Day 1 (Friday 10-21-2011): Seattle to a bike trail

Departure at the I-90 bridge

My first post about my experience cycling across the country! I'm not typing most of these posts the day that they happen so I'm not sure how that changes the reading experience as events and experiences have a chance to mellow, sink in, and perhaps take on a different meaning or tone in my memory as compared to typing them day off. Without constant internet access and only a three to four hour battery life, I mainly just use my laptop when I'm at some place that has internet access, a power outlet, and I have time to kill (ie, not during daylight hours).

So Friday morning I got up, bid farewell to Joel, and drove over to Rebecca's parent's place to drop off Goran's car. She met me there and was nice enough to drive me back over to the I-90 bridge where there is a bike path that would mark the start of my journey. By the time I packed everything away and got it loaded onto my bike, I didn't actually get rolling until close to 11. My goal was to bike around 130 miles to Ellensburg, WA where I would stay with a Warmshowers host. Warmshowers is a touring cycling resource where other tourists host people out on the road. It would have been a fairly ambitious ride to begin with, but the late start was making things a little dicey trying to make it at a reasonable hour without too much night riding. I figured biking close to 130 miles the previous weekend up to NYC with just one pannier at a pretty relaxed and easy pace was a good judge of what I could do on a fully loaded bike. How wrong I was...

Outskirts of Seattle

Thanks Google/Garmin...

The weather was a little dreary, but the temperature was quite nice – in the mid 50s. Once I crossed the bridge and started looking at my directions, I realized that I had actually mapped out a different route that had headed south instead of crossing the bridge! Oops. Off to a great start already. I figured if I headed south east everything would sort itself out eventually and it did. I biked along a network of paths that paralleled and went under I-90 for a ways, then headed south along the eastern shore of Lake Washington until I met up with my original course near Renton. A few closely spaced roads and over and underpasses took me on an enjoyable little detour into a closed neighborhood at the top of a fifteen to twenty percent grade! Take that Manayunk!

Fall colors

Once back on track, I was making good progress on the paved Cedar River Trail until my course directed me to get off of it. I spent a good ten minutes at a series of intersections trying to figure out what way my Garmin was telling me to head as the Google derived course didn't exactly mate up perfectly with the actual layout of the roads. Navigation didn't get too much better after this. Continuing down some lightly traveled roads, I came across my next turn. Ignoring the sign that said 'Dead End' as I had no other alternative maps and I run into that sign all the time in Philadelphia when heading down River Road (which only entails skirting around a gate meant to prevent automobile through traffic), I headed a few miles down a rough chip-sealed road that was mainly ascending.

It was indeed a dead end...

Come to find out, it truly was a dead end. No gate blocking off another half of the road, no path off to the side, nothing. Back I went. I figured heading north would bring me back to I-90 where if worse came to worse, I could just bike along the shoulder like I have read that many people do to get over the Cascades from Seattle via bicycle. Instead of taking 18 East which looked like it may have been a fairly busy highway, I decided to try my luck heading east on a side road. It ended up that this side road climbed Tiger Mountain before heading back down to the same road that I started from! Frustrated, I continued north-west on the semi-main road that I was on after I discovered the dead end and came across the town of Issaquah where I went to the library to map out an alternative route. Come to find out, I was able to jump onto a trail that paralleled I-90. I rode this for about an hour or so before calling it a day and pitching my tent alongside the trail.