Castle Rock, WA to Seaside, OR

With time running out on our trip, we rode into our 19th and final state of the trip, Oregon.  The ride was our final really long day and the weather was not very good, it was overcast and it looked like it was gonna rain all day.  We had to ride a ferry across the Columbia River in order to get into Oregon, so that was pretty cool since for the first time, we traveled for a few miles on something that wasn't a bike.  The ride took us through beautiful Astoria, OR where we got lunch at a McDonalds, and then climbed the steepest hill of the trip.  Conor and I were able to make it up this hill, which had to be approaching a 100% grade(45 degree angle), but the rest of our group had to walk it or they were going to fall over trying to climb it.  It was a short hill, just really steep, so it was actually kind of fun to climb it, as long as you didn't fall over.  The hill was so steep that the sidewalk was actually stairs!!

Finally, we got our first glimpse of the coast from the top of a hill about 5 miles away, which really got us pumped up, and we were really excited to ride into the coast.  When we made it to the beach, we jumped off our bikes, and sprinted into the ocean.  Once we had jumped some waves and done a little body surfing, we got out of the water, which wasn't as cold as I had expected, but it was still cold.  We had some time to consider what we had done as we waited for the back groups to arrive, and for the first time, I really had a sense of realization of what we had done.  We started this trip 60 days ago and could see the Atlantic from New York, and now we were all the way across the country.  We actually rode almost 4000 miles, from coast to coast, just by taking it one day at a time, and it took seeing the opposite side of the ocean to really put it in perspective.  At night, we got a ton of pizzas donated, and also visited the pool right next door, where we could rope swing, use the slide, a hot tub, and they had a rock climbing wall suspended over the water, so that was pretty awesome too.  Tomorrow is our last real ride day, so everyone is excited for that, and I am scheduled to hit 4000 miles tomorrow, which is also awesome.

States traveled through:19(NY,NJ,PA, DE, MD, DC, VA, WV, OH, IN, IL, WI, MN, SD, WY, MT, ID, WA, OR)
Distance today: 84 mi
Total Distance traveled:  3980 mi