Back at the end of November I asked Dean if he wanted to spend a long weekend down in Bend, OR riding fat bikes. I have President’s Day off from work every year and I thought it would be fun to head down for a long weekend to ride bikes and potentially XC ski. With this past week also including Valentine’s Day I kept referring to it as my “Romantic Weekend Away with Dean” (Since both our wives had to work on the holiday). But one of my coworkers recently came up with the awesome “Bromantic Weekend” moniker and it just stuck.

I love riding my fat bike. It puts a huge smile on my face every single time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t snow all that much here in Forest Grove. That means I have to generally drive to snow if I want to ride this bike on groomed snow trails.

Dean and I left his house about 7:30am on Saturday morning and arrived at Wanoga Sno-Park around noon after a short stop at Sisters Coffee. Wanoga was PACKED with people at both the sledding hill lower lot and the upper snowmobile parking lot. After a couple laps of the two parking lots we squeezed into a spot up in the snowmobile parking next to some camping trailers.

We had time to kill since we couldn’t check in to our room until 4pm. So we did a lap of both the Outer Loop and 3 PSI at a casual pace. Saw a few other fat bikers while we were out there. There were a ton of XC skiers and snowshoers out and about too.

We checked into our room at Loge about 45 minutes early (Thank you!) and then headed out to pick up some groceries and get a bite to eat. Stumbled upon the very unassuming but really tasty Bangers and Brews across the street from the grocery store. Their sweet potatoes fries were fantastic.

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Sunday we were up early(ish) and at the parking lot much earlier. Ended up with a better parking spot and proceeded to do more laps of the trails. Today was probably the best trail conditions of the three days.

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Today was totally chill. Ride bikes, hang out, go to dinner with one of Dean’s coworkers down in La Pine and then binge watch some episodes of The Last Kingdom. I had told Dean how awesome Mia and I thought this series was, so we started in on season 1. I picked up on a few things I had originally missed back when I started watching this show.

We did two quick laps of 3 PSI early Monday morning before heading to breakfast at one of my favorite places in Bend. Jackson’s Corner on Delaware. I haven’t been here since Kristi & Howie came up from San Francisco back in June of 2019. Needless to say, I was super happy!

Thanks to Dean for driving. It’s very rare that I get to be solely a passenger for a long weekend. I also kinda forgot how much I really do like Bend. As Mia and I are fond of saying….”We like Bend, but we love Sisters”. Bend can be a bit too many people for my liking, but it has incredible access to pretty much any outdoor activity you want to do. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why people like it here so much.

Thanks for reading,

-Pete