Another great Oregon Randonneurs event!
This years Verboort Sausage Festival ride started well enough, cool and cloudy but not raining. Well, that fantasy lasted for about the first mile before the rain came in and settled on our ride!
One great thing about ORR rides is the great variety of bikes that show up for a ride! On this ride I saw some great bikes, a Davidson, Vanilla, Ahearne, Thompson, a Jack Taylor, a 1974 Raleigh and some others of interest. It is great to see these machines, well ridden for their intended use!
The start location was in Forest Grove, about 20 minutes outside of downtown Portland. For this ride I brought my recently built 1980 Holdsworth Mistral. Aside from how wonderfully this bike rides and how good it looks, it is also fully fendered, which would prove to be just the ticket for the days conditions!
The thing about rain rides is, that it is hard to get many pictures during the ride. You can get some before the rain and after the rain but almost never while it is raining! Even if you could, rain often doesn’t show up well in a picture. You must trust me that it really was pouring rain for over half the day!
The Black Bear Café in Vernonia was a great place for a brevet stop on a rainy day. Coffee, food, a warm wood stove and a dry place to sit for a little bit. In just a half an hour my cold wet gloves were transformed into warm wet gloves!
This was perhaps the best cheeseburger ever, and who knew that tater tots were so delicious!
A brief moment of clearing in the weather lured us back outside again. It was a trick however and within about 15 minutes the rain was coming down hard again. There were only a couple of bikes that were not sporting fenders but those riders may reconsider after this days ride!
From Vernonia our route took us down the Banks – Vernonia Trail, a 21 mile long rail trail that was completed several years ago. This was a highlight of the ride, a fun and fast path through the forest with few crossroads and almost no other traffic on a day like this.
The ride ended in the village of Verboort where the annual sausage festival was in full swing. I skipped the sausage and beer and just rode back to my car in Forest Grove to get dry again. The stats for the day showed that there were 36 riders who started the ride, three of whom did not finish. That is a high percent of finishers for a rain ride but is a pretty typical result for Oregon riders. I finished the 100 km ride in 5 hours and 21 minutes in a group with 5 others.
The Utah Randonneur 
November 13, 2015 at 12:37 am
Great post!
I too rode the Banks – Vernonia Trail this year. However, I picked a scorching summer day which brought out cyclists, walkers and wheeled users from 8 to 80. I was also loaded down and touring with my wife so opening it up like you and your crew did wasn’t much on the agenda.
We also stopped at the Black Bear Café in Vernonia. This was our breakfast spot after camping and the wait for the food was worth it as it was home cooked, generously portioned and downright delicious. It was clear that it was a local favorite morning spot and well-known by other riders as there were cyclists coming in droves.
What pleased me to no end was this tiny town that once thrived in the timber industry and was now in its twilight but seeing a strong resurgence in popularity because of the Banks – Vernonia Trail. It clearly gave tourists a reason to visit, camp, eat and pump local dollars that into local restaurants and other businesses in and around the town. The words, “Bikes Mean Business” clearly means something to the livelihood of the people here!
Thanks for the report!
November 13, 2015 at 8:16 am
“Bikes mean business”, that is so true Josh! Most of the riders on our event stopped at the Black Bear that day. That is perhaps 35 cyclists who on that rainy day brought some business to what would have otherwise been a good day to close early. They were friendly and seemed to genuinely appreciate our being there. I like the Black Bear Café!
Sadly, the same cannot be said for some locals who honked at us, I guess because we were riding on “their” road. Vernonia will live on and prosper in part because of this trail and the cyclists who use it. Some of the more narrow minded locals still resent us though.
November 13, 2015 at 11:51 am
Sorry to hear you had such a bittersweet experience.
Hopefully, over time, the mentality will change and become less “me vs you” and more of one that is a snapshot of a bigger picture with more open minded thinking.