Home again, home again, dinkety poo
Jul. 21st, 2013 10:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rebeccmeisterI can see how a person could come to like this whole bike-touring business.
We're back to typewritten posts around here. I want to make notes of today's adventures in my paper journal, for the sake of completion over there, but I'll give you a preview. I got up this morning and followed what became my usual morning ritual, deflating the Thermarest, rolling up the sleeping bag, donning bicycling clothing, brewing a mocha (with powdered milk and drinking chocolate from Theo's), cooking up some oats, then taking down the tent, packing things up, eating breakfast, and then finally hitting the road. This whole rigamarole took me around 2 hours every morning, at a comfortable pace. I got on the road today by 8:30 or so, and was winding around along some back roads outside of Elma when I had a sudden feeling that I'd missed a turn somewhere. I'd just come up a bit of a hill, so I headed back down the hill to check out an intersection. At the bottom, I encountered two other bike tourists, Susan and Roughie! The first two bike tourists I'd seen since that guy from the first day (I'm not counting the guy who was at Sol Duc because I never talked to him directly). S and R were on the final stretch of their bike tours across the US. They'd met up at some point along the way, and were favorable travel companions, so there they were. Apparently they'd had better luck finding accommodations in Elma the night before, at a youth hostel. They weren't going far for the day, just up the road to the next town for breakfast, as they wound down their tours across the US, so I joined them for that segment of the trip and then had a nice second breakfast with them at some small joint in town.
I was itching to get back on the road after that, so I did - straight up a big hill and onto more chipseal. By the way - I've renamed a few things as I've been riding. Chipseal is now known as SpeedSucker. Steep hills that take a long while to climb are Trudgers, but then if you make it up a Trudger you might have a Screamer down the other side. Anyway, I headed up the Trudger and onto another segment of SpeedSucker - pretty obnoxious stuff accompanied by big piles of gravel along the side of the road. The route wound its way along E Mason Lake Road West (now there's a head-scratcher). Mason Lake looks like the kind of place where wealthy people have their vacation homes and yachts. At one point, I heard a whole bunch of gunfire off in the woods, which made me decide I'd be glad to leave Mason Lake behind.
A somewhat hilly segment, Mason Lake. The departure from the area involved a good Screamer. Good Screamers always seem to have stop signs right at the bottom, for some reason. This road turned onto Highway 3, which runs along Hood Canal. I can't remember the last time I've been over by Hood Canal, but it was interesting to see another segment of Puget Sound.
The subsequent ride segments featured lots and lots of heavy traffic. Plus a few cars, thrown in for good measure, in case the traffic wasn't enough. I slogged along to the town of Belfair, and then missed a turn onto the Old Belfair Highway and instead headed up a big Trudger, still on Highway 3. At least the shoulder along that segment was reasonable. By the time I realized my error, I was at the top of the Trudger and didn't really feel like turning back, so I continued onward, up and down a series of hills, accompanied by hordes of vehicles all in a tremendous hurry to get to Bremerton. Not that I can blame them, but it would have been nice to have had a bit more peace and quiet.
At last, I found a road that cut away from Highway 3 and towards West Belfair Valley Road, just in time to reach the end of the road and the turn up onto Sherman Heights Road on the edge of Bremerton.
At this point, it became clear that I'd need to make a couple of revisions to my hill-naming vocabulary. Sherman Heights Road went one step beyond a Trudger, for on a Trudger, at least one can turn over the pedals in a reasonable fashion. Reasonable fashions went out the window on Sherman Heights and I had to turtle my way up (shifting my weight forward to keep the wheels on the road, mashing hard on the pedals while in the easiest of gears). Hence, this was a Turtling Trudger. Followed by something slightly more intense than a Screamer. A Bloody Screamer.
And thus, Bremerton continued: Turtling Trudgers and Bloody Screamers. Always with traffic lights or stop signs at the bottom of the Bloody Screamers. I'm just glad that the readjusted brakes and brake cables held up through it all.
Eventually, after one last Trudger, I reached the Bremerton ferry. Had some lunch, rode on board, admired some excellent, quite lovely scenery while someone else did the driving for a bit, and landed back in Seattle.
The fun wasn't quite over, but after a quick jaunt along the waterfront, another set of steep uphills, some zigs and zags, and a trip through Interlaken, I reached my parents' house at last.
And boy did dinner taste good, and boy did that shower feel amazing.
We're back to typewritten posts around here. I want to make notes of today's adventures in my paper journal, for the sake of completion over there, but I'll give you a preview. I got up this morning and followed what became my usual morning ritual, deflating the Thermarest, rolling up the sleeping bag, donning bicycling clothing, brewing a mocha (with powdered milk and drinking chocolate from Theo's), cooking up some oats, then taking down the tent, packing things up, eating breakfast, and then finally hitting the road. This whole rigamarole took me around 2 hours every morning, at a comfortable pace. I got on the road today by 8:30 or so, and was winding around along some back roads outside of Elma when I had a sudden feeling that I'd missed a turn somewhere. I'd just come up a bit of a hill, so I headed back down the hill to check out an intersection. At the bottom, I encountered two other bike tourists, Susan and Roughie! The first two bike tourists I'd seen since that guy from the first day (I'm not counting the guy who was at Sol Duc because I never talked to him directly). S and R were on the final stretch of their bike tours across the US. They'd met up at some point along the way, and were favorable travel companions, so there they were. Apparently they'd had better luck finding accommodations in Elma the night before, at a youth hostel. They weren't going far for the day, just up the road to the next town for breakfast, as they wound down their tours across the US, so I joined them for that segment of the trip and then had a nice second breakfast with them at some small joint in town.
I was itching to get back on the road after that, so I did - straight up a big hill and onto more chipseal. By the way - I've renamed a few things as I've been riding. Chipseal is now known as SpeedSucker. Steep hills that take a long while to climb are Trudgers, but then if you make it up a Trudger you might have a Screamer down the other side. Anyway, I headed up the Trudger and onto another segment of SpeedSucker - pretty obnoxious stuff accompanied by big piles of gravel along the side of the road. The route wound its way along E Mason Lake Road West (now there's a head-scratcher). Mason Lake looks like the kind of place where wealthy people have their vacation homes and yachts. At one point, I heard a whole bunch of gunfire off in the woods, which made me decide I'd be glad to leave Mason Lake behind.
A somewhat hilly segment, Mason Lake. The departure from the area involved a good Screamer. Good Screamers always seem to have stop signs right at the bottom, for some reason. This road turned onto Highway 3, which runs along Hood Canal. I can't remember the last time I've been over by Hood Canal, but it was interesting to see another segment of Puget Sound.
The subsequent ride segments featured lots and lots of heavy traffic. Plus a few cars, thrown in for good measure, in case the traffic wasn't enough. I slogged along to the town of Belfair, and then missed a turn onto the Old Belfair Highway and instead headed up a big Trudger, still on Highway 3. At least the shoulder along that segment was reasonable. By the time I realized my error, I was at the top of the Trudger and didn't really feel like turning back, so I continued onward, up and down a series of hills, accompanied by hordes of vehicles all in a tremendous hurry to get to Bremerton. Not that I can blame them, but it would have been nice to have had a bit more peace and quiet.
At last, I found a road that cut away from Highway 3 and towards West Belfair Valley Road, just in time to reach the end of the road and the turn up onto Sherman Heights Road on the edge of Bremerton.
At this point, it became clear that I'd need to make a couple of revisions to my hill-naming vocabulary. Sherman Heights Road went one step beyond a Trudger, for on a Trudger, at least one can turn over the pedals in a reasonable fashion. Reasonable fashions went out the window on Sherman Heights and I had to turtle my way up (shifting my weight forward to keep the wheels on the road, mashing hard on the pedals while in the easiest of gears). Hence, this was a Turtling Trudger. Followed by something slightly more intense than a Screamer. A Bloody Screamer.
And thus, Bremerton continued: Turtling Trudgers and Bloody Screamers. Always with traffic lights or stop signs at the bottom of the Bloody Screamers. I'm just glad that the readjusted brakes and brake cables held up through it all.
Eventually, after one last Trudger, I reached the Bremerton ferry. Had some lunch, rode on board, admired some excellent, quite lovely scenery while someone else did the driving for a bit, and landed back in Seattle.
The fun wasn't quite over, but after a quick jaunt along the waterfront, another set of steep uphills, some zigs and zags, and a trip through Interlaken, I reached my parents' house at last.
And boy did dinner taste good, and boy did that shower feel amazing.
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no subject
Date: 2013-07-22 03:38 am (UTC)And yeah, that shower afterwards is soooo nice.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-22 05:07 pm (UTC)I stole "turtling" from bikefag, though perhaps he stole it from someone else, too. That's a blog worth chuckling over for a while. :-)
I also named my left shifter/derailleur. I had a triple chainring, so shifting into the granny gear got renamed "flipping the bird." From there, I wound up calling the big ring, "setting the bird" and the middle ring was just "middle bird." So when I hit a Trudger, at a certain point I'd think to myself, "Okay, time to flip the bird" and then I'd settle in to a good trudge. Up until those Bremerton hills, at least. Man, that was some intense turtling, and today my feet are a bit sore from it all.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-23 05:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-22 11:39 am (UTC)