We arrived in Astoria, Oregon last night after a full 16.5 hours of travelling, and we were POOPED!  We woke up this morning, and after the sun came out, I realized that our motel, the Rivershore Motel, is right on the waterfront!! How cool!

We walked over to the continental breakfast, and it was an Otis-Spunkmeyer binge-fest of muffins and pastries containing at least 500 calories a piece.  Fortunately, they also had some apples!  So we grabbed a few handfuls of the sugary goodness, and some apples to help us get at least SOME nutrition, and headed back to our room.

...And that's when the trouble started. 

The bike store where our bikes were going to be delivered is closed today and the guy who said he'd be there anyway wasn't there.  Our check-out time from our motel was 11 am, and with no way to get our bikes by then, we'd need to find somewhere to stay another day.  We tried calling a bunch of campgrounds, but they were surprisingly impossible to deal with - the only one where we actually talked to a person said a campsite was $44/night; e-gad!  We also tried calling some other local hotels to see if they'd beat the rate we were getting, $70/day, but no one would.  We weren't sure what to do.

So we gave up and decided to take a walk.  And when we did, we fell in love with Astoria :-)  It's really pretty here.  It's right on the water, and it's full of history and colorful buildings and the nicest people!  We decided we'd like to open a coffee shop here.  But then we remembered it's only the first day of our trip, so we should probably wait to make decisions like that - ha!  We walked over to the Astoria Bicycle Repair shop and found it closed (boo), and when we looked in the windows to see what it looked like...*drum roll*...we saw our bike boxes!!  Now we just needed to get in and get them!  (In the picture below, you can just barely make out our boxes - they look like a white vertical rectangle just to the right of the white line on the window that outlines the store's name.)

The owner of a coffee shop next door helped us to get in touch with Benji, one of the owners of the bike shop.  He came over to the store to open it up for us so we could get our bikes and then even gave us a ride back to our motel so we didn't have to carry the boxes back ourselves!  He was really nice and said he'd even like to follow our blog - bonus!  If you're reading this: Hi Benji! :-)

He gave us some good advice about riding long distances too.  He said that after a few weeks, our bodies will start to rebel (rebel?!) against all the physical activity we're demanding from them on our trip.  We'll get really crabby, we won't have much energy to ride, and we'll be really tired.  He said it's normal (normal?!), and when we start to be constantly tired and fight a lot, we should stop and take 2 or 3 days off.  Then our bodies will be fine and we'll be able to ride the rest of the way OK.  Soooo, uhh...who's excited about that??  Anyone, anyone, Bueller?   So when we start to post pictures and videos like this, you all will have to tell us that we need to take some days off!

So, after we got out our anger at today not going how we thought it would (above), we've really enjoyed it here!  We walked all around the Astoria coast line, took a bunch of pictures, and really enjoyed the cool weather (upper 60's).  This is a big fishing town, so we saw a bunch of boating/fishing stuff I've only seen before on "The Deadliest Catch" - crab baskets, fishing nets, fishing boats, etc..  And we even saw sea lions!!!  They're all over in the water here.  How cool is that?!  Oh, and we also had some really good seafood...mmm!

Here's some of our pictures from the day.  Enjoy!

Now, we just need to put our bikes back together, pack up our panniers (bags) and mount them on our bikes!  Then we'll be ready to finally start practicing riding with fully loaded bikes...because...umm...we haven't done that yet....   (Yes, that's right: we're nuts, and we haven't actually ridden our bikes with all of our gear on them yet.) Say a prayer for us!   We'll let you know how it goes.

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