Originally Posted by
B. Carfree
Or I could give you some fun loops in the coast range west of Eugene, particularly if you don't mind a bit of camping (services can be somewhat sparse where there aren't any people). It won't have as much climbing as the Cascades and will be near sea-level, but you get to climb out of various watersheds and enjoy some very low-traffic roads along nice rivers and a bit of actual coast line (not that you can't do all of the above back home, except for the many miles of very low traffic). As always around here, there'll be a tiny bit of gravel, but it's imminently rideable on a road bike, even with 23's. I can put together a five-day loop starting and ending in Cottage Grove that has comparable miles and efforts to what you have plotted out.
You offered to put together a Eugene based trip for us and I'd like to take you up on the offer.
A little about our tours. We'd plan to leave Santa Rosa earlyish on a Saturday morning and drive to Eugene for a motel for the night. There will be 40 people (max) on the tour.
We'll have four tour vehicles, two rental trucks, one with baggage and the other with food and cooking equipment, and two 12 passenger vans with bike racks to carry riders to and from the start/finish. The overflow passengers will be in private cars, the cars get left at the hotel.
On Sunday morning we'd take off on stage 1 of the tour and head for the first campground. The vans will operate as SAG vehicles and the trucks will go straight to the first campground. We carry all our own food, do all our own cooking. We'd prefer campgrounds with water and showers but often use dry camps where we carry our own water and portable showers. We follow this routine for the rest of the tour and (preferably) return to where we started. That would put us back in Eugene Friday night with a drive home on Saturday. We could also drive home on Sunday which would give us a 6 day tour which is fine if the route calls for it.
It would be great if you could suggest a general route for us. I can then locate campgrounds and apply it all to the RideWithGPS mapping tool. I can then share the results with you and make sure I got it right and then fiddle with the details and finalize it.
Does this work for you?
I'm new to Bike Forums and am not familiar with the protocol. Should this sort of discussion be held on the Forum or are we better off doing it off line? Either way is fine with me, just don't want to bore others with the details !