My son Alex is on his spring break this week from Western Washington University, so I blocked out this week for a kayaking trip around Whidbey Island, hoping he might join me. He did join me, but not for a kayaking trip. Winter returned to the Northwest this week, with cold temperatures, rain, and worst of all for kayaking, plenty of wind. Plus we are in a Full Moon mode, with big tides. This mix might appeal to extreme kayakers, but I don't fall into that category.
Whidbey Island has some of the biggest tides and remotest stretches of water anywhere in Puget Sound. It is considerably more challenging, in that sense, than the trips I lead in Alaska's Tebenkof Bay Wilderness. It is nothing to mess with casually.
So instead we're doing a bike trip that I had planned for next month. Even this has turned out to be a challenge, but a good one. It's been months since I've spend any good one-on-one time with my son, and it has been very restorative for both of us. Yesterday we headed north up Whidbey Island and caught a ferry with our bikes over to Port Townsend on the Olympic Penninsula. Conditions weren't ideal, with temperatures in the forties, and plenty of rain and wind in the forecast - even snow as a possibility. As I've discovered so many times, if I go anyway it's rarely as bad as I expect, and often much better. We did face a cold, stiff wind for much of our ride the first day, which made it challenging, but the rain never materialized until a couple miles from our destination for the day. We made it to our home for the night just as the rain really started to crank up.
From Port Townsend we rode south on a hilly route along the shores of Admiralty Inlet through Hadlock and Port Ludlow, then crossed the floating bridge across Hood Canal to the Kitsap Penninsula. The wind really blasted us on the bridge with almost no shoulder and lots of traffic, so we were really glad to reach the other side. From there we rode south again along Hood Canal to the old fishing community of Poulsbo on Liberty Bay. Even though it was a modest day distance-wise for a trip like this - we peddled 43 miles - we were both pretty wasted from the effort of traveling most of the day into a headwind, and some pretty nasty hills we had to climb. I had a hard time keeping up with Alex, but I guess that's fair. I'm thirty five years older than him.
I spent most of the summers of my youth in a beach cabin on Liberty Bay near Poulsbo, so it is filled with images and deep memories from those wonderful summers of beach combing, fishing and tree-house building. A small commercial fishing port in its youth, settled by Norwegian immigrants, Poulsbo still has a bit of that flavor, but now primarily serves as a suburb of Seattle and as the home of a large nuclear submarine base on Hood Canal.
Today Alex will break off and ride across Bainbridge Island to catch a ferry to Seattle, and I will continue south through Bremerton and down Vashon Island to Tacoma. We'll see what the weather dishes up today, here in the blustery early Puget Sound spring.
So instead we're doing a bike trip that I had planned for next month. Even this has turned out to be a challenge, but a good one. It's been months since I've spend any good one-on-one time with my son, and it has been very restorative for both of us. Yesterday we headed north up Whidbey Island and caught a ferry with our bikes over to Port Townsend on the Olympic Penninsula. Conditions weren't ideal, with temperatures in the forties, and plenty of rain and wind in the forecast - even snow as a possibility. As I've discovered so many times, if I go anyway it's rarely as bad as I expect, and often much better. We did face a cold, stiff wind for much of our ride the first day, which made it challenging, but the rain never materialized until a couple miles from our destination for the day. We made it to our home for the night just as the rain really started to crank up.
From Port Townsend we rode south on a hilly route along the shores of Admiralty Inlet through Hadlock and Port Ludlow, then crossed the floating bridge across Hood Canal to the Kitsap Penninsula. The wind really blasted us on the bridge with almost no shoulder and lots of traffic, so we were really glad to reach the other side. From there we rode south again along Hood Canal to the old fishing community of Poulsbo on Liberty Bay. Even though it was a modest day distance-wise for a trip like this - we peddled 43 miles - we were both pretty wasted from the effort of traveling most of the day into a headwind, and some pretty nasty hills we had to climb. I had a hard time keeping up with Alex, but I guess that's fair. I'm thirty five years older than him.I spent most of the summers of my youth in a beach cabin on Liberty Bay near Poulsbo, so it is filled with images and deep memories from those wonderful summers of beach combing, fishing and tree-house building. A small commercial fishing port in its youth, settled by Norwegian immigrants, Poulsbo still has a bit of that flavor, but now primarily serves as a suburb of Seattle and as the home of a large nuclear submarine base on Hood Canal.Today Alex will break off and ride across Bainbridge Island to catch a ferry to Seattle, and I will continue south through Bremerton and down Vashon Island to Tacoma. We'll see what the weather dishes up today, here in the blustery early Puget Sound spring.
