The Plan Goes All Splodey

Really splodey. As in the kind of splodey that slimes all the best laid plans of delusional cyclists and men. 

Sorry.  Pyrsyns.

In concocting this quixotic quest, intarwebstering clearly showed that taking the Historical Columbia River Highway would be absolutely the way to go.  

On account of intervals, I picked a hotel in Troutdale, and the next in Hood River.

Little did I know that had Fail Army stamped all over it.

On May 15, bathing in blissful ignorance, Susan and I pondered the best route for getting to my step sister's house in Silverton, OR.  

It was close run.  All things being reasonably equal, I prefer not to take an interstate.  From Boise, it's a coin toss as to the best way to Silverton.  I preferred the least interstate.  Susan noted our bog slow box truck would cork the two lane across Oregon.  

Ok, interstate it is.

On that coin toss, everything else depends.

Because we took I84, and because it runs along the same side of the Columbia as the Historical Highway, we could see for ourselves there was no — insert family unfriendly words here — that was going to work.  

We would have found it out after we had traversed an unrecoverable distance out of the way.  Two hours in a car is a day and a half on a bike, thereby rubbishing twenty-nine lodging reservations.  And if one of them wasn't available ...

So.  Re-route to the north side of the Columbia.  Cancel Troutdale, on the southside.  Get a hotel in Camas, opposite Troutdale, and good to go.  Right?

Wrongo, wonderwings.  

After many hours pounding cycling trip planning apps, I eventually learned something fundamentally important, but inexplicably obscure:  sometimes the app will barf up bizarre, inscrutable, routes.  Why?  Because the app knows, in the sense that its knowledge is both unalterable and equally likely to be right or wrong, there is no getting there from here to there in any other way not involving a hopticopter.

Because alternates are few in the land of miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles, that most obviously shows up as a distance that should be, say, forty miles splodeying into 160 miles.  

Without explanation.  Without so much as a hint as to why the provided routing wasn't the product of Village Idiot, Second Class.

Just so here.  Moving the hotel directly across the river from Troutdale to Camas added over 100 miles. 

Dafuque?  (Pardon my French.)  

That was how I eventually discovered getting across the Columbia at the Hood River Bridge on a bicycle would be unpossible.  

How unpossible?  I called the Columbia Gorge Hotel and Spa, which I had chosen because the Wymyns love their spas, to arrange transport across the bridge.

Unpossible.  Because of reasons, the Hood River Taxi company will not cross the Hood River.

Purely by coin toss, and not yet having traveled an inch in our Quixotic quest, we stumbled over the fatal flaw that would have splodeyed everything else following.  Really, two fatal flaws.

Cue montage of frantic replanning and re-reservationing.  Okay, perhaps not so frantic because we fortuitously stumbled on the splodeyness with just enough time yet to put things right.  

Still to be explained is how we have gotten this lucky, and haven't yet started.  Not just inadvertently discovered fatal route errors, but also my bike having suffered an electrical failure due to a manufacturing flaw two weeks before our departure, instead of two days after.

In as much as The Conservation of Misery is just as much a fact of the universe as the conservations of mass, energy and momentum, one thing I know for sure is that there is a shoe out there that hasn't yet dropped.