Crescent City, CA. 4797 miles.

It is always easier to get up and out of a cheap motel than it is a nice comfortable house with good friends and a home cooked breakfast, so after a great morning with Brandy, John, and Olivia I set back out towards the coast. A quick ride through Oregon wine country got it back to the 101 which will take me all the way to the Pacific Coast Highway.

Once back on the coast, the ride for the rest of the day was simply surreal. The Oregon Coast is a very unique place. The mountains, rain forests, and ocean all meet and seem to do battle for supremacy. In any given mile one of them is winning, but five minutes later and the battle has completely turned. Trees along the cliffs and mountainsides are permanently bent at a 45 degree angle by the powerful ocean wind, but the pine trees grow straight to the surf line along sheer rock faces for miles.

The 101 itself does an interesting job of tour guide through this incredible terrain. As it dips inland and then back to the coast it swallows you in the shadows of the deep Forrest only to suddenly open up to an incredible cliff top Vista of the Pacific and then back again. Over and over and over for hundreds of miles.

(Quick bike rant. I don’t know if the D&D pipes have finally broken in over the last few hundred miles or if the pavement on the 101 is just really smooth but I have never felt the bike ride as smoothly as it did today. Even with intense crosswinds it hummed the whole way even when engine braking through curves. I love this bike and the custom setup more and more every day. To think I was getting annoyed with it a few months ago makes me laugh now. I’m beginning to think this is actually the perfect bike for this kind of a trip because it can be ridden comfortably enough as a cruiser but will absolutely tear into several twisties like the cafe racer it actually is. Half an inch one way or the other and it would either be too uncomfortable on the long runs or too stiff in the fun stuff.)

In the middle of the woods I came across a guy who made insane furniture and sculptures from giant blocks of maple and myrtle wood. He was quick to tell me that he hadn’t made everything on the property and that his main source of income was selling prime slabs of myrtle to high end guitar and violin manufacturers. Still, as he took me through his crazy cluttered barn/workshop I couldn’t help but think that my dad would have loved hearing the stories behind every enormous slab of wood he had piled to the rafters.

In the north the beaches are sandy and the towns cater to surfers. As you head south the coast becomes rockier as the mountains close in on the ocean until you reach Humbug Mountain. The ride from here to California is nothing short of alien. Incredible enormous rock formations jut into the ocean hundreds of feet high topped with patches of pine trees, somehow cut off from the nearby mountains millions of years ago by the strong ocean currents cutting into the shoreline. The 101 continues to pull you back into the forest again and again just to bring you back to another view of the ocean that you can’t imagine is possible. On the rare occasions it takes you low enough to walk from the road to the beach the wind is so intense it almost knocked the bike over on a few occasions.

So as the shadows were getting long I realized I’d been stopping for far too many pictures and on the road for a lot longer than the odometer showed. It hadn’t climbed far above 50 degrees all day and the PNW wind made it feel even colder. I pushed to the California border and stopped for the night just across the border in Crescent City. Tomorrow I finally hook up with the Pacific Coast Highway which will take me the rest of the way down the coast before pulling another left and heading back east for good.

Wyatt Neumann was a phenomenally talented photographer and director, a loving husband and father, and a passionate motorcyclist. On June 11th he was doing what he loved riding in Delaware when he suffered a brain aneurysm which caused him to lose control of his motorcycle. He died shortly after. Wyatt was instrumental in both inspiring this trip and planning many of its routes and logistics. The title of this site was unapologetically stolen from his series of photographs from his own travels. He leaves behind a wife and two young children. A memorial fund has been established to help his family in this very trying time. Please consider donating. Any amount will help. Thank you.

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