Biking LaPine State Park

Today ended up being a transition day, we didn't do anything too exciting, but we got stuff done that needed to happen.

It wasn't quite as cold overnight, but it was colder than I would have expected for July! It took the sun a long time to get up over the trees where it could warm my RV. I ended up having breakfast in bed again! I was just about ready when Dad came over, he wanted to ride some of the trails in the park before we left.

As you all know, Dad and I are not mountain bikers and the times we've attempted to ride on trails has never ended well. All the trails through LaPine State Park appeared to be wide flat packed sand, and there were no signs saying "no biking" and there were tire tracks on all the trails we'd seen. So, we decided to try it.

 

For the most part it was fine - wide and packed, flat, and easy to ride. There were spots where the sand was softer and that was hard. We did a loop with the Deschutes River Trail to the Fall Creek Trail. The Fall Creek trail was narrower and had more obstacles - little things like roots, rocks, soft sand, curves, bushes, up hills, downhills, things you'd never notice walking but that conspire against you when you are biking! I had to get off and walk a lot because I'd lose my momentum to a soft pile of sand or the downhill was just too twisty and steep. When we came back around and I saw an RV through thr trees I knew we were back in the campground so I bailed on the trail,and hot back out to the road. Dad was really far ahead of me so I couldn't tell him. Once on pavement I was zooming along and I got back to our sites at exactly the same time he did.

The scenery was not that interesting. Pretty much just Ponderosa Pine. If we were hiking it would have been really boring, and hot. At least biking made it more challenging and interesting. It was about 8 miles so would have taken us all day to walk, it only took about 2 hours to ride.

After our bike ride we went into Bend and got some fresh veggies at a farm stand, did the rest of the shopping at Fred Meyer and Dad went to fetch the mail.

After the shopping we drove the 20 miles to Sisters and we will be here through Saturday, when I head back to the east coast. On the way to Sisters we had great views of the Three Sisters Mountains, Mt. Bachelor, and I think Mt. Hood. After dinner we walked into the town of Sisters. It's a cute little town, but at 8:00pm everything was shut down.

We are now in the high desert area of Oregon. It was in the 90s during the day today (when I left the Fred Meyers the van said it was 106*! That was on the hot pavement in the sun, it quickly fell to about 95) and tonight it's going down into the 40s!

 

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