Jen flew home on Saturday night so I resumed my journey this morning, alone again. It was a little hard to get back in bikepacking mode again today but it will come with time. I rode back to downtown Portland again to meet up with where I had left off from last week, and then took a slightly different route by mostly path and very quiet streets back to the airport area and up to the Columbia river. I really enjoyed riding through the neighborhoods of Portland, and was sad to leave actually. They really have worked to make it easy to ride a bike there. It wasn't long after I got to the river that it began drizzling, and I pedaled on into increasingly darkening skies off to the east. I was protected on a path most of the time, bike lanes if one wasn't available. I did a big climb into the rain and got myself wet with sweat unfortunately. I stayed wet for awhile after the descent and went right by a couple of nice vistas that were completely blocked by all the clouds and rain. There were a couple good waterfalls I also bypassed because I just wasn't up to it. But by the time I rode to Multnomah falls, the drizzle had finally let up and the temperature improved so I decided to stop. The demand to see the falls is so high that the forest service limits peak time with a ticket system. Thankfully cyclists are excluded and so I was able to go and view the falls. It was still a mob of people, and there is a lodge with a gift shop and restaurant. I walked around and the falls definitely lived up to the hype. Easily the most impressive waterfall I have ever seen. Several hundred feet of sheer drop into a pool, then another nice cascade at the bottom. There was a trail to walk to a bridge overlooking the base but I decided to skip it. It was full of people and I needed to get going. Soon after the drizzle pretty much stopped and I finally began to dry out a bit. I rode through the town of Cascade Locks without stopping, because I had plenty of food and figured I would maybe stop at Hood River just down the road. I picked up another beautiful section of path again soon after. All the paths through the Columbia river gorge followed the old historic original highway through the gorge. Opened in 1916, it was an engineering marvel for the time and was the only paved highway in the Pacific Northwest at the time. The viaducts and bridges were too narrow for two lanes of traffic at once and so in only a few years it became obsolete as cars and trucks got wider and traffic increased. It has been successively bypassed in stages over the decades and now interstate 84 roars through the gorge. Lots of the original highway still remain, and a significant portion is closed to cars but open as a multi use path. I saw several more very nice waterfalls, and after some lovely brand new paths, was spit out onto the interstate because there was no alternative. Although they are working on building a tunnel to fill in this last gap. It actually wasn't that scary, I had a big shoulder and it didn't last long. Nothing will ever compare to the 101. I got to Hood River and took some side streets and found myself behind three cyclists, a loaded cargo bike, a bike with a loaded trailer, and a woman on an old Peugeot. I rode alongside them after a long hill, and it turned out that they grew up in Peachtree City. Went to Macintosh. Megan, the woman on the Peugeot, even lived on Pinegate road, not even a mile from my house... Crazy. They were super nice. I rode several miles of a lovely path with them and talked to Megan about bike advocacy, a subject she is very passionate about. I am as well so I found it fascinating. We parted ways when we rolled into the little town of Mosier, where they were playing a little gig for a bar or something. Super nice people. I went on down the road a bit, climbed a hill, and found an oak grove on the edge of the national forest. It's a bit windy but it will do for tonight.