{"id":1513,"date":"2020-08-31T20:50:52","date_gmt":"2020-09-01T02:50:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/?p=1513"},"modified":"2021-03-19T16:16:48","modified_gmt":"2021-03-19T22:16:48","slug":"day-1-redmond-wa-to-belfair-wa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/blog\/2020\/08\/31\/day-1-redmond-wa-to-belfair-wa\/","title":{"rendered":"Day 1: Redmond, WA to Belfair, WA"},"content":{"rendered":"

41.5 mi \/ 11.04 mph \/ 1709 ft. climbing<\/strong>
Staying at Twanoh State Park<\/p>\n

Hola amigos! I know it’s been a long time since I\u2019ve rapped at ya, but we’ve been hatching plans. Namely, we just started a bike tour! Our first in 4 years. It\u2019s just 8 days of riding, so nothing super-epic, but hopefully long enough to feel like a vacation and \u201cgetting away\u201d from the abnormally small bubble into which our lives have been collapsed for the last 6 months of this COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n

Only after I\u2019d completed the planning for this trip did I realize that previous-Neil would have never wasted his time on a mere 1-week bike tour. I\u2019ve done a few 4-weekers, and a few 2-weekers, but always considered the latter to be the absolute minimum. So I was momentarily confused as to why I\u2019d just screwed up so royally and planned a dumb 1-week trip. Then I realized that my previous minimum-requirements had been due to the high-cost of the \u201cbuy-in\u201d. If riding out your front door from Chicago, by the time you get out of the suburbs and exurbs, you get a couple of days of cornfields before you have to turn around. Or if you take a train or a plane somewhere more majestic, that\u2019s half your trip spent traveling with something that\u2019s not your bike.<\/p>\n

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Rett riding across Lake Washington on the SR520 floating bridge<\/p><\/div>\n

But here, from the eastern suburbs of Seattle, we can ride 40 miles (with an hour-long ferry ride in the middle) and end up at one of the most beautiful campsites I\u2019ve ever been in. We\u2019re at Twanoh State Park, surrounded by some mind-bending old-growth behemoths, on the Hood Canal (a dead-end lobe of Puget Sound), and are set to do a clockwise loop of the Olympic Peninsula. Our route will be marking out the numbers on the face of the clock, and the Olympic Mountains (and the National Park of the same name) will be filling the center of the clock face.<\/p>\n

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All loaded up!<\/p><\/div>\n

We took a mostly-familiar ride from our front door in Redmond, across Lake Washington, and into Seattle-proper for the first time since COVID began. Rett, with new panniers, and her relatively new bike (Claire), did a great job of urban navigation and to the downtown ferry dock. We had our packed-sandwich lunch on the ferry at an every-other distanced table during the hour-long crossing to Bremerton. Rolled into camp around 4pm for one of the least-stressful days of bike touring we\u2019ve done together.<\/p>\n

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The fairly lame Seattle skyline seen from the ferry<\/p><\/div>\n

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A pretty rough-looking aircraft carrier at the Bremerton Naval Base (though even in this state, it seemed more like a huge office building sitting in the water than a boat).<\/p><\/div>\n

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Our old-growth campsite at Twanoh State Park<\/p><\/div>\n

And then, we had pizza for dinner! Sunday pizza! (a Gregie family tradition!) Rett\u2019s taken a strong interest in camp cooking, and it\u2019s been awesome. Pizza, on a backpacking stove, fueled with gasoline, essentially from scratch. Well, not the dough, but fresh-chopped garlic, tomato paste, cheese, pepperoni, spices, and some wizardry with adding steam to the frying pan to heat the topside and melt the cheese. And a fresh spinach salad on the side! And with those giant trees watching us, and a creek burbling right below. A guy walking on the almost-invisible trail on the slope on the other side of the creek stopped and said \u201cwow, you guys have a great site there!\u201d which is the first time I think I\u2019ve ever heard that from a passer-by. If only he knew what we were eating too!<\/p>\n

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Sunday Pizza Dinner!<\/p><\/div>\n

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Another view of the giants (note the wine bottle in the base of the tree for scale!)<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

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We finished with a stroll down to the water, with the mobs of Sunday-afternoon beach-goers we saw on the way in now all cleared out leaving mostly just us, the millions of barnacle-covered shells, and the blue-tinged Twilight-like twilight saturating the air.<\/p>\n

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At Hood Canal<\/p><\/div>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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At Hood Canal<\/p><\/div>\n

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At Hood Canal<\/p><\/div>\n

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One of the millions of wild shell-formations<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

41.5 mi \/ 11.04 mph \/ 1709 ft. climbingStaying at Twanoh State Park Hola amigos! I know it’s been a long time since I\u2019ve rapped at ya, but we’ve been hatching plans. Namely, we just started a bike tour! Our first in 4 years. It\u2019s just 8 days of riding, so nothing super-epic, but hopefully […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2020-bike-tour","category-bike"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1513"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1561,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513\/revisions\/1561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}