The Route

We'll be setting out from my Brother's current residence in Portland.  It's affectionately dubbed "The Lodge", where he lives with the rest of his band, Just People.  They just ran a successful kickstarter and raised $15K to professionally record an album (Congrats Guys!); apparently they had a great first week in the studio.  In any case, it's a little over 70 miles from his house to the coast.

Once on the coast it's basically a straight shot down the 1.  My Mom got me this book along with the rear panniers:

It covers from Canada to Mexico in pretty fine grain detail.  Each state has its own chapter which is further broken down into an example daily mileage log, with anywhere from 40 to 70 miles per day.  Chapters start with a map of the day's ride and, what I think is one of the cooler features of the book, a chart with miles from start of day on the x-axis and elevation on the y.  Each day has points of interest (towns, campgrounds, sights) identified every few miles.  This book was also recently recommended to me by a friend of my girlfriend, who biked with his fiancee (now wife) from the top of Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, so it's definitely got some street cred.

We'd like to try to make the trip in around 10 days, which works out to about 80 miles/day, so we can't really use the example itinerary provided in the book.  Luckily for us it lists and reviews tons of potential camp grounds along the way, which allowed me to draw up the following route plan:

Start	Finish	Mileage
The Lodge	Oswalt State Park (SP)	83
Oswalt SP	Cape Lookout SP	60
Cape Lookout SP	South Beach SP	67
South Beach SP	William P. Tugman SP	80
William P. Tugman SP	Humbug Mountain SP	83
Humbug Moutain SP	Crescent City	81
Crescent City	Eureaka KOA	84
Eureaka KOA	Richardson Grove SP	84
Richardson Grove SP	Van Damme SP	70
Van Damm SP	Fort Ross Historical SP	72
Fort Ross SP	SF	90

On my actual plan I listed camp sites 10 miles on either side of the stops listed in case we decide to take it slower or to push it on any given day.  There seem to be plenty of options along the way, but I tried to pick places that listed at least hot showers.  If push comes to shove we can always try our hand at going Stealth, which might be kind of fun.  I also have been too lazy to sanity check the elevation gain by day, which seems prudent.

So that's the plan so far.  As for sights all we know for sure is that we want to visit the Tillamook Cheese Factory, the Rogue brewery in Newport, and the giant redwoods (wherever they are.)  We're definitely looking for recommendations about where else to stop on the way down, so please share!

In other news my brother got a bike over the weekend, will post pics once I get them.