Leaving Tahoe…& Trip to Portland…

The last few days at Lake Tahoe was pleasant with excellent weather and some easy work to do at the site. After work, there was something I needed to do before leaving and that was to get my bike repaired. I’d bought a cheap $65 bike at Big K near Dan’s place a couple weeks ago and I put it together the day before I left Rosamond. Dan lives on a steep hill and while I was testing the bike after I put it together, the damn right side plastic pedal cracked trying to pedal up the hill. Over the next six weeks of use at Tahoe, it finally fell apart. And the left pedal was all cracked too. Cheap crap. (I checked and I’m not over weight for the bike).

Anyway, I went into the Tahoe Big K and explained my problem with the new bike and (surprise!) the manager of the sports department just gave me a new pack of pedals. Didn’t ask for a receipt or anything. Nice. I bring them home and they’re the wrong size, but that was the only size they had in stock. So I go to several thrift stores looking for bike parts and ask the bike repair guy near the Tallac site, since there are thousands of rental bikes all over, where is the bike ‘bone yard’ for Tahoe? He doesn’t know but sends me to a sporting goods store a few miles up the road closer to town. When I get there, I wander back to the repair counter and I kid you not, they have a glass case with several sets of bike pedals in there with $150 price tags. Choke.

Well, I don’t think that I’ll find anything there but I ask the guy anyway if he has used bike pedals that will fit my bike. He says ‘Yeah, for around $12’. ‘Metal’, I ask? ‘Yeah’ he says. OK, good start. Then I ask him if we can work out a trade for my brand new, but won’t fit, pedals I got at Big K. ‘Sure, straight across’, he says. Well. That’s pretty neat. Here I am in Tahoe, where they really charge tourist rates for everything, and this happens. Not such a bad place after all. He hands me the pedals and they look brand new. He explains that they came off a new bike that the purchaser upgraded with better pedals.

Here’s what’s left of the orginal equipment ‘Huffy’ bike pedals, the plastic pedal part is all broken off and what’s left is the metal shaft:

Then here’s the new pedals all pretty like:

The next day I was on the road to Portland (Gresham, really), and passed many a forest fire. The valleys were looking very smoky. In fact, I bypassed Carson City so I wouldn’t have to deal with road closures:

This is many miles North of Reno and I’m still seeing forest and grassland fire smoke. Every ten to 30 miles I’d see another new fire smoke column rising. These were all started by dry lightning storms. And this area had them for around two weeks.

It’s cleared up some here, I’m South of the Oregon border in Califoria just rolling along Northward. The weather was fine, the temp was comfortable and the rig was running great. This is where I decided to just keep driving and make it to Gresham around 9pm instead of stopping at a RV park for the night. I also decided to push my luck and keep going to Kalamath Falls to get fuel. The Oregon prices are $0.50 less per gallon then in California. It was worth the attempt. At this point, I was under 1/2 tank (90 gallon tank with a range of 800-900 miles).