An Oregon interlude

The day after lil red bird's marathon ride I was supposed to ride Baby to Ann Arbor so I could get in a ride on Labour Day with my friend Marc before he drove me to Detroit, where I was hopping a plane to visit my friend Kevin in Oregon. That morning, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to climb into the saddle, because I every muscle in my body ached and I still had no feeling in either of my thumbs.

But I ate some naproxen sodium (generic Aleve), cleaned and lubed my chain, checked the tire pressure, and took off. By the time I got there I was zonked, but we had a wonderful ride around Ann Arbor the next day. Michigan really has some nice twisties. Marc turned me onto a massage therapist at his athletic's club, so I got some work done on that fire between my shoulder blades left over from lilredbird's ride.



Got on the plane the next day (Wednesday), and took my gear because I planned to take Kevin's Silverwing out for a ride while I was there. But was still so sore when I arrived (and my thumbs were still numb) that I took it easy for the first week. Took three days to get any feeling back in my left thumb and two more after that for my right thumb to stop being numb. The massage therapist in Ann Arbor told me I must have compressed the nerve for too long on the ride and it got inflamed. Only thing I could do was to take an anti-inflammatory and give it a rest.



We did some travelling to the coast, and visited the sea lion caves. The sea lions must have all been out to lunch when we arrived, because we didn't see any. But got a couple of great pix of the caves. and nearby beaches -- see the pix all along this entry. The first one is inside the sea lion cave, reportedly the largest sea cave i the world. The second is a lookout from the top of the cave, and the other three are beaches a bit south of the cave.



By the time I got the feeling back in my right thumb (although there's still a patch about a centimetre and a half square that is still numb) the weather wouldn't cooperate, so I never got to ride while there. I at least wanted to get a pic of Kevin on the bike, but weather didn't cooperate for that on the day we thought of it, either. So he said he'd take one and send it to me. I'll post in this entry later after he sends it.



Since I'd brought my running shoes to Oregon, instead of riding I took the opportunity to take some great runs on the dirt roads around Kevin's place. He lives about 40 miles west of Eugene in Walton, population 350 -- so I could run for miles without seeing or hearing a single car. The disadvantage of this remote location was that it was so far from the nearest phone line routing station that Kev can get only dialup Web access that is SO slow it took up to 20 minutes to load a Web page. Even grabbing email from Yahoo was painful. So I was almost completely off line for 10 days. I was going through withdrawal.



Flew back to Ann Arbor last Saturday night and Marc and I went on one last ride around rural Michigan. I was supposed to ride back to Toronto last Monday but left my parking light on all night (that snick on the ignition is TOO damn close to the parking lock snick) and even a boost couldn't get her started the next day, so I bought a trickle charger small enough to travel with (figured I needed one in case I did something this stupid again) and hooked her up. Took 18 hours to recharge the battery! So I didn't ride back to Toronto until Tuesday.