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Here are a few things about Oregon that make Ben and me very, very happy:

1. One can bicycle on the interstate, if one so chooses;
2. One can camp anywhere one pleases in the middle of national forest, if one so chooses;
3. One can chop down eight chords of firewood per year with an annual ten dollar permit, if one so chooses;
4. One can ride a bicycle across both a desert and a mountain covered in snow all in the same day, if one so chooses;
5. One can call #6 and try to convince her to come visit oneself at Crater Lake over the Fourth of July Weekend. Period. End of sentence. Goodnight and good luck. There is no other choice and if there was one, no one would chose it. One must convince #6 to come to Crater Lake — one must! That was it. That was what needed to happen.

I would like to take a moment and confess here, for the record, that Ben and my first assumptions about the Adventure Cycling Association were poorly founded. They were based solely on the fact that all of our internet searches for bike touring maps and trips along the West Coast led us to the Adventure Cycling website where their maps were not available for free. Since we are communists we believe everything should be free and anyone attempting to sell us anything is evil. So after having visited their website numerous times, we knew that the Adventure Cycling people offered maps for cyclists, bike touring all-inclusive vacation packages, as well as clever and inspiring quotes. I believe their website to be borderline-mushy about the whole bike riding thing but everyone needs to get their kicks somewhere. In summary: Adventure Cycling wouldn’t give us free maps and we weren’t about to sign up for a romantic getaway and that was all we knew and, being the unkind men that we are, we reached some erroneous and unfounded conclusion about the troupe and the trips they offered before we had ever met anyone involved with the organization. We made funny jokes at their expense and our general opinion about people who joined a bicycle touring group was: losers. Unequivocally, unabashedly, unashamedly: they were all lazy good-for-nothing wimps who needed to be slapped across the face with a loaded pannier and made to pedal up a hill with a winch pulling them in the opposite direction. We judged harshly those people that paid good money to have someone cart around their own junk while they rode a bicycle unburdened — they were pansies and sissy-la-las and unworthy of our time or conversation.

Ben and I have since changed our opinion. First, and foremost, the people who run the Adventure Cycling organization are some of the nicest people on the planet Earth. They let us sleep, shower, and eat with them for free. They offered us booze. They let us use their bike tools. They patted us on the shoulder and asked us questions that we actually wanted to answer. They treated us better than they treated some of their own party. They could be best describe by a single word: very, very, very cool.

Secondly, if either Ben or I had the money we would travel with the nicest bicycles and carry nothing but a specially designed, ultra-light bag which would hold our credit card. Just one credit card, mind you. One: and that would be all we would bring. When we got hungry, we would buy food; when we were tired, we would sleep in a hotel; and when we became bored with our bicycles we would dismount, leave them where they were, and select new ones from the truck following us.

Thirdly, the people who take these trips are basically good people and they are not lazy just because a giant U-Haul is carrying their gear and someone else’s mother is making their peanut butter sandwiches; they are not lazy, they are just enjoying the great outdoors in a different way than Ben and I would. That’s all. And while they are very weird and I am afraid to enter into a conversation with any of them, I’m sure that some them feel the same way about me. So: I can’t really judge them for that.

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