club with reviews that argue for modesty might seem a bit absurd. On the other hand, bicycling for days on end, dodging traffic and potholes to at last behold a ball of string or to pedal over a mountain range just to fact-check internet reviews on a small-town strip club can be appealing to even highly rational people if they don’t think too much about where they’re going. It’s not about being there, it’s about being on the way.
I’m new to bike touring and did not expect my first bicycle trip last summer to be that much fun. I did’t know that it was possible to go so far so easily and I didn’t know that the wonderful people of Oregon have created an amazing web of bicycle routes that brings Oregon’s abundance of campgrounds, hot springs, wineries, ghost towns, natural wonders and tacky tourist attractions to my doorstep. Within a few weeks I made a three-day circuit to the coast and then spent the long, rainy winter planning trips, putting together equipment and setting up this blog site.
A blog is written by an author who has no idea where the story is going so I can’t say how this one will develop. I’m pretty sure that it will have something to do with bicycles, the places they take you and the people you meet along the way but blogs, like bicycle tours, are always a work in progress.
If the journey is the destination then it doesn’t matter where you are going, where you think you are going or even where you finally end up. It’s all about where you are now. The destination is the mile you are pedaling at this moment and your most important blogpost is the one you are writing today.