4/22/2000 Saturday

Good News a REST DAY. We sat around most of the day and did not do anything of any great significance, but it sure felt good and we enjoyed the time with our son and his wife. Lyuda was not feeling well most of the time and it rained on and off all day. I went to the store for a grocery run in the morning and read a book from cover to cover the rest of the day. I started a second book and finished most of it before going to bed at 10:00 PM. Lyuda needs a root canal on one of her teeth, and that could be part of the reason she was not feeling well. The only other thing we did was watching some movies on TV.

4/23/2000 Sunday

We got up and moving at 7:00 AM. With four people using one bathroom it takes a while to get everyone up. Since I like to sleep in anyway, I make sure that I am the last one up. We all dressed, ate a light breakfast and went to Easter Sunday Church at St Andrews Presbyterian Church. It was an enjoyable service and I did not even go to sleep. After church Lyuda was not feeling well and Mark and Lyuda decided that they would not go to the Russian church Easter Sunday church service. We want to Subway for lunch and then we changed our clothes took some pictures and left about 1:30 PM in light rain for Troutdale.

We used a map of Portland, OR that Mary Kay bought that provides guidelines on what streets to use. It took us on mainly back streets. On some of those back streets we got to stop almost every block for a stop sign and on others we had to slow down at every corner because nobody had a stop sign. Progress was very slow until we got to the east side of Interstate 205. We were on Halsey and most of the time we were going in excess of 18 miles per hour.

Part of the earlier route took us on the Beaverton-Hillsdale highway. As we were going up a hill during a medium heavy rain and in the wrong gear, Mary Kay spotted a portable toilet and said that she was stopping. Up to this point, I was fairly dry since Mary Kay acts as a great wind and rain shield. However, while she was using the portable toilet, I got wetter in those few minutes than I had on the ride to that point.

We turned off the Beaverton-Hillsdale highway on to Capital highway still in that medium heavy rain. We stopped at a grocery store and checked our map to make sure we had turned at the right place. We then continued up a hill on Capital highway and started down the other side of the hill. We had only gone a short distance when we came to Terwilliger, our next turn. We were in the wrong lane so we stopped in the right hand lane. The corner was a traffic light and we just positioned ourselves so we could go through the intersection when the traffic light showed green for Terwilliger. When we started up something sounded very bad. When we got to the other side of the intersection we stopped again. Dragged the bike out of the road because there were no shoulders and it was a curve, and after looking over the bicycle, we discovered that the rear tire was completely flat. The funny sound we heard as we crossed the intersection was the bike riding on the rim and not the tire. God was generous because he turned off the rain so we could change the flat tire without getting soaked.

After the tire was changed we proceeded on Terwilliger, which led to 6th street on downtown Portland, OR. Most of the way we were in sunshine. We proceeded north until we felt that we had missed our turn to go east and cross the Hawthorne Bridge to the east side of the Willamette River. Therefore we turned east, stopped in a place where the sunshine was not blocked by a building and checked the map. We could not see enough streets on the map to know if we were OK or if we had passed our corner. In one block, at 4th street, the street we were on ended in a dead end so we again turned north and in about 4 blocks we came to Jefferson followed by Madison where we turned right and headed directly for the Hawthorne Bridge. Just as we got to the bridge, the gates came down and we had to wait as the bridge opened to let a cruise boat go under the bridge. I took pictures of the cruise boat and the bridge, as it was open. We did have one interesting young man come up to check out the bike. He is leaving in two weeks for a trip to Alaska on a mountain bike. We sure wish him well. We then proceeded across the bridge to east Portland and finally to Troutdale where we are staying in the Phoenix Inn.