Cycling Day 1 – 2 1/2
The warm and sunny days of Seattle seem far away now.
We tried to find a good kick-off point on the west side of Seattle to make us feel like we were at the starting line. So we found a nice little park that looked to be on the coast on Google Maps. Well this “park” was at the bottom of this incredibly curvy and steep hill. So our “start” was a 6 mph climb up this behemoth of a hill. We get to the top, and are already feeling a bit gassed. “Well only 95 more miles to go today!” Apparently, if you wiped all of the houses off of Seattle, all that would be left are seven GIANT hills. Riding through the streets of Seattle and its hills prepared us for the journey we were about to take on.
Heading out of Seattle, there is a fantastic trail called the Inter Urban trail. 
It’s as straight as an arrow, pointing directly south, paved, no one on it, and gorgeous views wherever you turn your head. This was the beginning of seeing the luscious lands of the northwest. It was a very new feeling thinking that “I’m going to be doing this nearly every day for the next 6 months,” but then be able to look around at what you are seeing and be excited for EVERYTHING despite the pain and chafing that will surely occur.
We broke for lunch at around 4, which is obviously, quite late for lunch. This would be a recurring “issue” for us in the first few days. We aren’t very good at our timing yet. We’re learning. We continually get a late start (it’s a bit more difficult getting 5 people fed and ready in the morning) and take more breaks than we should (flat tires, water breaks, refueling breaks, photo breaks, high-five breaks). But we’ll get better.
The rest of the ride was bike lanes through multiple small towns of Washington. The highways/streets/trails of this part of the ride were incredibly straight, with a mountain of trees on either side. We don’t have trees like this in Colorado.
But, not going to lie, it felt good to see that big green behemoth when we finally pulled into the town of Chehalis as night had already fallen. We parked in the parking lot of a Napa Auto Parts store, made about 16 pounds of food, ate it all, and went to bed. (We have a rule, that I don’t think will be tough to uphold, that there are “no leftovers.” Burning 5,000+ calories a day, we each have to eat A TON!)
We all had our alarms set for 7AM, but no matter, at 6:59 AM we had a more “natural” alarm. We hear a loud pounding on the driver’s side door followed by… “Dis is a professional parking lot! You’re gonna have to move your rig out of here cause we already have people shoring up!”
Basically, some guy was pissed cause we parked a little bit into his lot. Having a 27 ft RV plus another 13 ft added on with a trailer is, well, obtrusive.
The ride today was designed to get us to the coast as fast as we could. A trail, called the Willapa Hills Trail. 56 miles of sheer beauty! It started out great, just like the Inter Urban trail. Straight, paved, no one on it, gorgeous views. We could get used to biking up here! But then suddenly, it turned into this bridge that had no business even being a bridge.
We picked up our bikes and carried them across the bridge, tiptoeing in our cycling cleats across the decayed beams that were supposedly holding this bridge together. We figured it was just a minor obstacle that would eventually lead to more paved road… not so fast. Gravel gravel gravely gravel. We tried toughing it out on the gravel for a bit but it led to nothing going nowhere. Enough was enough, we were done with the Willapa Hills Trail.
So we headed out to the secondary highway, Highway 6, which basically led us in a curvy route through the “rainforest.” And it was raining in the rainforest, the entire time.
Our first real taste of the Pacific Northwest weather we had heard so much about. We gutted it out to make it to the town of Raymond, plop down at a pizza joint called Patrizio’s and eat our hearts out to try and refill up on 3,000 calories. Extra-Large, also known as Steve Lunn, ate most of our shared large pizza, and even had the daily special (half-sandwich and a bowl of soup). He nearly passed out at the table as all of the blood ran from his legs to his stomach. We felt warm again and were ready to jump onto the 101 till the end of time.