Seattle: Saturday Part 1

Colleen and I awoke on Saturday morning to a crisp and cool, but sunny, day. I literally cheered for joy when I saw the sun out of Colleen’s computer room window. I don’t mind riding in the cold, but cold and rain — or worse, cold and SNOW — makes me grumpier than need be.

We got ready to go, but hadn’t even made it out of the garage when we discovered that Glen’s KLR wouldn’t start. The battery was dead. Glen must have suspected this as a possibility, since he’d emailed Colleen the night before saying to call if he needed to bring over the brand new battery he had charging at his house. Colleen made the phone call, and Glen drove over to the rescue.

New battery thusly installed, we rode the pair of KLRs over to the Fauntleroy-Vashon-Southworth ferry to cross Puget Sound. We were a bit freaked out that we wouldn’t make the 10am ferry, but we managed to get on with seconds to spare. We were literally the last to board before they raised the gates and the ferry pushed off.

Once on the other side of the Sound, we did a little bit of circling trying to find the specific dirt roads we were looking for. Luckily for Colleen, my direction sense is terrible and I didn’t even realize that we’d gone in a circle until she told me. 😉 In my defense, I was distracted by a beautiful bald eagle perched atop a roadside tree…instant Alaska flashback.

Colleen decided to take us to the dirt she knew, so we headed to Tahuya State Forest. The first section was paved, and we eventually turned off onto a nice wide 4×4 road, which was more like a flat gravel fire road with pockmarked puddles. All of the puddles were ringed with ice and they crunched as the KLR rode through.

A couple of guys out camping took this photo of us…awwww!

We had our first “gravity incident” while on a trail that did a sharp lefthand uphill over some tree roots and then an immediate lefthand downhill. Colleen navigated it perfectly but I got a little stuck over the root and couldn’t get a foot down. I was upright, but stuck. Colleen parked her KLR to give me a push….and her sidestand sunk into the mud! We got my KLR unstuck and righted hers with some help from a passing Big Burly Dirtbiker ™…I was a little shaken up from being stuck, so Colleen rode my KLR up and around the little zigzag.

Shortly thereafter, we wound up on a….well, I guess technically, it was “deeply potholed”, but that doesn’t even come close to describing it. They were like giant whoops. I stopped for a break halfway down the section to let a Jeep by — I was having trouble sticking to a line, and I didn’t really want to add “hit by 4×4” to my list of accomplishments for the day. Colleen kept going to the end of the section, then came back to report that the trail twisted upwards into a very steep and pretty technical section, and that we were better off turning around.

OK, I need to get to bed. To be continued tomorrow!