What a glorious morning ride it was from Coburg to Corvallis. We were out of the room just before 4AM, the same PB/nutella rollups powering us, and it was flat and cool. We hit Harrisburg, 13 miles away, in just less than 1 hour, and as we rolled up to the convenience store hoping for a hot coffee, the gal who worked there was literally turning the key to unlock the door at that very moment. The coffee was brewed and hot, and we were the only patrons at 5AM so she came outside and talked with us a bit about our trip and fawned over Maui and her bike basket a bit, and then we headed on our way. Now just pre-dawn with the sun light just faintly lighting the sky, our route took us down a back road much quieter than the busier Highway 99W and we rolled along watching the sun rise to our right, over low mountains in the distance, through a small slit of clear sky and then up into the cloudy sky. These early morning bike rides are so beautiful and it has me rethinking my typical, non-TransAm life of staying up late like a night owl and then sleeping in past sunrise (or setting an alarm for an early workday and being miserable when it sounds); it's so easy to get up early now because I'm used to it and when we get home I hope I can figure out a way to continue to go to bed earlier so I don't miss these precious early morning hours like I have been doing all my life. Vanesa captured some nice photos along the way, and we hit Corvallis along with a slew of other people in cars and trucks who were also headed to Corvallis, presumably to begin their workdays. We stopped at Dutch Bros for a coffee to share, and sat on a big rock in the grass next door at an insurance company that had yet to open for the day and we ate a second breakfast of pepper jack cheese slices, Triscuits, and mixed nuts. It was yummy, and it gave us a lot of energy. I couldn't believe I ate that instead of walking directly across the street to a taqueria selling breakfast burritos, as normally I'll choose a breakfast burrito over just about ANYTHING else! And with that, we left Corvallis, 35 miles under our belts and a long way to go until 80-something miles. The flat or slightly downhill ended after Corvallis and we began a series of small ups and downs that weren't really any big deal. We got onto highway 99W and it was somewhat busy but not too bad, and we stopped about 10 miles up the road at a small store in Adair Village to reapply Chamois Butt'r and for me to get a snack; I ended up with an almond poppyseed muffin which was pretty gross but had a lot of calories for fueling a long day, and I surprised Vanesa with a Fanta soft drink, a favorite from her childhood, though I got orange not knowing the lemon was her actual favorite (here in the US I've never seen lemon, only orange and grape, and she said that she'd never seen the grape flavor in Spain!). We hit Monmouth and grabbed a big breakfast burrito at Casa Burrito, and we ate half of them while saving other half for later energy. On the way out of the parking lot, we ran into cyclists, two ladies probably in their late 60's or early 70's, who were out on a 30-mile road ride and wanted to talk about our trip after they saw our gear and our dog. Pam and Joanne were really nice and had some bike touring experience of their own so they could relate to what we were doing on some level; it was a really nice interaction we had for about 15 minutes under a shade tree before we continued on. Not long after leaving Monmouth, we ended up off the road and on a nice, smooth bike path next to the road which was much calmer and it probably lasted 5 miles until we got to Rickreall, and was really great until about the last 0.5 miles when the path crossed a number of gravel driveways of local businesses and we had to slow down quite a bit. After Rickreall we had another 24-ish miles to our destination of Grand Ronde and it was on incredibly busy, narrow Highway 22, and the small bike lane had rumble strips in the middle of it. It was awful, constant noise, constant vigilance with closely-passing traffic, constant vigilance with avoiding debris and rumble strips in the bike lane, and really jarring to the senses. Right before the big hill at about mile 72 of the day I suddenly felt something not right with my bike....it took a second to realize that my rear tire was only about half-inflated and I just wanted to scream. Now I KNEW that I was running on a rear tire with little tread left (if you remember I had put new tires on back in Kansas, and that was at about mile 1800, while we were currently at around 4100), but I was trying to ride extremely carefully and hoping to get home with no flats...but the busier the road and the smaller the shoulder, the greater the likelihood of flats and I just ran out of luck again. But, fortunately, right across the street was a quiet side street and there was a shade tree there not far from a bridge that ran over a little stream - perfect location to fix a flat, with no traffic, a wider shoulder, and a water source to check for the location of the leak in the inner tube! We went through the now-all-too-familiar ritual of taking all the bags and the aerobars off my bike before I turned the bike over and went to work. At some point we stopped and ate a bit more of our burritos before I finished the tire. But the tire wasn't REALLY finished. I pumped up the tire with the new tube in it and noticed that it hadn't sealed to the rim symmetrically, so when I spun the wheel I could see a little hop/bump with every revolution. Damn! It's the same thing that happened the last few times I've fixed flats on this trip. Why can I no longer get the tire/tube seated properly on the first attempt?? I'm stumped, as I surely know what I'm doing, but I just seem to be getting worse at it. I tried two more times to deflate/reseat/inflate in order to get a smoothly rolling tire, but to no avail. I said "screw it"; I was done and just decided to stop wasting precious time and ride this thing as is and hope for the best. Vanesa helped me reassemble the bike and we got back on the road, having lost an hour, and the temperature now a few degrees hotter right as we were about to climb the hill on this busy highway. The tire held (though I could feel the little bump with every wheel revolution when I was on a smooth stretch of pavement) and we rode up and down, up and down, and then finally up and up with a 10 mph headwind into Grand Ronde. We were basically at our destination, only 1.5 miles shy of the Wandering Spirit RV Park where we planned to camp, but we were quite hungry having ridden 85 miles and we needed a meal and some peanut butter for the morning. We rode up to and locked our bikes at the Spirit Mountain Casino and headed in looking for their Chinese restaurant. Choices for food out here are quite limited, and I was expecting nothing special at a Chinese restaurant in a remote Oregon casino, and I was right. The fried rice we got was only good for calories, it was quite mediocre in taste and I left annoyed we'd paid $28 for basically rice and oil that tasted like nothing but the soy sauce I sprinkled on it. But, again, we got energy so YAY FOR US! We rode the (now quite challenging with a headwind in excess of 20mph) 1.5 miles further where stopped and picked up a jar of crappy peanut butter at the convenience store next to the RV park. The Wandering Spirit RV Park was an interesting experience; for $18, they let you camp in a quiet grassy area right next to a small river, far away from the highway and out of the vicinity of the RV's (many of which seem to be permanently renting space there). But after we got the directions to the tent site from the owner at the entrance to the park and rode to where we were to be, we were really shocked to see the "Pet Area" sign in the same location. We paid $18 to camp where people take their dogs to toilet?!?! There are no other camping options out here, and no other lodging options other than the casino hotel 1.5 miles back that rented rooms for $175/night, so I got to work looking for a spot that didn't seem to be, uh, dirty. Actually I found that the pet area was quite clean and I never saw or smelled any poop, and the spot we pitched the tent was lovely. I quickly bathed in the secluded part of the creek but Vanesa went to the RV park showers, which she said were pretty nice (the men's had been pretty gross, hence my bathing in the cold creek). Actually, it was HERE we finished our burritos - they were the gift that keeps on giving - and we fell asleep to the sound of a quietly babbling brook, before the sun went down but in the protective shade of some huge trees, the sound of the distant highway traffic acting more like a white noise sleep machine than an annoyance. Tomorrow - a short day, to one of my/our very favorite places - Cape Lookout State Park hiker/biker camping area. It's paradise there!