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France to Greece Trip ’08 – Corsica

Published on February 2, 2009 in bike and france greece 08. 0 Comments

Thursday, Sept 11th – Monday, Sept 15th

Thursday, Sept 11th

Wednesday morning we got on the ferry to Calvi, Corsica. The ferry ride was a few hours of reading and a little eating.

When we got to Calvi we stopped at a bakery for some bread and a onion-filled pastry. I ate most of the pastry while we did a larger shopping trip for dinner food. After checking where we could camp at the tourist office, we set out for the farthest camping place in the direction we were going. I think it was 15-20 Km.

The ride there was beautiful, if somewhat windy for riding along a steep grade above jagged red rocky shoreline. There were a couple of times when we stopped to catch our breath after nearly being blown over.

We stopped at the camping place we had planned on. There were quite a few people there. We camped near the edge of the camping area toward the beach. Near us were a couple of Australian women, and a German couple with some kids. When the kids went to bed the adults smoked pot.

We set up our tent on a tiny patch of grass in the gravel. The beach and some of the campsite was a coarse, smooth gravel of many colors. Mostly darker gray, red, and brownish rock. We went swimming, then made dinner. It got dark. On the way back from the restrooms we were startled by a pair of bright yellow eyes and curved horns just past our tent. There was a small herd of cows nearby, one of which had wandered through a hole in the fence. We had to move the tent off of the grassy patch due to fear that we might be trampled in the night by incautious grazing.

Friday, Sept 12th

Was it Thursday morning we rode some rough roads? This experience prompted a discussion about whether we could just bike straight to Bastia without the rest of the route, or whether we could take a ferry to Italy from Calvi. The rough portion turned out not to be that extensive. Most of the roads we used in Corsica came closer to the French standard.

We stopped for lunch at a pass above Osani. Lunch consisted of some of those savory filled pastries mentioned earlier. We were hungry and the pastries were good, but we kinda regretted bringing our lunch up there. The place we stopped had a wood-fired pizza oven that cooked some very good-looking pizza.

We spent a fair amount of time following other cyclists on Thursday. There was one pass we stopped at where there must have been 8 or 10 other cyclists stopped for a break. The majority of the cyclists were riding hardtail mountain bikes.

This day included a lot of shorter climbs and descents. The road wound around the landscape.

As the day was lengthening and drawing to a close we passed through Cargèse. A few miles later we decided we should have investigated where we could camp nearby. Luckily we found a mostly-empty public beach and camped there back amongst the scrub. We cooked a semi-rainy dinner on the beach.

Saturday, Sept 13th

Friday we rode along the beach for a while, over some hills and down into Ajaccio. We touristed around for a while there, checking out small shops and taking a look at what camping places were available to the northeast. We had gelato. We bought some food.

We rode up the highway toward the Col de Vizzavona, which would be our highest point on Corsica. The first section of this leg was pretty flat, but it was a hot afternoon. We stopped and had a snack of some cheese and bread.

The afternoon got dimmer and clouds were building when we stopped at a camping near Vero. The sites were right above a river (La Gravona). The site had rows of Eucalyptus trees. We set up the tent. I scrambled around the river a bit. We made dinner and the rain began.

Sunday, Sept 14th

In the morning the guy who owned the camp came to tell us that we could use the shower, which required some type of token to operate, while we were making coffee. There was little understanding. It was raining. I figured it out and showered while Evelyn pouted and fiddled with her wet clothes.

We spent most of the day’s riding climbing up the pass and descending the other side. I had changed into shorts for the climb, but the other side of the pass was chilly and rainy. The descent was freezing. My knees and fingers got stiff and cold.

There was a little climb through some smaller towns to Corte. We stopped at a many-wayed intersection promising a campsite to the northeast, the direction we were eventually headed. Corte was west. We went into Corte across some small bridges. There were at least three camping places real close to the town square. Two phone booths in the town square. A can of Pietra. Evelyn made a call to buy ferry tickets for the 16th. The required sequence of numbers was lengthy and obscure, the recipient difficult to understand.

We set up camp at Camping Chez Bartho. The citadel could be seen from our campsite. We walked into town for dinner. We had a traditional Corsican-themed dinner. It was okay. Some pastry, a soup not dissimilar to minestrone with a piece of pork, some pretty good cheese.

Monday, Sept 15th

This was my birthday. We spread the tent and some clothes out to dry in the sun after the night’s rain.

The road from Corte to Bastia was mostly downhill on a sizable highway with a wide shoulder. A fast ride. We stopped for lunch at a small park between the road and the train tracks. A couple walked their dogs from the back of their van. We ate good sandwiches we’d purchased in Corte.

South of Bastia the highway went straight north over rolling hills. The shoulder filled with overgrown flowering shrubs. Evelyn was stung in the eye by a hornet or a bee or something.

We avoided a tunnel and rode around a hill into Bastia. It got very windy. We went to the ferry ticketing office and got tickets on a ferry to Italy, instead of the tickets to France that had been accidentally bought on the phone the day before. We had an espresso and Evelyn picked up some stamps and mailed postcards.

We headed north along the coast into wind and rain to look for camping. We found a place not too far away. After setting up our tent the owner found us and told us we couldn’t possibly camp. It was raining. A backpacker with better French convinced her that camping might be possible. Near our site, there was a cute nook with seating built into an old loose stone wall.

In the tiny town near the camping we had pizza, lettuce salad, and wine for dinner. Pear tiramisu for dessert.

France to Greece Trip ’08 – France

Published on December 30, 2008 in bike and france greece 08. 0 Comments

Sunday, Aug 31st – Wednesday, Sept 10th

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This entry, and all of the entries regarding this Europe trip are written in collaboration with Evelyn. They’ve been edited to my POV for consistency, since most of the original text was in that POV, and it seemed simpler to stick to it.

Sunday, Aug 31st

Evelyn and I arrived in Geneva around 8 AM Sunday the 31st. We woke up at about 2:30 AM on Saturday to get on the Shuttle to SEA-TAC. The flights were pretty uneventful, and we managed to get some sleep. In Geneva the bike boxes were promptly delivered to the oversize baggage area and we put everything on a baggage cart. The baggage cart had a well-designed deposit system. In order to use a cart, the customer inserts a 2-euro coin forcefully into a shallow slot, which forces a clip out the opposite side of the device which holds the carts together in a long line. The coin is held in place until the cart is clipped back onto a line of other carts. My uncle Jean-Pierre picked us up after a few minutes and we drove to a flea-market in a town near Dressy. My cousin Nicole and aunt Susan had just finished seeing the market and drove back to their house to drop off our bikes to make room in the car. We had coffee and a croissant and checked out antiques for a while. Later Susan picked us up and we drove up the hill to Dressy. There we toured the house, barn and grounds, had a nice lunch (salad, bread, wine, cheese, saucisson, ratatouille, fruit and cheese) and a short nap. Later we went for a hike up on a little mountain. It was grassy and nice. People were hang-gliding off the top of the mountain. The grass had colchicums growing in it, which Jean-Pierre called ‘colchic.’ Then we went to a cafe at La Chambotte on a precipitous overlook above Lac du Bourget. That evening we had a delightful dinner with a dense chocolate torte for dessert.

Monday, Sept. 1st

Un-boxed the bikes and put Evelyn’s bike together. My rear rim was out of true enough that I couldn’t loosen my brakes enough for it to spin. I spent most of the day trying to true it, but only made it worse. We visited a farm across the road from Susan & Jean Pierre’s where some calves had recently been born. One that had been born that morning was already larger than some of the older calves. Some calves were feeding greedily from big milk bottles. Many cows were being milked. Dinner included homemade olive bread baked in JP & Susan’s bread oven and pear sorbet.

Tuesday, Sept. 2nd.

Susan, Nicole and Jean-Pierre were driving to the Luberon. Evelyn and I got a ride with them to a bike shop in Aix-le-Bain where I bought a new rear wheel and a mechanic swapped my tire and cassette to the new wheel. I couldn’t understand the guy much, and Jean-Pierre mostly talked to him for me. After the new wheel was installed, we loaded up our panniers. I tried to adjust my brakes in front of the shop, but the mechanic came out and wanted to know if there was something wrong with the bike. We said no, and I ended up adjusting the brakes behind a Champion grocery store. Champion became one of my favorite large grocery store chains in France, mostly because their store PA system played a jingle composed of a moment of whistling from the Peter, Bjorn & John song “Young Folks.”

We ate lunch (which Susan packed for us, including an Opinel knife for slicing the cheese and saucisson) by a toll booth after taking a wrong turn onto what would have been a freeway, though since you pay for them I suppose they’d be called a payway or a tollway. I like that there are toll booths at the entrances so you can’t accidentally enter one of these big roads.

We rode to Annecy via some highways, and walked our bikes around the old narrow part of town. We got ice cream, or likely it was gelato. Then we got on a bike trail that Jean-Pierre told us about around the southwest side of Lac d’Annecy. We stayed at Camping l’Universe (an old orchard) near a lake access park. After setting up the tent we took our dinner to the park by the lake and ate a picnic dinner (avocado, bread, cheese, saucisson, sardines, leftover chocolate torte Susan packed for us) there. I found a 50 euro note in a cigarette pack that I picked up to throw in the trash. This conveniently paid for the replacement wheel I had purchased that morning.

Wednesday, Sept. 3rd

We headed southeast and tried to stop at a huge château by the lake, but it had a huge fence with a locked gate. We went through a dark tunnel on the bike path. The east end of Lac d’Annecy was quite open on the south side, and a headwind made this section seem long to me. The wind got better once we were more sheltered between the hills. The bike trail petered out in Faverges, I believe, and we took to the road. We were hoping to wait until Albertville to eat lunch, but we got hungry and almost stopped in Ugine. I think a navigational confusion or something, perhaps indecision as to where we should eat lunch, caused us to continue. We rode the rest of the way to Albertville and stopped at a sandwich shop to buy a picnic lunch. We rode to Conflans, an old fortified town, to eat lunch. We stopped half way up the circuitous road up the hill to eat in a parking lot with picnic benches and an old flywheel-assisted well. It was a really good lunch. I had a baguette with duck meat, cornichon, and doubtless some kind of cheese. Evelyn had a baguette with lox and creme fraiche and “salad” (romaine lettuce). I looked at the photos that Evelyn had taken so far, as she was tasked with photographic documentation.

We packed up, filled our water bottles, and got ready to crest the fortified hill. We asked each other if we’d packed the camera, and apparently neither of us had. We saw a parks worker emptying the trash nearby, and a picnic bench with three teenage boys smoking. We interrogated both the worker and the boys in poor French, but of course neither of them had seen our camera. We looked at the fortified town but were pretty distracted.

We stopped at a supermarket and bought a disposable camera and some juice. (Pago!) While we were unlocking our bikes to leave the market, some other American kids were locking up their bikes.

The ride toward our destination was through many small villages. There were lots of hills, sloping steeply up to our right, sloping more gradually and greenly and covered with vineyards to our left. At one point, to our right was an old fortified castle on the crest of the hill. There were lots of signs indicating caves where wine could be sampled and purchased. As we were riding through this hilly area, we started to look for food to take to our campsite for dinner. There wasn’t much by way of markets and bakeries to begin with, and ones we saw weren’t open–we didn’t realize yet that between 3 and 5 or 6, small shops are closed. Then there was a vending machine along the road. We pulled over. It had loaves of bread inside. For 2 euro we bought a loaf.

As we got closer to our campsite, it began sprinkling. It was pouring by the time we got to the campground (Escale, in Sainte Hélène du Lac). We ate dinner at a picnic table under a shelter at the camp cafe. There was lots of thunder and lightning. The family that owned the campground had their dinner at the same time as we did. We were a little jealous of what they had (warm food). We had a bottle of wine, some cheese, bread, chocolate. Then a very wet and chilly night.

Thursday, Sept. 4th

It was still pouring when we woke up, and it continued to rain, hard, as we biked.

We stopped at a street market as it was ending. The guy running a “agriculture biologique” (French “organic”) stand gave us organic vegetables free because we were wet. He threw in some shallots to keep us from catching cold and said “Welcome to France.” We also successfully bought un morcaeu du fromage Brebis from vendors who spoke no English and though we were German because of our Ortliebs (German brand of panniers).

It rained. We rode toward Grenoble. It cleared up as we neared the city. We stopped to use the internet outside of Grenoble to look for some place to spend the night. We also looked for the locations of sporting goods and camping stores so we could buy some white gas for our stove. (Our airline wouldn’t allow us to take our gas on the plane, and we hadn’t found a good camping store along the way yet, so we bought a bottle of kerosene at a Champion.) When we got into Grenoble, we checked out a couple of stores; no luck.

We stayed at a “Hostelling International” hostel south of Grenoble. It was good to have warm showers and a clothes dryer.

Friday, Sept. 5th

It was sunny Friday morning. What we didn’t get dry at the hostel dried as we did our morning ride, climbing toward the Col du Fau. Before we left Grenoble, we’d bought these cheese pastry things for lunch. They were rich, with about four kinds of cheese, and particularly good after several hours of climbing. We ate them on a little road off the highway near the top of the pass.

After lunch we descended from that pass and headed for the second pass of the day. We stopped for juice and ice cream bars at a little hotel’s poolside cafe.

The final push for the day was up the Col de la Croix Haute. After bombing wobbly down the top of the descent from the pass we stopped and had drinks at a cafe next to the road. I had un kir and Evelyn had a local sparkling wine.

We camped for the night beside a small town at a spot called Champ La Chèvre. We walked into town for makings of dinner, and we also bought a bottle of herby beer flavored mostly with thyme. The weather was dry, cool, and windy, and from where we pitched our tent we had a nice view across a small valley to some mountains. Behind us, at the top of a hill, was the town’s very old cemetery.

We discovered during the night that choosing the camping spot closest to town let us hear the town church’s bell ring at quarter-hour intervals ALL NIGHT.

Saturday, Sept 6th

For some reason, neither of us remember much of what happened this day. What is remembered: it rained occasionally, sometimes hard; we took a wrong turn at one point that led us down a quiet road through a forested area with occasional turn offs to houses or cabins. We rode through a lot of orchards growing pears and apples.

We camped for the night at a campground near Sisteron. We ate dinner beneath the awning of an unused cabin so we and our dinner wouldn’t get rained on.

Sunday, Sept 7th

Today was our last big climb in France, the Col de Léque

The weather was sunny and warm. We got a late start because we stopped at a small craft fair/farmer’s market, where we bought some delightful pastries–Evelyn had a savory pastry that’s like an onion pizza, flat bread with carmelized onions, herbs, olive oil, and I think this one had goat cheese on it too.

We spent the night at a campground just northwest of Castellane. Before setting up the tent, we went into Castellane and caught the end of a craft fair, which was held in the center of the town. Around the center were some bars and restaurants; we had a drink at a bar and rested for a while. Then we bought a bottle of wine to have with dinner.

It was windy while we were using our camping stove to cook dinner, and because we were cooking with kerosene, keeping the stove burning was difficult. We made plans to stop the next morning at a camping store we’d noticed in Castellane.

Monday, Sept 8th

In the morning, we rode into Castellane and bought pastries, large jambon cru sandwiches for later, and, finally, white gas, which was called essance “C”. The weather was nice, warm and sunny.

In Thorenc, we had a picnic lunch next to an abandoned cabin.

We stopped to see Gréolières and the waterfalls along the way to Nice. We contemplated camping before we got into Nice because we anticipated the city being big and confusing, but we rode into Nice anyway and got tired and crazy trying to navigate the roads and find some place to stay. So we rode back west to one of a large group of campsites we’d passed on the way into Nice. A few were full; one of them had a few sites left, so we stayed there. The thin blond woman in charge had good English and gave us a hammer. The ground was hard and we were glad to have the hammer to use.

Cooked a meal as it was getting dark, drank some wine, got sleepy and slept.

Tuesday, Sept 9th

We hung out in Saint-Laurent-du-Var (a few kilometers west of Nice) and Nice. We had salads Niçoise for lunch in Saint-Laurent-du-Var, visited a street market, and used the internet. Then we rode to the port on the other side of Nice to buy ferry tickets. I got a slow leak on the way back west. I filled the tire, then we had juice on the beach and swam for a while in the Mediterranean.

As the sun was going down, we stopped at a Champion for supplies for supper, then rode further north than we meant to to a strange camping place named Camping Magali. There were oddly-shaped topiary and lots of beetles.

We cooked dinner in the dark. While we were setting up the tent, some guy loaned Evelyn his tiny flashlight. It wasn’t really necessary or even helpful, but the guy was insistent. Then, sleep.

Wednesday, Sept 10th

We took our time getting back to Nice, meeting up with a bike path and riding slowly on the beach. We walked around, got lunch at a cafe (Caprese salad and omelet). Then we got down to looking for a hotel. Many of the places we tried were booked for the next week or longer. We got frustrated and went to the office for tourism and asked them to search for a hotel for us in our price range. They found one with one room remaining. We got the room, checked in, showered, then went out to walk around old Nice for the evening. We had Socca and pizza for dinner at a bar. We went to bed fairly early since our ferry to Corsica left early the next morning.

me on google street view

Published on November 14, 2008 in Technical Communications and bike. 0 Comments Tags: google street view.

Months ago I saw a street view car driving along Ravenna Blvd. while I was riding back to work after lunch. I waved. Now I am on google street view.

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Circumnavigation of the Hood Canal

Published on August 11, 2008 in bike and eating wild things. 0 Comments Tags: bike.

Evelyn and I rode around the Hood Canal. Counterclockwise.

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Here is a flickr set of the trip.

Friday

We met at Westlake Center just before 5pm. We took the 5:30 ferry to Bremerton.

There was a detour and we didn’t quite know which way to go after taking an alternate road in Bremerton, so we stopped and bought a map. Then we rode up a steep hill. Soon we found Campus Parkway, which was a wide gravel road into a cleared strip in the forest. We camped where the road narrowed. There were lots of ATV tracks and berries around, and a dead car in a dirt pit with a little makeshift shelter next to it.

Saturday

We awoke to rain, went back to sleep a few times until it stopped, and got up.

We gathered wild berries for our breakfast, but rode to square lake before preparing it. It was a nice lake, but the park had no trash or water.

We stopped at a newly installed pre-fab house for water, but it tasted gross and made us paranoid. We stopped at a highschool for water, but couldn’t find anything except a vending machine with bottled water, so we bought one. Then it rained. When the rain slowed, we left.

When we stopped for lunch at a crappy gyro deli on 106 it started pouring. We waited with two motorcyclists on Harleys until the rain slowed. One was a fireman and one was a Native American.

The rain continued periodically all day, but when it wasn’t raining, the sun shone through and warmed us and dried our clothing. At some point Evelyn got a flat tire.

We stopped at a vegetable stand at the south end of the canal to get vegetables for dinner. We got peppers, okra and apples.

We tasted and bought a bottle at the Hoodsport Winery before turning inland from the canal. The road to Lake Cushman was a huge hill. About 3/4 of the way up, we were resting and a woman pulled up and offered to let us stay at her house near Lake Cushman. We went to the park by the lake, but it wasn’t a state park anymore, it was a private campground. There was one site left. We had a campfire with wet wood that was hard to light.

Sunday

Lake Cushman had a lot of huckleberries, which we had in our cereal for breakfast. They were sour and good. I dug up a small beargrass plant, Evelyn took some pictures of the lake, and we set off for the north end of the canal.

It was a hilly ride. Evelyn got another flat tire once we got back on 101. It was a blowout through the hole made during the flat on Sunday. We stopped and constructed a boot from a mini vodka bottle on the side of the road. The replacement tube had 2 holes that needed to be patched before we could use it, and my pump stopped working. I oiled it and tightened it and hoped it would work later. We inflated the tire with her pump.

We stopped at the Pleasant Harbor marina for lunch. Soon we left the canal for Walker Pass, which I had not realized was almost 800 feet high. I guess the road to Lake Cushman was almost 1000 feet, but it was hotter when we climbed Walker Pass. The ride seemed long as we headed for the Hood Canal bridge. I got a flat tire. My pump worked. After the Hood Canal Bridge the ride didn’t seem so long. We got home and ate at Tacos Guayamas. I had a wet burrito al pastor.

Independence Day Weekend Bike Camping

Published on July 9, 2008 in bike. 0 Comments

Evelyn and I went on a bike tour over Independence Day weekend.

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We left on Thursday evening after I got home from work, and managed to ride 40 miles past Lake Stevens before camping for the night. We camped at the Centennial Trailhead, which had a “no camping” sign, but also a nice spot to camp that was out of sight of the trail and the gravel turnaround where a small road crossed the trail. There was also a stinky porta-potty, so I didn’t get to use my trowel in the morning. We brought sandwiches for dinner, so we didn’t have to cook between setting up camp and going to sleep. That was a good thing, as there were ravenous mosquitoes in that forest.

You can click on the map for route and camping spot details. It totaled 235 miles by my (google maps) calculations.

Here’s a list we made of things to bring or consider bringing on our month-long tour in Sept.

notepad and pen (for making lists)
bigger knife (oak handled one)
cutting board (small rollable plastic one?)
another stove & pot for fancier cooking?
picnic mat?
insect repellent
food-hangin’ bag
more small drawstring bags to make searching for small camping tools faster
fallopian dirigible firecracker

Tolt Camping Trip

Published on May 27, 2008 in bike and eating wild things. 0 Comments Tags: logging road, mahonia, tolt pipeline trail, violets.

Here’s a map overview of the trip:

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If you link to the google map page, you can find all kinds of more intricate information on the trip, including my planned routes out and back, and the routes that I actually took. Find out where I had to get off and walk, where I was lost and tired and turned around, where I ate lunch, and where there are gates.

The idea of the trip was to follow the Tolt pipeline trail out to the reservoir, or however close I could get, camp, and ride back. I made the route a little more interesting by riding up to the Snoqualmie valley on a logging road before coming back.

The Tolt pipeline trail was not bad, once I got up to it, and the day was unexpectedly beautiful. The trail follows the pipeline straight across all landforms, so there are many unnecessary hills. All except the first were ridable. At some point out in the middle of nowhere it becomes paved, which is nice. There were these huge imposing buildings, and then the big gate at the Tolt Regulating basin. I turned around and took the other less-imposing gate and got back on the dirt roads. This was the hottest part of the day, and I had worn wool pants since the weather report was for clouds and rain. Bad idea. The climb was grueling. I stopped in shady spots to cool down. When I got to the top of a ridge, there was a lot more active logging and bare, hot dirt. I didn’t want to go over the ridge because I knew I’d have to climb back up, and I was too tired to buy into that. I coasted back down to a turnoff I had seen earlier that looked promising and camped there. It was a nice camping spot.

I surveyed the area for edible plants and found violets(Viola sempervivens) and Oregon Grape (Mahonia aquifolium).

I ate some of the violet leaves fresh as a snack. They tasted great, like wintergreen. I put quite a lot of them in my dinner as well, which was seasoned rice with canned smoked herring. I don’t think the herring and the violets went together very well, but it was alright. Next time make the violets into a salad or dessert or something.

I saw some Mahonia, and had just read a blog post about Mahonia tea a few days ago, so I wanted to try it. Finding enough was difficult, as most of the plants were small and spread out, but I got an amount that I thought would work. The tea was excellent. Sweet, sour, and with a pleasant but hard-to-describe flavor.

It rained before I got up, so my tent got wet, but I stayed dry. The morning was cool and I was grateful for my wool pants for the first few hours before regretting them again. The logging roads to the Snoqualmie valley were fun. I had to go under or around lots of gates, but that was okay. I only got a tiny bit lost a few times. I saw a pack of squids and about that many other cyclists on Highbridge road. I had lunch at the Snoqualmie Ice Cream factory. Sunday was a nice day, and the Burke was pretty busy the whole way home.

WordPress 2.5, bikes

Published on April 2, 2008 in Technical Communications and bike. 0 Comments Tags: bikes, Col, software, tacos, wordpress.

It was released with much fanfare recently, but I am waiting to install WordPress 2.5 until K2 gets a release compatible with it together. I read a post from them that said they were working on it, but they are perennially slow on the releases.

Last weekend I rode in the Taco Truck Time Trial, which was lots of fun. Nobody barfed. Steep hills were ridden on. During the after-party, it started raining, so we had another beer and waited for the rain to stop, but it started hailing and snowing, so we had another and waited it out, but we lost patience and sobriety and eventually went home, and the precipitation didn’t seem like that big a deal, or like it could be tolerated.

I am looking forward to bike camping this summer, and the european bike camping vacation. I’m looking for a nice place to ride to that will simulate riding to the crest of the Corsican mountains at the road to Corte. I guess it’s the Col de Vizzavona.

The Second Annual Starbucks to Boundary Bay Centuryathon

Published on February 25, 2008 in bike. 0 Comments

On Saturday (2/17/08) I and 10 other people rode from Seattle to Bellingham.

Here is the forum thread planning the trip.

The route was 110 miles, including the trip from my house to the Starbucks meeting point.

Amanda had a flat tire when she got to Starbucks, but that didn’t count for the ride, which had no flat tires.

Brandon and Bob rode a recumbent tandem that Brandon had finished putting together the day before. The tandem lost its chain a few times, and Brandon had some excruciating knee pain, but that was the worst of it.

6 of 11
At this point five of us were already trying to get a table at Boundary Bay.

The weather was good. There was a little soft rain before the sun came up, but the fog cleared after it was densest in Snohomish.

We had dinner and a few beers at Boundary Bay, after waiting seemingly forever to get a table. Admittedly there were 11 of us.

Boundary Bay

Then we figured out who was sleeping where. Bob and his brother Joe were staying with a computer science professor that Bob knew from college. Miles was sleeping in a hammock in the forest, and I got to sleep in Sean’s friend Derek’s apartment.

Sean and Derek wanted to go to some bars, so we went to both of the bars on the lower level of the apartment building Derek lived in. First we went to some bar with a thin rastafarian theme. Then we went to the Up & Up tavern, which was just next door, and had a much better beer selection and a more interesting clientele. Sean ineptly played some pickup game. I chatted with an off-duty bartender named (Awesome) Autumn and another friend of Derek’s whose name I forget. We then went to a bar called Wild Buffalo just long enough to see it was empty and leave. Then to a dumpling place for a stack of styrafoam boxes of potato dumplings. Derek, Sean, and a girl that Derek went to prom with in high school and some other guy she or they knew from school, I think, came back to Derek’s apartment. The guy played classical guitar and the girl sang a song. It was good.

Four hours later at 7 AM I couldn’t decide if it was worth the hangover and not being able to finish my breakfast at Little Cheerful. I ordered the eggs Benedict special with capacolla and asparagus. It was really good, but my stomach was not up to it.

Then we rode to the train station and got on the train. The ticket machine was broken, but the train left on time.

Bellingham to Seattle train

Once we were on the train a man came around to collect our tickets. When one of us handed him a ticket he said that it needed to be signed. We had all signed them earlier in the station, but there were two tickets stapled together and the top ticket had been torn off when we put our bikes in the bike car. We attempted to explain this to him, but he didn’t seem to understand. He just told us that we needed to sign on the line. We didn’t have any pens, so we asked him if we might borrow a pen. He didn’t seem to understand this either, and said that we needed to sign next to the “X”. After asking him a few more times for a pen he gave us a pen and we got that over with.

Then he asked us if we were going to Tacoma. Everyone except Sean said, “no, we’re going to Seattle.” Sean was going to Tacoma. This took a couple more askings back and forth about who was going where. Then this guy wrote “TAC” on some little yellow cards and stuck them in a plastic clip on the baggage bins overhead.

Later this same guy walked into our car and bent over conspiratorially and talked to us in a low tone, almost whispering. He asked us if we were aware that we could be kicked off the train for odor. It was hard to hear what he’d said, but we confirmed with each other that we’d heard correctly. We had ridden more than a hundred miles the day before, and hadn’t taken showers since then, but what a rude and passive-aggressive thing to say. Later on another train guy came around and asked us if we were going to Tacoma. We said that only Sean was going to Tacoma. The man looked puzzled and changed around the yellow cards on the baggage rack. Brandon asked the man if we seemed smelly to him. He said no. We told him about the guy who had messed up the tags and told us we could get kicked off the train for odor.

The ride home from the train station was sunny and pleasant, except that I lost a cookie out of my pocket after taking only one bite.

More pictures of the trip are on Pete’s flickr set