Summer holiday by bike, train, bus and ferry.

My fiance Kate and I have had a summer tradition of taking our holiday during late July/early August for the past three years now. It has usually consisted of us driving to our destination in Kate’s dodge caravan, sweating and having the usual semi-uncomfortable-summer-road-trip-without-air-conditioning experience en route to our destination. This year we had a wedding to attend on Orcas Island, after imagining driving I-5, waiting in line for hours to drive our van on the ferry and paying for all of the gas and fees we decided to try our hands a public transit and bicycles.

The first leg of our trip was from Portland to Seattle via the train and then from the train station to Kate’s mom Lana’s house in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. We had some directions from map quest, which we knew were most likely to worst way to go, but were thank fully steered to the Bicycle Alliance of Washington by one of the many helpful cyclists we were to encounter during our travels.

The fellows at the Bicycle Alliance of Washington gave us a super detailed and and easy to read map of Seattle and we were off to Ballard on the Elliot bay trail in no time. On the trail we met another helpful Seattle cyclist who offered to ride with us to the Ballard bridge (by far the part of our trek that was giving us the most anxiety) and show us the ropes of crossing this quite dangerous and long bridge.

So this is how it works: the Ballard bridge is about a half of a mile long with four traffic lanes and one small side walk on the west side for bikes and foot traffic. This sidewalk is so narrow you can’t even ride two bikes past each other so you have to look as far as you can down the span and wait for an opening. We finally crossed the bridge with only two or three encounters with cyclists trying to go the other way (when this happens if you are going north you have to scoot your bike as close to the curb that separates you from 45mph traffic and let the south-bound cyclist squeeze past you and the guard rail, harrowing indeed!). After the bridge we had a short ride to Lana’s house for dinner and a nights rest before continuing on the second leg of our journey from Seattle to Orcas island, stay tuned for the details of that epic trek on my next post.