Today there was a glitch in the matrix…we definitely did NOT do 2200’ of climbing like RideWithGPS says we did, but the mileage, time, and elevation profile statistics are right. Vanesa's ride showed something like 300' of climbing done, which I think is right. So don't think we just busted out a lot of hills today, because we didn't. OK. So. We headed out of Paradise Campground today around 315-330AM after a hot cup of coffee and a hug from our super duper kick-ass friend Orlando. It was a nice, dark, downhill morning ride with the occasional slight, short, incline. There were the occasional semis passing us, but not too much other traffic.. We are SO lit up at night that you can’t miss us, and the semi drivers (and others) always give us a TON of room, passing completely in the other lane. We rode and rode and rode gently downhill for lots of miles, the exactly-half moon in the sky partially lighting our path and creating awesome mountain silhouettes for visual entertainment. I hated riding this beautiful, forested, McKenzie River highway stretch at night because it's so gorgeous and I didn't want to miss one second of optical awesomeness but once again it’s gonna be HOT today, 93-95 in Eugene, so we gotta ride early. As the sun slowly lit the sky and then rose, we noticed how DIFFERENT this forested McKenzie River highway looked now in the light. There’s been a HUGE FIRE here in recent years since we last drove through here in 2019, and hundreds of houses and many MILES (maybe 30?) of forest had clearly been destroyed. There were literally hundreds of new homes, sheds, barns, decks, and other structures rebuilt along the river where they originally stood, and blackened trees everywhere, some standing, some fallen. It was really sad and oddly beautiful simultaneously. This area is a pretty deep canyon through a dense forest and a narrow, rushing river, so a fire getting moving through here would (and DID) do serious damage. It's so odd how fickle fire can be though; some people clearly lost and rebuilt everything from scratch, and others lost only a deck, or a shed, or even somehow miraculously were untouched by flame. Ultimately, as the sun rose higher and higher, traffic got worse and worse and we ended up pushing pretty hard to get to our turn at Walterville so we could get away from the relentless stream of cars, trucks, and semis headed to Eugene on this narrow road who now were often giving us very LITTLE space as they passed because there was so much traffic in the oncoming lane. Actually there was a decently wide and quite clean road shoulder for much of the time, and traffic was generally quite polite all day, but it’s still unnerving to ride a road like that for too long; it grates on you and it's hard to sustain that heightened sense of awareness for extended time periods. It's a bit like getting stuck in a sympathetic nervous system "fight or flight" response; or maybe, that's just exactly what it really is.. At Walterville, after about an hour of tough traffic, we stopped and grabbed breakfast and coffee at the Lucky Logger (haha, not the beer) restaurant, 42 miles completed by our 7:30 AM breakfast time! Then our route snuck us out on a backroad and thankfully off of the suddenly awful Hwy 126, out along McKenzie View Road past lovely riverfront homes, with constant mountain/forest/river views and way less traffic. We reached the end of our Trans Am Map 11 near Coburg, which leaves only one more short, 200-something-mile, Map 12 left for us to complete our journey in the next 4-5 days. There isn’t squat for motels out here so we ended up at the Coburg TA Truck Stop which has crappy motel rooms ($98 for 2 uncomfortable twin beds, no fridge or microwave, heavy residual smell of old cigarettes!) but it’s better than tent camping at an RV park next to Interstate 5 in the 95-degree heat. We would have ridden the 5 miles off-route to Eugene and booked one of many hotels there but during this week they happen to be hosting the International Track and Field Games and hotel rooms, if you can even FIND one because they've been booked for many months or longer, are going for $400+!! So...thank you, gross truck stop, for getting us out of the heat so we can sleep somewhere cool and semi-dark in the late afternoon and early evening for under a hundred bucks! We just ate a shitty meal in their shitty cafe and now we are relaxing in our dark, cool, stinky room about to fall asleep now in late afternoon with the alarm already set for 2 am. I just watched the Tour de France - it's Jonas Vingegaaurd's to lose now that he and his team have held off the usually-stronger but now with a depleted team around him, Tadej Pogacar. Good night....we have a long day of riding tomorrow! 80-something miles to Grand Ronde is our plan. We'll see if we make it. If not, we can stay in Monmouth around the 60-mile mark.