Washington State Ferry coming into Kingston

Bicycle Trip to Bainbridge Island & Kitsap Peninsula

hover over the pictures for additional notes

Monday, June 30, 2008

We started our trip leaving our home in Beaverton in the early morning. We rolled our bikes onto the MAX and we were started. Downtown Portland we rolled off this train and bicycled the mile or so to the Amtrak station, located in the grand old Union Station. Amtrak provides baggage car service (the only way to transport a bike on this intercity train) here in Portland and in downtown Seattle, so we are ok.

Four hours later we were in Seattle at King Street Station. (Across the tracks is another train station that is no longer in use.) King Street Station had a superficial interior remodeling in the early 1960’s. If I am guessing this date correctly, it was probably in honor of the 1962 World’s Fair, an event I attended when I was 15. A drop ceiling was installed at a 10–15 foot height, leaving another 20–30 feet of baroque concrete wreaths, etcetera, mostly hidden in the darkness above.

While almost every city in the US has cleaned up their classical old train station (if it hadn’t already been torn down or turned into a museum), Seattle seems to be waiting for the perfect moment, or perhaps a gift from Bill Gates or Paul Allen. However the building’s lower entrance (the only one in use at the moment) is a little gleaming gem of white marble with green, gold, silver and white mosaic bands made up of half inch tesseri. In color, tile size, and style these are nearly identical to the ones we saw at the old downtown Chicago Public Library, now restored to a performing arts center.

What I see here in King Street Station are much less elaborate and don’t seem to have all those fine literary quotes, but are still stunningly beautiful. They extend down the wall behind other mid–century improvements, but those exposed are clean and inspiring. It would seem that some peripheral restoration is taking place here and maybe what we saw was exploratory surgery on the ceiling. I hope. It would be nice to think that it is our modern age tolerance that leads to appreciation of a wide variety of styles, and not just a passing fancy for “all things old.” The old rough downtown of Seattle, where I once visited my mentally ill brother in a flop house hotel, is the first place I noticed the wholesale disguising of old buildings behind space–age, ultra–modern facades.

We rode our bikes to the Ferry Building — about 8 quick blocks — by riding toward the waterfront and then toward a rather imposing building a short distance north. (I don't have a photo of it). We bought tickets and stashed our bikes in their bike locker (which was a covered, less than apparent, unsecured room) while we bought food at Ivar’s open–air counter two doors down. With our food stuffed in our backpacks, we rode onto the ferry and followed the lead of other cyclists by using the ropes hanging from a railing to tie up our bikes. This was up at the far, soon to be “bow,” end of the boat. From this position and with cars snuggled up next to us, it appears we will be among the first to exit when we land in Winslow.

on deck -- container terminal is south of downtown

We ate on a sheltered portion of the deck, enjoying the warm cloudless sky as we made our 45 minute crossing. It would have been a picture perfect day, but moisture in the air made distant views uncharacteristically fuzzy.

It was too nice of a day to be inside. Many people commute to work on the Washington State Ferries and especially appreciate this option in the Wintertime. Here we are approaching the Winslow dock.

an inside lounge area on one of several decks

Leaving a ferry by bicycle was a first for us, but we were signaled to lead the way, and we rode up and off the ferry with a few hundred cars hot on our tail. We pulled over and walked our bikes on the sidewalk until we had oriented ourselves. The other cyclists didn’t do this of course, but I am not a strong cyclist, and also a bit timid — and Joe is patient.

In Winslow we bought a couple of maps and Joe some sunglasses, but neglected to buy food, etc. The moderate route outlined in the Bicycling the Puget Sound book took us south and out of town rapidly, and up and down hills in the usual way: up slowly; down terrifyingly fast. We didn’t even remember to fill our spare waterbottles on the ferry or in town and the weather was warm (always unseasonable in the Sound).

the shoreline here is full of houses, this is a rare viewpoint

At the end of Old Creosote Road. This is the southeast region of Bainbridge Island with views of the Seattle waterfront and the Space Needle.

one tiny example of the highly dissected coastline

It became apparent we would need to adjust our expectations after we talked to a local couple about available services nearby. We were on the Chilly Hilly bike route — a competitive run. We ate dinner at Lynwood Village near the south end of Bainbridge Island. There were two other places to get food in this little backwater. No place to spend the night unless you are equipped to camp, or know somebody who lives in one of the hundreds of palatial waterfront homes that line the shore. The islands of the Puget Sound are submerged mountains. A thick layer of moss–laden forest covers the rugged terrain to provide lots of nooks and crannies and privacy.

After dinner we limped back to Winslow on the wimpy road — one not even suggested in the Bicycle Adventures book. We took the first accommodations we found and collapsed in front of Fox TV. Later we watched some of Freespeech TV (Amy Goodman’s) War & Peace Report. This place has opening windows and, for us, a view into the woods.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

We rose late in this new Best Western 4–story hotel of “suites” and, for $125/night, enjoyed a marginal continental breakfast. We should have searched for the B&B that folks at last night’s restaurant recommended, and we would have, but they were divided in opinion as to whether it was still functioning or not.

At breakfast we ran into a family of Brits who actually live in France. They said they hoped to meet a friend who worked at Nike, only they pronounced it with a long I, silent E. We told them the E was pronounced, and they said “not in Europe.” Their children were clearly somewhere between amused and uncomfortable. Pronouncing it the way we were means “fuck” in Europe. It is good to learn something new every day!

We walked to the grocery store in the strip mall across the street. This is all new construction around here, unlike the cute little old downtown a half mile away. We were trying to find a map with contour lines so we could explore and travel without killing ourselves. A state highway a half block away was just what we wanted. Close to flat, it has a wide shoulder for much of the length of the island. The traffic was light most of the time; you could tell when a ferry had just dumped its load. We stopped twice to eat (once in a cemetery and once in a woods), and once to repair Joe’s shifter while we were on Bainbridge Island.

at the northern approach to Bainbridge Island

We rode across Agate Passage Bridge onto the mainland; here “Mainland” means we were on an arm of the Kitsap Peninusla. This is a highly dissected piece of land, heavily glaciated with maximal shoreline — a peninsula of peninsulas. Hood Canal, the body of water that forms this peninsula is an inverted “7” (or an L with a sharp bend in it). From this bridge we saw a typical beach for the Puget Sound — hard, small gravel, and narrow, and a long ways down a very steep slope. We continued on the primary road up the eastern shoreline without seeing the shore, or water of any kind except lakes and bogs. We turned off the highway onto Suquamish road to the town of the same name where Chief Sealth, the man for whom Seattle is named, is buried. This community has a tavern as well as a gravesite and a gravel beach.

at a busy intersection just north of the Agate Passage Bridge

From here were continued north to our Kingston turnoff. This is named NE West Kingston Road. This road finally had a nice wide shoulder again and definitely has benefited from fairly recent road cuts and widening. The road cuts are all shored up with the same decorative concrete–to–look–like–rocks. But nicely done. On one of these we spotted a jeep for sale which was almost falling off the top edge of the wall. After we stopped to admire its precarious charm we realized we were also at a bike repair shop. The friendly owner spent an hour between a steady stream of friends/customers trying to find just the right part for us in his boneyard. A Shimano shifter like Joe’s was not “in stock” and he finally installed a thumb shifter and charged us $8.

We soon arrived in Kingston (about 5:30 pm) and were directed to Smiley’s motel. It has a different name now, but we found it anyway and it is still friendly. We got a nice (off the road) upstairs room for $60, and bicycled back the half mile to town without our panniers for an excellent seafood dinner at Main Street Ale House, one of Kingston’s many restaurants. We took a short chilly walk around the waterfront after dinner before returning to our motel. We slept after reading the news magazines we’d brought with us. The plan had been to catch up on our reading and find out what was going on in the world. The news is: June 2008 is the worst stock market showing since the Great Depression.

We rode 20 miles today. (I said I was a wimp.) The photo on the left is one view of the ferry dock. On the right is Joe's bicycling glove hung on his handlebar, and the view down toward the ferry landing here in Kingston.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Hard to get up this morning. Everything hurts. We ate breakfast wraps at a sidewalk cafe‚ and watched the ferry load and sail. Later we went down for the next ferry. Every 45 minutes one leaves for the 30 minute crossing. The Washington State Ferries are a part of many islanders’ regular commutes. During the summer months, tourists (like us) overload the system and sometimes the wait can be quite long, though not for pedestrians or bicyclists of course. While waiting in line (again up in front of all the cars) we talked to one of the attendants. She told us: 1) The earlier ferry was 10 cars shy of full, and though more arrived, they weren’t let on. 2) Today’s low tide is a truly exceptional minus 3 and the big rigs (semi–trucks with trailers) can’t get up or down such a steep ramp because the transition angle is too sharp. So the ferry attendants have to insert little boosters under them. We got to watch this process. Then we saw that one car had a dead battery and had to be pushed off the ferry onto the landing dock. Apparently people leave their lights or radio turned on and run down their batteries on a regular basis.

After breakfast in old town, we heard the toot of an incoming ferry. I zoomed in for the shot I used at the top of this story. There is a big grassy park to the south of the terminal with this fine view of the enclosed pedestrian ramps. I don't remember these walk-aboard facilities as a child, but then we always drove. It was the 50's, and we were a large family of young children.

lashing down our bikes with a view of the interior of the lower car deck

In Kingston it is free to travel westbound direction for peds and bicyclists. As we boarded we admired the large and beautiful white sea anemones attached to the pilings. At least 12 inches in diameter and on equally long stems, they are visible at most low tides. Today’s exceptionally low tide gave a spectacular view of them.


Closer view. See the slimy blobs hanging from the pilings? Those are anemones too.

Pulling away from Kingston Ferry Dock.

Across the channel we landed in Edmonds. The beach here is a designated Wildlife Preserve and the sea life is protected. This is a rugged coastline and this is one of the few places I remember where the beach is accessible. Even if much of it at low tide is a wide expanse of slimy green seaweed–coated gravel. We parked our bikes in this little park. (I love the multiple meanings of the word "park" -- it is no doubt residual from when parks served as places to temporarily leave one's animals -- your transportation horse, or perhaps the herd of sheep you were moving to market.)

A park with landscaping and senior center where once Graybar Shipyard stood; it is

Looking back at the shiny new Edmonds Ferry Building. The glass-enclosed causeway is for foot passengers.

A minus 3 tide at hand, we walked down to the beach of my youth. Graybar Shipyard used to stand on this site (or at least very nearby) and I was here for a launching of a ship my dad had helped build when I was young. Over 55 years ago, when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old. It is amazing. And it was then too. I remember seeing men, shirtless and sweating under their work, bending large loops of metal into submarine nets.

A dozen or more people (lots, by Puget Sound standards) were mostly under the pier peering into the water, so we did too. We saw so many amazing things, some new to me, all new to Joe. The first thing I noticed though was the metal debris scattered around, reminding me of this site’s former life. But what I took to be hundreds of abandoned giant rubber gaskets from the same source, turned out to be moon snail egg collars. These snails have shells which are 4 inches in diameter; one was standing on its huge monopod foot spread out beneath it. Their egg collars have a diameter of 12 inches. [They were so common here, that even when I was told what they were, I neglected to take a proper picture of one. Below is the edge of one with a small ____ (slimy thing closed up anemone?) on it.]

We saw the giant white and orange sea anemones closed up, sea stars 14 inches in diameter feeding on barnacles and mussels, crabs, sea lettuce, pink and orange flat–growing sponges. Sea grass undulated with the wavelets and kelp floats tethered to wood pilings waited for the tide to raise them upward again. Flounders, those bottom fish with an eye that relocates itself to be on the top of the fish (to accommodate the fish’s desire to lie flat against the sandy sea floor) seemed plentiful. They seem to hide under the sand (or do they just blend perfectly with the background color?) and flit away instantly as I near them. Most were barely 3 inches long, but a few were twice that.

I wandered knee deep in icy water for a half hour before the chill took me back to shore. I showed Joe the squirting clams. That is, I showed him the little holes in the sand and how to get the buried clams to give away their hiding places. When I stomped my foot they would squirt in arcs of clam spit 18 inches across. Geoducks? (pronounced gooey–ducks) That is what we dug for at a nearby beach when I was little. Or was it Razor clams? Razor clams look like an old–fashioned straight razor — closed up; a flat little oblong shell with a brown leathery varnish–like coating.

The Edmonds Amtrak station is a half block away from this wildlife preserve and the senior center is right there on the waterfront. At the station we made reservations for the 5:30 train tonight from Seattle (the next train that goes through Edmonds and also on to Portland won’t be until tomorrow sometime) and then cajoled a nice woman at the senior center to print us up a piece of the Snohomish County Bike Map because nobody had a paper copy of any maps of the area. It took quite a while for the site to come up. She was very kind and I gave her $10.

This area would have been my stomping grounds as a teenager, had I remained a resident of Alderwood Manor a few more years. Instead, all these locations are places in my earliest memories: Waiting for Daddy’s train to come into the station one winter night in Edmonds after he’d been gone from home for months — I heard it coming and dashed out onto the narrow platform carrying my infant brother. It wasn’t Daddy’s train. It was a freight that was tearing past the rickety wooden platform at full speed, just a few feet away from me and my terrified shrieking and squirming little bundle.

We bicycled up State Hwy 103 that cuts diagonally southeast through Edmonds to the King County Line. This is a major thoroughfare, a major hill, no bike path, and a narrow sidewalk; you should not be surprised to hear that I pushed my heavily laden bike the entire mile. Once at the top of this hill I was wary about losing any elevation, so was reluctant to wander too far in search of the Interurban Bike Trail. After only a minor argument and some misinformation from a nice man in a strip mall vitamin store, we finally located the route that would sail us across the top of this rise — a lateral moraine no doubt — and down the long gentle slope to Lake Union, one of Seattle’s downtown lakes.

The Interurban was a passenger train system that ran from Seattle to Everett before I was born. My Dad rode it regularly when he was a child. In my childhood the tracks were gone and its abandoned bed, less than a mile from my house, was the pathway to adventures. I tagged along whenever my older brother and sister allowed me to partake of their explorations. After I moved, much of its right–of–way was buried under I–5, but in this area, within the Seattle City limits, it was spared.

Our route passed high above Echo Lake, where I first experienced the miracle of floating on water during swimming lessons. The dead man’s float. Some special summer program for children bussed here from a location along the highway a half mile or so from my house. I remember the day I wore my bathing suit under my pretty maple–leaf–print circle skirt, and, in so doing, forgot to bring along panties for the trip home. It has always been a tiny lake in a deep little hole; the five–story condos that now hug its shoreline would hide it almost completely, if not for the view from the bike path.

I kept wanting to stop and explore — the site of the old Playland Amusement Park which carries its own vivid memories — stuck on the top of the Ferris wheel and wanting down. Shouting to our father, he misunderstood Carolyn’s and my terror, and gave the man two more dimes so we could have an extra ride. I kept wanting to stop and explore, but this is a twenty mile stretch from Edmonds to Seattle, and the afternoon was wearing on. I remember as a child my parents decided to take us to Seattle for a movie one evening. Have I ever mentioned that we virtually always had a worn out old car? We had 5 flat tires along Aurora Blvd that night. I don’t remember if we ever made it to the theater.

We rode frantically through what is left of the Interurban, through the neighborhoods of the north end of Seattle. We rode it all the way to Green Lake and then down Fremont where the afternoon auto traffic had started to thicken. Just west of UW, this is a neighborhood full of urban bicyclists and we briefly found ourselves swept along in a flow reminiscent of Holland in 1982. We crossed the low (Fremont) bridge (under the high Aurora bridge — U.S. Hwy 99), turned onto the wrong road and, in spite of that, traveled along the west shore of Lake Union and across Denny Hill and into downtown. The correct road would have had a bike path. This road had not even a shoulder and the commuters were more polite than we deserved.

In our rush to make it from Edmonds to the train station for our 5:30 train, we now found ourselves coming down the long incline of 2nd Avenue in the left hand bike lane with a few minutes to spare. Since I was famished, and Joe knows I don’t do well without an afternoon snack, we decided to stop. We pulled over abruptly and parked our bikes at a fancy yuppie “after work” sort of bar where, in spite of our inelegant dress, we were soon served a pair of happy hour snacks and drinks in their outdoor dining courtyard. Outdoor dining in the northwest is always a treat to savor: warm evenings are not the norm; one has to be at the peak of summer and on the best of days. We were there just long enough to eat and soon jumped back on our bikes, edged out into the busy bike lane, and continued our gentle downhill ride through heavy rush hour traffic.



Typical scenery at a sidewalk cafe in downtown Seattle...↑→

We got to King Street Station with 2–3 minutes to spare.

where the Kingdome used to be -- across the street from King Street (train) Station

→ This is NOT King Street Station, but the arena nearby.

Dinner in the diner; nothing could be finer. BTW, that “finer” line refers to the relaxation of watching the scenery slide by, not the quality of the food.

Four hours later we rode our bikes from Union Station to the Max line a few blocks away. Such is good fortune when combined with the beauty and length of our summer days, we arrived home before it was totally dark!

in Portland, preparing to take the MAX home over the hill before dark

We arrived at Portland’s Union Station late on Wednesday, July 2.

A couple receipts:

Maps:

Guide book (that I can't recommend) and Maps: