Orcas 1, Cy 0

Hey, Orcas is hilly! You can file this island's hills under "Humanity, Oh the." It's 15 miles from the ferry dock to Moran State Park. I made it. Barely. And now I can barely walk (partially because I just sat down in THE comfiest chair EVER at the Rosario Resort).

On Sunday at 12:05 I left my car behind and hopped a ferry. Ferries rock.


Here's my bike all decked out on the deck.


Here's all the scenery I'd been hoping for, right before I unloaded everything to fix my first flat. Riding about 300 yards behind me up the Hills of Humanity (Oh the) was a senior citizen riding to go see about a mint 1946 Buick. He offered to help in a number of ways and then we started chatting. Of course he's a surgeon (plastics of the hand and also of the head & neck, which you can't really do any more without triple-boarding). He'd heard of Nova and he said I should expect no trouble as a DO. That's nice.


Here's a horse for Melissa. What a beauty. The horse was pretty too.


This is the road to the town of Eastsound, from where I stopped for lunch. Peanut butter pitas. I stopped in Eastsound at a bike store to borrow some air. The guy who owns the bike store was very helpful. My frame pump sucks.


After Eastsound, things got dicey. It was getting close to 5 pm, my legs were cramping, and the hills got REALLY intense. I was worried about it getting dark before I got to Moran State Park, I was worried about losing consciousness and falling over into the path of a truck, and I was scoping the side of the road for good trespassing opportunities. I started hiking up the hills, and riding down. At least it felt like I was making progress. I was moving so slowly that a deer on the other side of the road, maybe 25 feet away, didn't stop chewing and watched me go by. I took a picture but it didn't come out, nor did it bother the deer.

Finally I got to Moran State Park and then I had to keep riding more hills to the one open area of campsites. It was worth it.


Camping rocks. Cooking was really fun - I made miso soup with green beans and rice, and had strawberries and tea for dessert. Sleeping was trouble - I figured out in the morning that I was supposed to close the valve on my self-inflating mattress. Erf. Here's an otter that was goofing off while I ate breakfast. Look closely: it's the black bump in the middle of the shot.


Here's what my site looked like just before I tore everything down.


And here's the obligatory takeoff photo.


From there, I bagged on further camping because I knew I could barely ride the 1.25 miles to the hill down to Rosario. I'm staying here tonight, and I'll get a shuttle back to the ferry in the morning. I feel exactly like I used to feel after a triathlon: like I'm not ready to do another one yet.

OK, so the concept that I set out to prove was half proven. Everything about bike touring is fun, except for my fitness level. Good to know. Bike touring across the US is more ballsy than I think I want to be at this point - it could be done, but the first month would be really excruciating, day after day. I don't think I'm up for excruciating. So I think I'm going to stay Seattle-bound until I leave in July for school, and harass everybody I know to go workout with me. New goal: make it to the top of Mt. Si before I leave.

The fundamental problem with solo travel

I meant to leave Thursday afternoon for my Inaugural Proof of Concept Orcas Island Pre-World Tour Bike Camping trip. Later, I meant to leave Friday morning. Then Saturday morning. Now it's Saturday afternoon, and I have dinner plans. So the current plan is to leave tomorrow morning. Having a plane to catch and a traveling companion's wrath to avoid makes departures much more straightforward.

This trip was going to be a week long, riding from my house up Whidbey Island to Anacortes, then taking a ferry to one island after another, and riding back home down Whidbey again. For months I've been acquiring gear, reading bike touring memoirs and blogs, and finding out that really everybody knows somebody who's done bike touring. I've been ramping up to take off on this IP of COIPWTBC trip for months, clearing my calendar, making sure all the ducks are in a row. And riding my bike? A bit.

Now the trip will be at most two and a half days, because I have to be back Tuesday. I'd feel like a chump, but a couple things happened while I was procrastinating. First, a big med school drama (affecting somebody else) went down on Friday, and that's a don't miss. Second, just now at REI, I ran into my school buddy Josh, who I worked with at Harborview for a long time, and whose family I'd heard everything about but had yet to meet until today. That's a don't miss. Josh has been a huge inspiration to me with his humor-filled professionalism and dedication to detail, and it would have sucked to leave Seattle without any contact.

Meanwhile, I have my bike all tricked out with racks and panniers and horns, and I've practiced getting my tent set up while Eunice laughs at me, and I've practiced starting my insanely cool MSR stove, and I have my ubiquitous well-formatted spreadsheet of what all I need to bring and which pannier it goes in. I really need to finish getting ready to go this afternoon, so that I can get an early start tomorrow. Hmm, I think I'll go sit in the lovely new sun for a bit...