digibud

Our daughter just moved to Vancouver WA. and at some point soon we'll head down to visit. We recently visited Albuquerque and Groveland CA with our road bikes and regretted not taking our Salsa Fargo's or mtn bikes because the roads were so rough and torn up they were hard on my wife's hands. We can handle chipseal but not numerous breaks in pavement and hard jostling on our road bikes. We do, however, much prefer riding our road bikes and are curious what road riding is like in the Vancouver area. We are very experienced in traffic and prefer to stay off bike paths unless they are wide and capable of actual riding. Both Albuquerque and Tucson have great bike paths that we enjoy but typically we're on roads with a shoulder as a first preference. We'll probably rent a car capable of throwing our bikes into and be ready to drive here or there to start/finish some rides. We aren't interested in riding "downtown" unless it's for something specific. Comments on Vancouver WA for road riding?

tinrobot

Hop across the bridge to Portland OR and experience bicycle nirvana. There are many times when the bikes outnumber the cars there. Great bike shops, good infrastructure, nice people, good coffee.

Here's a good list of rides

Rubber to the Road ? Portland Bicycle Ride Guide

LesterOfPuppets

Only real rough road I can think of is Columbia. It's marked as a bike route, but a pretty bad road. Use Franklin instead. Downtown is OK to ride. Poorly timed lights but only a few blocks of them. Downtown gets deserted by early evening on weekdays, so you've got the place to yourself almost.

Nice flat time trial routes out by Vancouver Lake. Hilly routes out by Camas. I like doing the two bridge loop, going out on WA side, back on OR side. My favorite century route is downtown Vanco to St. Johns bridge in Portland, to Longview, then back to Vanc.

Lotta nice roads with bike lanes around town but unfortunately most country roads around here have zero shoulder and plenty of psycho drivers so I stick to the suburban roads with shoulders mainly.

Check out vbc-usa.com for group rides and routes.

Great mountain biking and gravel grinding opportunities out by Battle Ground and Camas.

trainsktg

Google Maps has a very good feature that allows you to pull up all local bike paths, bike-friendly street and roads, etc. It isn't quite 100% accurate (I think it 'fails conservatively') but its a great start.

Keith