Days 1 and 2

I started out around 11am, making my way through Seattle to the ferry terminal. It was $9 to cross, and the lady helpfully told me that it’d be free on the way back. I was woefully early, by about 40 minutes, and ended up having my socks bored of by a man who didn’t understand social cues. I’d forgotten how much I love being on the water; it’s so serene. The crossing was a peaceful hour or so, and I wandered around watching the gulls swoop and soar close to the ship. The tollboth lady had given me a 50 cent piece in my change. I’ve never seen one before.

The ferry to Bremerton is just stunning. I’ve spent at least a year cumulatively in Seattle, and yet I’d never really seen the best parts of the Sound.

The ride to the Belfair State Campground was mostly lovely, except for a busy section of fast road where I got something in my eye. The subsequent irritation had me doing all sorts of silly things such as holding the eyelid back a bit or sort of squinting with my head to one side to see where I was going. It cleared itself up after a couple of hours.

I arrived around 2:30 or 3 which felt super early, but by the time I’d put up my camp, cooked, eaten, cleaned and packed stuff away for the night, I had perhaps an hour of reading before it got too dark to see.

Sleeping in a tent in a forest is weird. At first I was too hot, then I was too cold, then I was bundling up the fabric around my neck to keep the heat in, then I was just a little chilly again. I was near a babbling brook and a road, so the white noise of the river was punctuated occasionally by what sounded like motorcycles zooming past.

The next day, on the road, I found that I was wrong: instead, it seems the area was full of trucks with what sounded like damaged two-stroke engines. The Hood Canal was just spectacular, and I spent the first half hour marvelling at it before coming to my turn, which had a similar name to the one on the map. Perhaps I should have printed those errata.

Shortly thereafter I met a rather territorial golden retriever. I was riding down the road when he started barking, running quite a distance from where he had started in my direction. I stopped. Turned on the helmet camera. Pulled out my mace. He must have been 40, 50 meters from me, and neither of us were moving. It was a standoff, dog barking like crazy, me terrified I’d be bitten. I didn’t have too many options and nobody had come to rein the dog in, so I started to proceed again. At this point I had apparently shown my dominance, because he ran backwards and hid behind a bush!

Shelton is a cute little town. They’ve got an old steam locomotive on some old tracks in the center of town. I found a diner where I got called “sweetie” a lot, and started asking friends in Olympia if they had somewhere for me to stay. If not, I was going to proceed to Elma per the cycle map. As it happens, I did find a friend to host me, and so I got on 101 south.

Riding on the shoulder of a freeway wasn’t as bad as I’d anticipated, although perhaps that was because it was a small one with two lanes going nowhere big. Forty minutes to an hour of this, and I saw something I really didn’t want to see: the mile marker one higher than the one I was meant to turn at. Google refused to give me any route to Olympia that didn’t involve riding the wrong way back down the shoulder, but fortunately I was able to improvise.

I’m in Olympia now, probably 50 or 55 miles from where I started. I’m glad I finally began this trip.