I am excite!
The family has been invited to spend a week in Newport next week (returning just in time for me to volunteer/organize orrando’s summer 300k. The original plan was to drive down there, but I’ve ridden most of this route already in both directions, so my suggestion was that while everyone else drives down I’ll just wake up at 4am and do it as a couple of 200ks.
Not for RUSA credit, alas (the timeframe is too tight to submit and get them approved) but there is more to life than chasing RUSA miles.
The route is very very simple; climb the hill on the west side of the Sellwood Bridge, hop onto 99w, then head south to highway 223 and take it south all the way to Blodgett (okay, there’s a little bit of Priest Road and highway 20 at the end), then, after ice cream and other control-related activities, head west on Summit, Nashville, and Logsden Road to Siletz, where you turn south onto highway 229 into Toledo, and then onto Yaquina Bay Road for a lower-traffic water-level runout into the Newport docklands, then up to highway 101 to finish.
Almost all paved, except for a 3 mile stretch where Logsden Road turns to gravel and does a 200 meter climb to the summit of the Coast Range (a climb and descent that I will do fairly carefully) and it’s only got about 5000 feet of climbing, most of which is easily graded.
I might do 100 miles tomorrow to whet my appetite, but I’m getting excited about this loop. (I wonder if it would make a good outandback 400k? I’d need to clean up the runout from Newburg to Portland to avoid 99w, because the fast guys would hate me for routing them onto 99w during rush hour, but aside from that it’s basically all on lightly travelled secondary roads.)