Every time I see these hay bales wrapped in plastic I think “The marshmallows harvest is upon us”.
It was a 510’ish km kind of day not he motorcycles, and I had the Nikon D810 with the Lensbaby Burnside 35mm on it…and the iPhone to back it up because I know the Burnside is a bit of a strange animal and I’m not entirely comfortable with what makes a good shot with it, vs what just doesn’t work. So the iPhone stepped in a few times.
We rode down to Edison for lunch, intending on eating at Tweets but forgot that they only take cash or some app-based payment that we don’t use, so we wandered over to the Longhorn instead. Even after the change in clientele we are still, after all else years, about the only sport riders that ever seem to stop in there. Maybe the long line of Harleys dissuades sports from pulling up, but we’ve never cared. The clubhouse is too good. it’s also too big, so we split one.
We left Edison the back route, heading for Whidbey. Google maps hadn’t let me plan the route the way I wanted, indicating that Bay View Edison Road was closed in the middle section until August 25th. So I rerouted and muttered about it because it meant missing a nice little stretch. And then I missed the turn back in and ended up running Farm to Market Road all the way to SR20.
From there it was up SR20 and eventually towards Clinton where, if we’d wanted to, we could take a ferry to Edgewater, near Everett.
We stopped at Deception Pass and took in the view of the Deception Pass Bridge, an impressive structure completed in 1935. It’s a beautiful spot and during a tidal exchange the currents ripping through one needs a power boat to navigate and you have to go through at full throttle.
We rode from Deception Pass through Oak Harbour and towards Loveland, where the intent was to get off the highway and onto some side roads.
One of the things I love about riding in the US is that they have signs telling you the name of the road that the next sign ahead is for. In a sense, every road you can turn off a highway onto has two signs, one “at” the turn, and one a short distance before the turn.
It’s fabulous…..except when the one turn you want to make is the one turn without the “pre’sign” is the one you are looking for and you blow by it.
Dammit!
Pull off, about face, backtrack, get on the right road. And then realize you haven’t turned the GPS logger back on and missed a chunk of the ride.
Double-dammit!
We rode along the waterfront and past a shellfish farm on Madrona Way. I had this sense of deja vu and I have a sneaking suspicion that I had ben here before. In my undergrad I did a summer stint at Bamfield as a required part of my Aquaculture degree. We did a massive circular road trip across some of Vancouver Island (Fanny Bay Oysters, Big Qualicum River Hatchery, United (when they still were working with Pacific salmon), Rosewall Creek (when it was still a research facility and before SEP took it over), and a few other place. We also went to the Lower Mainland and visited West Van Research Lab, Capilano River hatchery, and Inch Creek Hatchery. And on the US side, we visited the first ever Atlantic salmon farm on the Pacific (In Washington), a clam farm (which I later recognized along Chuckanut Drive as Taylor Shellfish) and a few other places lost to the depths of my memories. But was we passed the floating shellfish rafts I just knew I’d been there before, and we HAD passed though this way via the ferry from Victoria to Port Townsend to Keystone. I looked online and I believe that the company attached to the floating rafts is Penn Cove Shellfish, a mussel grower. I long a go threw out the notes from that course, but now I feel nostalgic and wish I could look back. I’ll have to just go with “I think I may have visited here in another lifetime”.
We rode through Coupeville and then onto some side roads that wound through the forest and sometimes along the waterfront. I have a memory for about three road names before I have to stop and consult a map….but I realized after the first two turns that I didn’t need the map.
I have a colleague at work who is a distance cyclist. And I do mean distance, with a capital “D”. Over the years we’ve come to realize that we often ride the same roads, albeit at vastly different speeds. That came to light one year after Kirk and I did a three day ride down to the US, over SR20 past Concrete and into Winthrop, through Twisp and out to Grand Coulee, down and around through Leavenworth and Munroe, and then back home up Highway 9 with a little side trip along the South Skagit Highway. When I’d returned to work and we were chatting about our respective rides, turned out that we’d not only been on the same roads at the same time, but that we’d passed them on the highway (not a lot of tandem riders, fewer wearing sunflower yellow).
So on today’s ride, I realized I was passing a number of “Bicycle route” signs with arrows….so I started following them. Good choices and it meant I was able to navigate through a series of confusing backroads with no confusion and no requirements for backtracking.
Somewhere along the route we rounded a corner and a momma deer was on one side while her fawn, just losing its spots, was on the other. I also came down a hill as a bird started crossing…at first I thought it was a quail, but it was too large. I assume it was a grouse, but I’ve never seen a grouse pick up its speed the way that one did when it registered a motorcycle bearing down on it. Other wildlife included a bunny and a squirrel with survival skills unlike any I’ve seen in Vancouver…that thing literally sailed across the road!
We ran out of road at Clinton/Columbia Beach and got off for a badly needed stretch, before turning around and running the highway back to the turnoff for Fort Casey and the Keystone ferry, possibly not a smart choice as I knew I was running on close-to-fumes by then, but it was still a nice little sidebar and, as Kirk pointed out, at practically every location where a street has a light at a highway crossroads….there is a gas station.
Back on the highway, through Oak Harbour, a quick left onto Rosario Road and around the other point of land at Anacortes, before heading back off the Islands, through Edison, and back up Chuckanut into Fairhaven where we planned on dinner.
Note to self, Chuckanut Drive on a setting sun is not ideal. In fact, it’s blinding, and the road all but disappears on most tight corners. Also, in that blinding light, the thick patch of sand in the middle of the road that I hit yesterday, is invisible and/or just looks like a asphalt patch…until I hit it dead on while in a bit of a lean.
Ah well, what doesn’t take you down leaves you still upright.
Ride on.
Dinner in Fairhaven at a lovely little Italian cafe on the main road (Mambo Italian) for a wonderful plate of handmade ravioli filled with spinach and ricotta and drenched in a rosè sauce with basil, tomato, pine nuts, parmesan. Definitely recommend.
And then a run to the border on the I-5 to make up time and try to get home before it got pitch black. Still had to stop and swap out my visor for a clear shield, but it was a beautiful sunset once the sun wasn’t straight in our eyes.
And that’s what kinda of a Sunday it was, about 512’ish kilometres 😊
I tried to link the two tracks with a third that I made in google maps…but it kept jumping the points back to the start and back and adding 162 extra kilometres on and in the end I got annoyed and stopped being bothered to try to generate one continuous track, so here are three….two recorded and the middle one generated.