The Palm Tree Ride Report (21 Jan 2018)

Hello folks! I had a pretty darn successful Palm Tree Ride on Sunday. Despite an unpromising forecast, seventeen people showed up! And thankfully, the weather wasn’t as bad as it could have been. There was light rain at the beginning that tapered off. Eventually we even saw the sun! Compare that to the last time I did the ride in 2015: We got a whopping 1.8 inches of rain that day. That ride was not a fun ride to be on, unless you like being soaked to the bone within five minutes.

Anyways, I designed this ride to be a replay of the “greatest hits” of previous rides, especially the first couple I did starting in 2005. So nothing was unfamiliar to those who had done it before, but since I had new folks, it doesn’t matter. Plus, these stops were always great destinations!

What did matter is two driving reasons I decided to bring the ride back from the dead. The first is the media. There’s a documentary crew I’ve been talking with for the past couple months, who are documenting palm trees in Portland. So I decided to do another ride so they could film it. (So vain, yes! 😉  )

But there’s also a bigger reason: The last stop features Sean Hogan’s house on NE 11th at Knott. Sean is the owner of Cistus Nursery on Sauvie Island. His house is an oasis of palms and other exotic evergreens. It was featured on the very first Palm Tree Ride back in 2005, and I’ve stopped here one or two times since then. But Sean has decided to put his house on the market. So this could very well be the last time I could take a Palm Tree Ride here, because the new owners may not be cool with people wandering around their back yard, or…they may even do the unimaginable! So now or never.

The ride was just about seven miles, winding through inner SE and NE. After the ride, half the folks went their own ways, while the other half retired for food and drinks at the nearby Hophouse.

Will I do another Palm Tree Ride again? Maybe. I don’t think I’d bring it back as a regular, annual thing. I did that for ten years, and got burnt out. But I may bring it back sporadically, when the need or desire arises…