42 mi / 10.7 mph / 1600 ft. climbing
Home: Twanoh State Park hiker/biker campsite

We’ve sure never started a bike tour like this before. But then, we’ve sure never done a bike tour like this before. This time, we have gone full-nomad, disposing of most of our possessions, putting the rest in storage, and strapping the remaining ~120 lbs. of them to our two bikes. With no deadlines, our plan is wide-open and being figured out on-the-fly (a scary new way to do a bike tour for me). We’ve been telling everyone we expect to do this for 3 to 5 years. But who knows? Maybe we do it 6 months and get tired of it. Maybe we can’t get enough of the lifestyle and do it for 20 years. One broad goal is to hit all 50 (maybe 49?) of the United States, to see and feel our whole great country at bicycle pace. The plan for the first season is to head slowly south down the West Coast, bum around Southern California for the winter, and then head east along the southern border as the next year turns to spring. Next winter we hope to spend in opposite-hemisphere New Zealand, and beyond that, we’ll figure it out when we get to that point.

But before all that is simply getting started, which was wild. We sold our car less than 14 hours before we left on our bikes. We still had many loads of trash from our townhome to take to the dumpster, final things to pack (and walk to the storage unit in 2 suitcases), return our Internet, deposit the check for the car, and finally start riding at 1pm, to catch the 2:50pm ferry from downtown Seattle to Bremerton. As we rolled out of our empty garage (which was no longer “ours”), it seemed impossible that we were actually doing this thing, abandoning a life in a way few sane people would do, even though our brains have been getting adjusted to the idea for at least five years.

And wait, we have started a bike tour like this before, in fact, exactly like this! To make it slightly easier on ourselves, the route was the same one we took a year ago on our Olympic Loop tour. But the traffic was 3 times more insane. Apparently we were still in COVID times last year.

Rett was hurting pretty bad, due to doing a full day of exercise before even starting to ride, so we considered staying at a motel in Belfair, but in the end, she was willing to push on.

Back at Twanoh, we couldn’t get the site we had last year because that section of the campground was closed, but the friendly host talked us into taking the hiker/biker site right on the water (but right next to the road). He left the bathroom building unlocked for us, so we basically had our own personal bathrooms.

Sleep wasn’t easy with the loud road, and literal apples falling on the tent through the night, but eventually we got a small bit of rest.