Sometimes, when you make another plan to go somewhere exciting, the entire Columbia River Gorge catches on fire, and you have to re-evaluate. Thus it is that my much-anticipated bike-and-backpack around Mt Adams trip has become instead a Vancouver Island bike-and-train-and-ferry-(and, hopefully, still backpacking) trip.
It took me a bit to change gears, both mentally and logistically, but tomorrow I’m off, having lost only about a day and a half of vacation — a much easier loss to swallow than those who have lost houses, for example, or property, or places in this totally ridiculous fire. Yay for flexibility.
(and yay for fireweed and California false hellebore from the Wallowas, which are much lovelier than all the pictures of the Gorge going up in flames that I’m sure many of you, at least those of you in the NW, have been fixated by lately)
Also, this is the advantage of bike travel: when tickets mostly aren’t involved (though now they are, now that I bought a train ticket north), it’s easier to switch gears without too much hassle. All it takes is having an arsenal of things you might want to do or see in this life, especially semi-local things, so that when one doesn’t work out you can reach for another.
Anyway. Not sure why I feel the need to write this, really, given that I’ve barely been posting anyway, but now I definitely won’t be posting for the next almost-three weeks while I lose myself to the world in the wilds of British Columbia. Hold down the fort for me in Portland’s smokey wasteland — when I come back, we’d better be able to breathe here again, or I’m going to turn right back around and settle in with the bears, wolves, and cougars all these BC websites keep warning me about;)
I feel ya. Not just the Eagle Creek fire, but all the other fires in the NW. My “Plan A” for a bike tour starting around the 17 was something incorporating the coast, Southern Oregon, and Crater Lake. The Chetco Bar Fire and others have made that impractical. Then I wanted to do something in Gifford Pinchot, and that isn’t good either.
Looks like I’ll aim for some aspect of the coast. Maybe Olympic Peninsula, or parts of the Oregon Coast, or maybe even BC. Haven’t figured it out yet.