39.2 mi / 10.2 mph / 1238 ft. climbing
Staying at Sequim Bay State Park Campground

Despite the brisk business at our campground’s restaurant, the kids visiting the petting zoo, and all the noisy animals from said zoo (who knew emus make a deep thrumming noise, like a guttering toilet?), the Emerald Valley Inn was the quietest and chillest night we’ve had the whole trip. And then you stroll over to the restaurant window, order up some breakfast (and 2nd breakfast of lemon-blueberry scones for the road), and stroll past the goats and chickens and donkey and emus back to your picnic table to eat. Hard to make bike camping fancier than that!

The day’s ride was almost exclusively on the trail part of the Olympic Discovery Trail, which took us through a really unique mix of places from Port Angeles through Sequim. Some parts are former railroad, but many are not, and must have been thin strips of land purchased from existing landowners. We biked mere feet away from the waters of Puget Sound, under dense forest canopies, across the middle of a farmer’s pastures, and over four of the coolest bike-trail bridges I’ve ever gone over (including one that required pushing the bikes back up the hill on the other side). It also included all sorts of annoying bike-trail sharp-turns, awkward road-crossings, and unclear signage, but Rett said that despite all those things that give her particular trouble, she’d take it again over the highway.

The final perfect bit of the trail is that it led directly into the backside of Sequim Bay State Park and the hiker/biker campsites that are just off the trail. This was the only night for which we didn’t have a reservation (the park had been fully-booked for Labor Day weekend for weeks), so we hoped there wouldn’t be a sudden surge of bike tourers heading out from Seattle on this Saturday and filling all the last-minute spots. Of the four parks with hiker/biker sites we’d be staying in, we’d seen zero of them occupied (the place we saw two biking couples was one that *didn’t* have hiker/biker sites), but would that suddenly change? Nope, we had our choice of the three spots, so got a huge, beautiful site far away from the rest of the full campground. Ideal.

Dinner was a rehydrated feast of “ramen”, which turned into more of a beef stew (with jerky, dehydrated veggies, and soba noodles cooked into the broth), and was none the worse for it! Exploring down to the bay, Rett thought she spotted an otter in the water, but the camera revealed it to be a seal! A new animal added to our list!

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 6th, 2020 at 1:23 pm and is filed under 2020 Bike Tour, bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.