Wow. It’s our final day of the 2024 Bike the US for MS Olympic Peninsula ride already. Meeting everyone a week ago and building my bike seems more like a month ago, yet, also only a couple of days. Time is very strange on these trips.
I’m writing this as I sit in the airport at Dulles waiting for my sister to very kindly pick me up on Sunday morning (June 30). I’m groggy and my brain is foggy from the hour I slept on the plane. Leaving Seattle feels like a week ago already.
Let’s go back to the last day of the ride, yesterday. It’s Saturday morning, so everything about the day and ride would involve more people on the roads and sidewalks. Unlike how I usually ride on these trips (which is solo), for the most part, I rode with other people all week. This day was no exception. Part of the reason is that I still use the paper maps, while everyone else uses the GPX files on a bike computer. I haven’t been ready to spend the money on a bike computer, but it does change/hamper things for me if I need to stop and look at the map. I’m a little old school in that way and enjoy reading the map, though.
I stayed in the gym with the oldest cyclists in the group who didn’t want to bother setting up our tents. The lights only came on a few times, so I slept some, but not as well as the day I had taken off from riding, hmm.
We enjoyed our last camp breakfast together before everyone headed out on the clear, sunny day that would surely get warm. On this trip, warm means anything above 70°F, since it’s typically been in the 50s/60s and rainy. I’ve discovered that partly sunny temps in the 60s is my preferred Goldie Locks weather for riding – not too hot, not too cold.
Leaving Olympic Middle School around 8:30am, Route Leader Cove led the way. We had a big group and we had nearly everyone in our group, except for the Davies family and Todd B., who had left a bit earlier. We worked our way out of Shelton, and, thankfully, not down the curvy road with the angry motorists. We eventually got back out onto rural roads and stopped right away at a road side coffee shack (we need more of these on the East Coast!!) and for scenic photos whenever I shouted that I wanted a photo – by Mason Lake, Oakland Bay, or with views of what seemed to logically be Mount Baker, across Puget Sound. We bombed down an incredibly steep road that almost scared me enough to use my brakes, which I did need at the bottom, thanks to an abrupt Stop sign to turn onto busy State Route 106. A number of trucks passed and one even “coal rolled” one of our cyclists for no reason other than to be mean. It's amazing how mean people can be to cyclists, but we make sure to never retaliate in order to protect the organization and avoid any sort of escalation. We ride defensively and obey the signs, but I know there are cyclists out there that don’t ride that way and make the cycling community look bad.
