So, after about 7 hours on the road we managed to find our way to John Day, Oregon to begin the adventure. As you can imagine, 2200 people converging on a town of ~1800 people is a little bit of a logistical challenge, but the Cycle Oregon Staff (with pretty much 1/2 the town acting as volunteers) handled it without a hitch.
Within a few moments of arriving and parking we were rounded up by our friends from Olympia, Washington and guided to our camp location in a huge grassy field. Sorry no pics on the first camp. After a celebratory beer, we made it through the massive (and yummy) dinning tent.
It was pretty impressive on the logistics end. 2200 people and the longest line was maybe 2-3 minutes long for the first dinner.
After dinner we wandered all of 100 yards to a nice amphitheater style, grassy bowl which housed both the live music for the evening and the beer garden. Yeah....I think I'm gonna be having a pretty good week of "riding"!
The band that evening was from Bend and I can't remember their name for the life of me. They were however, excellent and we listened to most of the show before crashing out in the tent. We listened to the last few songs of the set as we drifted off to sleep.
As you can see both wifey and I appear to be enjoying ourselves.
Now....that's it for the pictures. What you haven't seen is the traveling city that was set up on location each and every day. It included 3 semi cooking trailers, a 2000+ person dinning room, 6 semi shower trailers, a full set (at least 10) of Bicycle Gallery mechanics that do anything you want for just tips, a set of 4 bicycle detailers, a coffee shop, a smoothy shop, massage tents, acupuncture tents, a cycle oregon store, a rider services information office, water bottle fill stations, multitudes of recycling stations, and of course hundreds of "blue rooms"....aka....porta-potties.
So that was day one....haven't even ridden a mile and it's already been an experience. We'll get on with the riding tomorrow!
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