Intro

Planning

After doing Cycle Oregon for the first time in 2019, I looked forward to finding out about future rides.  In January 2020, they announced the 2020 route.  It would start at John Day Fossil Beds, an area that I had interest in visiting in the past (for hiking and photography), but had never actually visited yet.  So I was pretty interested in doing it.  However, a couple months later the pandemic started and everything was put on hold.

The Cycle Oregon Classic rides were canceled in 2020 and 2021, and when the 2022 route was announced, it was basically the same as the previously announced 2020 route.  So I started asking around to see who else was interested.  This time around, Todd would re-join me, and we’d be joined by Alex as well.

Training

I didn’t do as much training on the bike this time around as in 2019.  I did a handful of training rides with Todd and Alex, but didn’t consistently do long rides like last time.  I mostly rode once a week for a while, then not at all in June (due partly to some scheduling issues).  I started to ramp up in July, but then got COVID in early August, just when I was going to kick it up a notch.  Thankfully it wasn’t too bad and I was able to resume riding a month before Cycle Oregon, at which point I tried to ride 2-3 times a week, culminating in rides of 47, 62, and 71 miles the weeks directly before Cycle Oregon.  I had kept in good shape with other activities like hiking, basketball, lifting, and Peloton, but I was happy to get confirmation that I could still do a long ride.

Getting to John Day (September 9th-10th)

John Day is significantly further from the Bay Area than Oakridge (which was the start of the 2019 ride).  So we’d have to split up the drive into two days both before and after the ride.  Complicating things further, we would have 3 bikes to transport.  I thought I might have to get a hitch, but Todd’s friend had two extra roof mounts, so we were able to put all 3 bikes on top of my car.

We left the Bay Area around 9:30am on Friday (September 9th).  With just a couple stops for food and gas, we arrived in Bend around 6:15pm.  We took the bikes off the top of the car and checked into our hotel.  After dinner we walked along the river and saw that there was a Nine Inch Nails concert on the other side.  There were a few people just hanging out on the edge of the river, listening.

The next day, we did a little warm-up ride.  We biked along the Deschutes River a bit, then biked over to Tumalo State Park, which was one of the campsites for Cycle Oregon 2019.  Of course it looked completely different now without a giant tent city there.  Quite peaceful.  In any case, after a brief stop we biked back, showered, and checked out of the hotel.

We stopped at a local REI, as Alex wanted to get some last-minute supplies.  Also, Todd noticed one of my cleats was missing a screw, so I went in and had them fix it.  Thankfully they found something that worked.  It probably wasn’t disastrous to have 3 screws instead of 4, but it felt safer to have it.

Now we started the roughly 3 hour drive to John Day.  We stopped in Prineville for lunch and immediately noticed it was very smoky from wildfires.  After lunch we stopped at a hardware store to get some N95 masks, just in case.  We almost certainly wouldn’t ride with them (too hard), but might want to use them in camp.  Thankfully, smoke wouldn’t be too big of an issue.

We arrived in John Day around 4:15pm and checked in.  There were about 1100 riders this year, as opposed to the roughly 1600 in 2019.

We got our t-shirts and souvenir cups, which we later decided to put in the car (since space was short in our bags).  We had signed up for tent and porter service, so we went over to find our tents (Todd and I shared; Alex had his own tent).  Soon after we met our neighbor Monica, who was part of a group of 4 women tenting next to each other, so we’d see them every day the rest of the week.

We had dinner around 6:30pm.  Instead of the usual big tent, they had set up most of the tables inside, in a large building.  I thought that was a little odd, considering COVID hadn’t completely gone away.  We decided to stay outside, as a number of people did.  We grabbed a picnic table just as another group left it.  Tonight’s dinner was ribs and corn bread.  It seemed apparent almost immediately that the food wouldn’t be quite as good as in 2019.  It’s possible inflationary pressure had caused them to cut down on the food budget.  Or maybe it was because they were using different food vendors.  Whatever the case, the food was decent; it just seemed to be not as good and they were doling out smaller portions.

They had some announcements at 7:30pm, as they would every night, and then the band started to play (until about 10pm).  It was getting cold, so we went to get ready for bed.  We didn’t see any sinks for brushing teeth, but I had seen the shower trailers earlier, and I helped guide us in that direction.

Then it was off to bed in anticipation of the first day’s ride.