This is a long one, but hopefully worth it. I included lots of pics for people who, like me, need something to hold the attention. There's boobs in there somewhere. Okay, not really.
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There's an odd balance between going off half-cocked and being a go-getter. This applies to so many things, although the most obvious examples that leap to mind are... bikes, coding, and cooking. In software engineering, it's easy to shoot from the hip. Don't plan, just do it and get some code down. The rest of the application will just fall into place. Yeah, right. We call those jerks "cowboys." And that is not a complimentary moniker. We have all worked with someone like this or replaced such a coder. Or worker, depending on your career. It's pure hell to clean up such messes.
On the other hand, some other places seem to get project management paralysis. You know, plan, plan, meet, plan, meet some more, and by the time you have anything in place that resembles a spec, you forgot what the hell the project is. The schema or metadata model takes so long to develop by committee that it's obsolete before the first lines of code are written.
I have been planning out how to ride to every city and township in Oregon. I figure it would be a good way to see this fine state in which I live and still get in a lot of riding while not being able to take off a lot of time from work. But the plan has been tricky. The first challenge was finding every single city and township. Here, I relied on good old Wikipedia. This will just have to be Good Enough.
Then there was documenting my trip, which usually means gear. I figure GPS and photographs should about do it. I have a Garmin eTrex Vista HCx with the City Navigator maps. But there are fiddly bits with the GPS process. I was trying to make an automatic upload process whereby I could just drop a file in a folder on my web server and have a Google Maps overlay created without having to do anything else. That might still happen, since I have my own ASP.NET server (it's probably down right now, at least for you), but it has taken a backseat for now.
And photographs... I like my Olympus Stylus 790SW because it is water- and shockproof and nicely portable. But it can be very tricky to get a decently exposed picture out of this camera. The flash is epically bad. Everything within 15 feet of the camera is blown out and everything beyond 15 feet is underexposed. How does that happen?!
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| Less than 10 feet, you can use this flash for suntans and x-rays. From etc |
Then there's the chromatic aberration on this camera. Just about anything 15 degrees from center looks out of focus.
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| My camera came with a free "soft focus" feature. Too bad I can't shut it off. From Sutra |
I did not want to attempt to document my journey with this annoying camera. But this is Oregon. And it rains here sometimes.
To add more uncertainty, my best friend decided she wanted to join me on this romp through Oregon. On the tandem.
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| From Bicycle Travels |
I once read, "No matter where you're going on a tandem, you'll get there faster." It's difficult enough to plan this with one person on one bike. Adding another person doubles the personal variables. And we're both human, at least the last time I checked. We disagree, we have moods, and my body just doesn't work as well as it did when I was younger. Also, on the tandem, the maintenance issues are increased by at least 50%. When it was just me on my touring bike, I had to keep the touring bike in good working order because I use it as my main transportation.
I'm also trying to figure out what our pace should be. Are we going to randonnee out to distance locations or are we going to meander? I wanted to be able to cover lots of ground fast, but I don't think that will be particularly reasonable for when we need to carry camping gear or water. And we will need to carry water throughout much of Eastern Oregon.
I have to get our tandem into good fighting shape. I tend towards the retrogrouch side of things, without being totally Luddite. I don't trust things like STI for any kind of real distance riding. If it breaks in the middle of nowhere, we're screwed. Even if it breaks in town, we're screwed because we can't put the tandem on the bus or train. Because of this paranoia, almost all of my bikes end up looking the same.
Furthermore, the added torque of two riders chews through drivetrain components in short order. An aluminum 26T chainring was not up to the power we were putting down, and we're not even that strong. We would get about 50 feet and then it would start skipping. I turned it around, we would maybe get 75 feet, and then same thing would happen. Turns out the teeth were getting bent as we pedaled up hills. So I had to hunt down a stainless steel 26T chainring. eBay to the rescue! Problem solved. But the middle and outer chainrings on the tandem also need to be replaced.
We also really could use a new rear wheel. This one is cursed. We once had four flats in 40 miles.
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| Cursed rear wheel. |
The rear brakes (v-brakes) do not completely clear the fender (
So. The cockpit on the tandem is not what I want it to be. I don't have the camera I want for this. My process for displaying GPS tracks is rough around the edges. There are many, many uncertainties in the whole process.
All these details are still unanswered or unaddressed.
But screw it. In software, it's never the right time to upset the situation. When cooking out-of-season, we must improvise or use dried or frozen or something sub-optimal. If I wait for all the lumps to be beaten out of this journey, it would never happen. So, off we went.
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| It's gotta start somewhere. |
Sometimes, you just gotta jump.
There are plenty of nearby places to check out so that we can shake down the entire process. For the first trip of our Oregon Survey, we took the route I ride to work everyday. I figured it was a good idea to ride on a route that I knew well, especially this early in the game. We hit Hillsdale, Beaverton, Multnomah Village, and Tigard. Scratch them off the list.
Suprisingly, taking pictures is one of the hardest parts of this. That and, getting all the fiddly technical issues smacked down. The first time I passed the Hillsdale sign, we forgot to take a picture. And I passed the Tigard sign. Rose was kind enough to hop off, run back, and catch a picture. I returned the favor by not rolling away without her. After all, she had my camera. Hopefully we'll get better at this part (the pictures; not the part about ditching each other) because remembering a sign a quarter mile up a huge hill is not fun.
My plan (I think) will be to use the Olympus Stylus for quick snapshots in motion and to mark which places we want to visit again. The DSLR I want will have to wait. And the tandem will just have to get refitted as we go along.
The best part? We started. Now we just have to finish.
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