Day 11: Serendipity (Potlatch SP to Twin Harbors SP)

From the moment I woke up to get ready to the time I broke down my tent and packed up, I was dreading the ride for today.  I was annoyed with the fact that my tent was covered in slug slime from nights before and Sang Hyun was already packed up, waiting for me to get my act together.  I knew it was going to be a long day.  In fact, the longest day of our ride with the extensive amount of mileage we were to cover within the middle part of the state all the way to the Pacific Ocean before we start our journey southward towards San Francisco.  I was not feeling it.

We started the morning riding through what looked liked a war zone of fireworks left on the side of the road.  Some of these things looked professional and definitely would be illegal in California, but in the Indian reservation land, they were lighting them up like bombs over night.  Luckily, I had my ear plugs which helped calm my nerves and gave me some recovery time in the sleeping bag.  We rode about 10 miles through the Hood Canal until we reached a town call Shelton.  From that point on, the 101 highway became a 2 lane freeway.  The good: we had very wide shoulders to ride in.  The bad: Cars were whizzing by at an unnerving speed that we weren’t used to.  The ugly: I still wasn’t feeling it with my left knee starting to ache.

We rolled on until we reached an exit which directed us to get on the 108 highway towards McCleary.  We stopped by a gas station to use the facilities and buy snacks.  We were uncomfortably stared at by dudes with lifted pick up trucks, beards, tattoos, and camouflage clothing.  We quickly got out of there as soon as we picked up some food and saw 3 other guys riding ahead of us.  We rode a good distance until they pulled to the side to put on rain gear.  We stopped and chatted about their trip which was going to take them to Mexico.  They were from Santa Barbara and had ridden the San Juan Islands instead of the Vancouver side of things like we did.  We said good bye and went ahead of the trio.

We stopped at McCleary for our 2nd breakfast / lunch.  We enjoyed our meals and saw one of the trio ride into town without his panniers and then the other 2 arrived in the back of a pick up truck 10 minutes later.  After we finished our meal, we both went to investigate and discovered that one of their bike’s chain had broken and their chain breaking tool also broke, so he was dead in the water.  They sent the first guy to go fetch a new chain from a bike store in another town ahead.  We offered to help, but they had left the broken chain on the side of the road a few miles back.

We continued on to other towns like Elma, Satsop, and Montesano.  We entered and left each town at various points to ride the highway, which I’ve provided the positive and negatives earlier. We were also privileged to see the locals in their natural habitat of each town.  At Satop, the main bridge was closed, so we turned back around and got back onto the highway.  We even caught a glimpse of the abandoned nuclear power plant in the distance – very eery just seeing the double cylindrical stacks standing in the middle of the mountain of forests.

At the Wynoochee River Bridge, the book instructed us to wait for passing drivers to go before attempting our chance.  It was nerve-racking as the speeds at that point was your typical freeway speed, so both Sang Hyun and I hightailed it out of there as fast as possible.  We eventually got to town of Aberdeen whose tag line read, “Come As You Are” (Nirvana-much?).  The entrance of the town from the east was densely populated with traffic and had huge strip malls with the likes of Big 5, Dairy Queen, McDonalds, and Walmart.  We needed fuel so we stopped by Big 5 to buy 2 canisters for our stove (generic brand, not Jetboil).  We then had some ice cream and saw 2 female bicycle tourists brave the traffic and continued on through the town.  Aberdeen is one of these towns where people pass by when they are enroute to either the beach or back into the Seattle metropolitan area.  Lots of traffic was on the road as we navigated over the several drawbridges.

We made it over to the South end of the city which lead us West towards the Pacific Ocean.  We rode another 20 miles down the 105 highway, passing the town of Markham, the home of Ocean Spray and several narrow bridges with no shoulders and steep ascents (why would one design it that way?).  We finally got into camp close to 6PM and was the first bikers at the hiker / biker area.

There were 4 sites available.  A French family came in and a couple touring from Seattle occupied the sites across ours.  I went to shower and when I came back, the site next to ours was occupied by the 2 female cyclists who we saw at Aberdeen.  I was talking to one of them who I thought looked familiar, but I waited for our introductions to be sure.  She introduced herself as Victoria, and I immediately asked, “Are you Victoria Merriman?” and she replied, “Johnny Lam?”  We excitedly gave each other a huge hug as we both confirmed our identities.  I wrote about Victoria earlier this year in a blog post asking if anyone can put her in touch with me.  I didn’t get any response and left it at that.  Victoria is probably one of the main reasons how I discovered bicycle touring as I’ve mentioned in the my previous post.  She was here with her friend Evadne who grew up in Los Angeles, but has been living in Boston for the past 10 years.  Victoria was accompanying Evadne down the Washington coast from Seattle and will eventually fly back to work when they make it to Portland.  Evadne is going to continue on her own, down the Oregon coast and eventually into Los Angeles to visit family.

The crazy thing in all of this was that they were not intending on staying at Twin Harbors State Park that night and wanted to ride further, but they got lost and had to go through a huge ordeal of scaling barbed-wire fences to get back on track.  The extra miles they took on landed them right at the camp site next to ours.  Isn’t that the craziest thing in the world?