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.
At the first and only rest stop for the day, we were 25 miles in, but it was only 10am and I was hankering for a burger already. I was the first customer in the Dairy Queen in the bustling town of Belfair to get cheeseburgers, fried cheese curds, and an Oreo Blizzard for Cove and I to split. We were all young once, so it makes me happy to be able to treat the young route leaders now and then. They are so incredibly grateful, too. I also got to meet the DQ owner, who was an old man that gave me a hug, not for any real reason, it seemed, though. He was just very nice and glad to have me as a customer.
With only 40 miles to ride for the day before the 1:30pm ferry back to Seattle, we took plenty of time to hang out together at the Rest Stop. Once back on the bikes, we only had 15 miles to Bremerton where we’d catch the ferry. This part of the ride wasn’t very memorable for me, other than the very busy highway we had to ride on (thank goodness for a WIDE shoulder, despite plenty of debris to avoid a flat tire) to get to Bremerton. Route Leader Drew found a coffee shop and noticed the Admiral Theater was showcasing two of my favorite bands that night – The Ataris and MXPX!! I had been talking about MXPX’s song, “Move to Bremerton” all week, so it was super fun to see that they were playing! It was sold out and I’d be back in Seattle that evening anyway, but I would have loved to have seen MXPX play in their hometown. Before heading to the ferry, I spent $7.50 on a bubble tea that I promptly spilled, so my bike and my gloves were thoroughly sticky for the rest of the day. Ugh.
The ferry ride made me sleepy, but it seemed like a faster hour than the original ride across when we didn’t yet know much about each other. Instead, we enjoyed the views of Mt Rainier and savored each other’s company while we were all still together. Arriving in Seattle, we had to go through the extremely high traffic waterfront downtown pedestrian area and mostly had to walk our bikes. Eventually, it opened up to the Elliott Bay Trail before our very, very long and steep climb back to the church in Magnolia where we had started from a week ago. This was the climb I most dreaded all week, recalling how steep it was. My breathing was labored, but I didn’t have to stop at all, thankfully.