Monday, August 2, two days before I launch segment one

The drive to the peninsula takes a while, so we stopped in Pendleton Oregon for the evening.
When I was planning this trip I looked into shipping my bicycle to Seattle and taking a shuttle to Neah Bay. I found I could fly a typical Utah polygamist family to Seattle for the cost of flying my equipment on any airline! Over-sized baggage!
So I decided to transport by car, ride segment one--Olympic peninsula and Whidbey Island--then store the bike at a bike shop and drive back to Utah. Segment 2, I will fly to Seattle and take a shuttle to the town where I've left my equipment.  Even though I get profiled with some frequency, at airports, it will be cheaper and easier to fly back and forth to SLC between segments. Maybe I can wear biking shorts and a helmet through security. Wonder what would happen then? Kind of a scary thought both for them and for me.

I'm very anxious to get to Neah Bay so I can get on the road. Of course it isn't without some uncertainty. How far will I get? Weather? Traffic? Ambushed by Sasquatch in the Cascades?

On the road today I was thinking about how I do things. In reflection (from the perspective of hind-sight driven wisdom) it occurred to me that I've done things backwards most of my life, maybe made them harder than they had to be. For example I'm more fit now than I probably ever have been. Had I stayed fit throughout my life staying fit now would have been much easier. And in a sane world I would have attempted this bicycle trip when I was twenty not now when I'm four decades older. The difference is that this time I've thought it through. When I was twenty I would have probably stolen a bicycle and ridden away from the scene instead of planning a direction and ended up in the closest hoosegow. There is precedence for this.

When I was a kid, growing up in Colorado (I will attach the entire story to another page of this blog later) I always dreamed of seeing the ocean. My agüelo (grandfather in the Judea/Spanish we spoke in my home) told me stories about crossing the Atlantic to get to the killing fields of Belgium, during WWI. I could imagine the smell of sea air, the wind, the call of sea birds. Of course I ignored his story that almost everyone, including the sailors on his transport ship, spent hours leaning over the railing,--sea-sick--wishing that either the seas would calm or they would die.
So, I ran off from home when I was sixteen, stole my parents 1959 Ford sedan, loaded it with the few books (probably also stolen) and the other pair of jeans I owned, my dog, and I headed for the ocean. I had visions of working on a junk steamer; my dog and I having many adventures, meeting the salty characters from Steinbeck, Hemingway, maybe even left over seafarers from the Iliad.
SW Colorado is significantly closer to the Pacific than the Atlantic nes't pas? So, I jumped in the purloined Ford, pumped it twice, fired that 352 cu in V-8 up and headed as straight as I could to the east. Somewhere just shy of the Atlantic, on the banks of the Savanna river just outside of Augusta Georgia, my dog and I were arrested for vagrancy. We were sentenced to a month in a labor camp but a local dairy farmer bought out my sentence and I worked on his dairy for a month.

So, having started off my life kinda backwards and done many things in reverse, now, even though it wouldn't hurt if I were a few decades younger, I'm going to start on the Pacific coast and ride east.


Tomorrow: Neah Bay! According to the atlas I bought (I quit stealing when I got back to Colorado from Georgia) this little village is on the Pacific.