Day 289 – Best Buddies

5

289/365 (Oct 16, 2011) – Today we hauled our butts out of bed relatively early and geared up for a ride. We headed for the US border in the cold morning fog and retraced a route (without all the wrong turns I’d made the first time) along the coast. We made a quick stop on the outskirts of Whiterock to clear our visors of the layer of fog that had condensed out on them and then crossed the border at Peace Arch, sailing by the line of waiting vehicles and into the Nexus lane. We then followed the coastline roads along Drayton Harbour all the way around to Semihamoo State Park, then back up and around through Birch Bay, Lummi Bay, Bellingham Bay, then up along the cliffs of Chuckanut Drive and along Samish Bay, Padilla Bay, through Bayview State Park, Anacortes, Deception Pass, and along Whidbey Island through Oak Harbour, Penn Cove, Admiralty Bay and looped back at Keystone with a quick stop in at Fort Casey, before heading back towards home in the dark.

We put about 500km on the bikes today and, although a very cold ride, had a fabulous day for it. Friday was my flex day and I had intended to ride out to a salmon spawning channel, but on the way I changed my mind and opted instead to loop around at Agassiz and run a back road to more or less bypass Chilliwack and meet up with Kirk back in Port Moody for a coffee. Saturday we rode up to Squamish for coffee and had a great chat with a fellow on an older (and highly modded) SV. He was entertaining and difficult to get away from and asked me several times how it felt to own “one of the greatest bikes on the road”. I think he was just a tad biased 🙂 So today combined with Friday and Saturday saw another 900km on my bike and I rolled over another round number on the bridges over Deception Pass.

(Our track – most of it, I forgot to turn the GPS on at the start)

Gotta take advantage of sunny weekends while they are still available on the coast.

That is Mt. Baker in the distance, another relatively local volcano in the string along the Pacific Northwest.