Day 3 - Home from Infocomm - Rogue River, OR to Olympia, WA - my home and the end of my ride!

It was time once again to make the final leg of my trip home.  Rogue River, Oregon to Olympia, Washington is about an 8 hour ride.  It's fairly pretty as you ride up and over Grant's Pass and then eventually into the river valleys around Eugene, Salem and then Portland Oregon.

We hit our first really bad traffic jam just north of Portland as you are heading toward the bridge over the Columbia River into Washington State.  Although we never did see what the problem was ahead, we decided that this jam was so bad, that they must have had the bridge raised for a ship.  That's all we could figure that would cause such an awful miles long mess on I-5, a major 5 lane freeway.

It was nearly 80 degrees in Portland, and we had heavy gear on still as a result of leaving Rogue River in temps of the low 60's.  After sitting and cooking for about 15 minutes, we decided to do something that you 'can' do on a motorcycle.  We rode up the side of the road past lots of cars and trucks.  When it's 80 degrees and you're stopped....any kind of movement is welcome relief.

The traffic opened up again as we got onto the bridge and never slowed down again.  We stopped for one last gas fill and coffee at Starbucks just north of Portland in Woodland, Washington.

After this stop, it was a mere 90 minute ride for me to reach my home.  Peter spent the night one last time.  We took my wife Joyce out to dinner and then called it an early night.

Peter left about 9 am on Sunday morning (June13th) for his 4 hour ride back to North Vancouver, British Columbia.  He arrived safe and sound around 1 PM.

So ended our 5th 'long ride' together.  We've now done 3 roundtrips to Las Vegas for Infocomm; one to Los Angeles for this same tradeshow, and one up to Calgary, Alberta.  We've done many shorter rides together.  Peter is an awesome ride companion.  He's a lifetime rider with tremendous riding knowledge, he's very mechanically proficient and is also a multiple black belt holder in mixed martial arts, having owned his own martial arts club. Peter's all black 1999 Harley Davidson Dyna Sport is tuned to perfection and sounds just plain awesome!  My favorite bike sound.  You see very few older bikes on the open road.  His bike is truly special; it has cachet.  Since he's also much uglier than me, you could hardly want a better riding partner....

Addendum:  Peter just wrote to tell me he is not the ugly one....He says he's the handsome one, and I'm the 'wise' one.....OK...guess we'll go with that.