An inauspicious beginning. Separated and lost from each other in the first five minutes. How did that happen? Assumptions; they’ll do it every time. I thought. He thought. And then we were instantly enveloped in a maze of possibilities. Luckily though without credit, we came upon one another in relatively short order and after a fruitless assignment of blame to the other and no new information we got underway. We had bike paths for a while - a lulling experience that left us ill prepared for the main highway out of Anacortes. Here we hit traffic enough to call into question our survival and noise enough to deafen us. Surviving that, we had 25 miles of rural riding through crop land bordering the bay. Piece of cake - tailwind and flat. Good idea this trip, knowing all the while this interlude like all others was just interlude and ahead lay a reckoning.
By evening we were in River City Campground, Sedro Woolley, Washington, best known, derided and revered for the construction of logging equipment that has cleared the Northwest. There by the Skagit River we spent our first night on the road and met a fellow rider - a woman pulling a buggy with a dog in it and with panniers for a total of 215 pounds of weight. That’s when we first realized our inadequacy and came to feel that perhaps we didn’t have accurate bicycle self-awareness. She made us feel puny, worse than the kid that got the sand kicked in his face at the beach until he learned to play the piano.
We slept well, though, and lived to face the day as there is little choice for any of us who make it through whatever night.
Pat Sewell
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