Oregon’s Willamette Valley by Bike: a Video Tour

In case the video isn’t abundantly self-evident, I’ll go ahead and start with the conclusion: I could not recommend this trip enough! Low-traffic roads, comfortable terrain, friendly farms, and beautiful views made this bicycle vacation a delight. Read on for all the details of our trip. This post is part 1 of at-least 3.
My goal with this series of posts is not only to share my own experience, but also to highlight some tips in case you want to do something similar too.

Intro: Car-free Travel to Oregon

Anna and I packed our panniers and left home early on Friday before the Fourth of July weekend for a short ride through downtown Seattle to King Station. We’d booked a roomette on the Coast Starlight down to Eugene, an almost eight hour trip that left on-time at about 9:45 am. We weren’t complete strangers to Amtrak, but this was our longest train ride to date.

Since there was a pandemic to avoid, we spent most of the time keeping ourselves comfortable in the little room and enjoyed the slightly-better-than-airline food delivered to us for breakfast and lunch. Or maybe the food is the same as what’s on airplanes, and it just lands on slightly more functional surface-level taste buds. Either way, no complaint from me! Sleeper reservations have meals included, by the way. And taking bicycles onto Amtrak couldn’t be easier, since there are bike-specific hangars in the luggage car.

Tip: make sure to reserve tickets in advance since the spots fill up by departure; we booked it 2 weeks before the trip.

View from the observation car

Scenic Bikeways

I’d first read about Oregon’s scenic bikeway program a couple of years ago, after moving to Seattle. However it took a bit of digging beyond the brochure to find out what exactly to expect, and honestly I still wasn’t entirely sure until we’d actually begun the trip because the route seems to be a bit under-represented online (most of the crazy guys on a bike rode it more than a couple years ago). But what sold us on the trip was flipping Google Maps to Satellite view, zooming in, following the roads, and finding not a single passenger vehicle on (most of) them. Of course that’s only a snapshot of a few minutes of a particular cloudless day, but it was enough indication to us that the trip would be worth it.

Tip: when planning cycling routes, remember to switch into street view and satellite view once in a while! It’s no fun getting unexpectedly routed onto a fast highway with minimal shoulder. Update: I made a website exactly for this!

Arriving in Eugene

A bit of reading (The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley), a bit of napping, and a lot of lazing about later we arrived at Eugene and retrieved our bikes. We were spending the night at a hotel just a few minutes from the station, yet the 1-mile ride there took us right over the Willamette River, the same one we’d spend the next 3 days loosely following north to Salem. The bridge and park by the river deserve a mention here for being especially pleasant, and it felt great to get a bit of fresh warm air after spending all day in a little cabin on the train.

Riverside park in Eugene