Oregon Trail
6,584 Miles

This year's trip had the makings of an epic trip. I joined Steve in retirement in April and we were well prepared. We decided to even give ourselves some extra time this year and increased our normal timeframe from 12 days to 14 days. We knew there were fires popping up in the West, and smoke was a real concern but the Oregon and California coasts looked good on the days we were scheduled to be riding, and this was our biggest concern. Riding the Northern California and Oregon coast is always a bit of a crap shoot in terms of being foggy, and all weather indications showed we were in store for some clear days. As free as our calendars should be now we still didn't have much room to move weeks let alone even days. We had planned on going in May and riding down through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas but some scheduling conflicts arose and we dusted off our 2020 plan that was nixed due to the Wuhan virus. We ended up having some really hot days, a flat tire, and a number of days pretty much ruined by smoke, but the two full days on the coast were perfect. I would have to say the smoke made this trip lose some points on the overall ranking of our trips, but it was still a very good trip. We rode a record number of miles for us which was no surprise since we added a day and a half over our previous high in 2013.