In search of rain (Nathan)

I never thought I would find the sun so hard to take.

But picture this: it's shortly after noon in the north part of Washington
state. The sun is out, the coastal waters are calm and it's beautiful
weather for a motorcycle. There's only one problem. You've already spent a
small fortune to book a cargo van so you can avoid the hurricane you
expected to find. What to do?

We had the option of cancelling the van, for a fee. But we decided to hold
onto it, even though we felt awfully dumb heading out onto the freeway in
the sunshine. We felt slightly less dumb when the first grape-sized drops
smashed into the windshield a half hour later. And we felt even less dumb
when we passed through periods of torrential rain so heavy that at one
point crews closed off a freeway lane because it was flooding. That was on
the way to Portland, where we arrived last night to a bitter cold, steady
drizzle and the warm feeling of having made the right call.

This morning: further vindication. The rain fell for hours, and it was
cold.

Then we hit Medford. It's an Oregon town 35 miles north of California, in
that part of the coast where the lush forests and verdant sheep pastures
give way to the high plain, scrublands and snowy hillsides. Medford, it
seems, is rain's Waterloo. For us, it brought many frustrated questions.
Most prominent aming them: should we ditch the truck and ride? We had over
700 kms to go to Monterey, but the weather was finally good, the scenery
was great and even I-5 had become a twisting paradise for two wheels.
Better yet, Penske said we were free to drop the truck wherever we wanted,
no extra cost.

We decided against it. It's sunny now, but only for a few more hours - and
a few hundred miles on the interstate at night didn't seem worth it. It was
a decision based on logic. Still not sure it's the right one - after all,
we could be riding. This is the weather and the scenery we came to find,
and we're passing it all by inside a gas-hog of a van. That, and we've
suddenly become an object of ridicule. We got this email not long ago from
a friend:

"Hey you bums,    From what I can tell, your driving 1400 miles of your
trip in the comfort of a truck.  Dump that thing at Sacramento and drive,
man!  It can't be that cold and rainy all the way down California."

For what it's worth, Doug, we're stopping just on the other side of
Sacramento. That, and we're only driving 1,000 miles.

Yeah, that's pretty weak. But so is taking potshots from the comfort of
your office chair.