National Parks Tour: The Alaska Leg: Sleeping in Seattle

     After the visit to the Redwoods, we wandered up the coast into Oregon and Coos Bay. This whole ride is based on a National parks Tour, the Gold version of the Iron Butt Association's challenge. In addition, and a nice way to break up long runs is the Grand Tour hunt for towns that have water in their name. We are up to 21 such places. Both of those we've already discussed, but now a new one to further complicate the record keeping. The IBA has a new ride based on collecting lighthouses. The basic task is to find 60 lighthouses in one year. Higher levels of this game include getting examples on both coasts, multiple countries, and higher still, from multiple continents. The big one gives you three years to find 180 lighthouses, which must include examples from both coasts, the Gulf of Mexico, and two continents. We'll see how far we'll go with this but a trip to New Zealand next year is in the planning stages. That would take care of the second continent. . .so who knows. In any event, we have managed to find a couple of lighthouses and we have plans to catch a few more of the low hanging fruit variety. Same with water named towns.
   From Coos Bay, we moved inland and up I-5 through Eugene and Portland to Seattle. In Portland, we got held up for half and hour waiting for a lift bridge to come back to Earth. The lady in an explorer one lane over engaged us in chatter. Turns out she was a beer distributor. She didn't have beer samples, but she did have baked goods from one of her delivery spots. Next thing you know we had a gift of some funky organic bread produced by a company owned by an X-con. I think the bread is called Killer bread. . .not sure what he did time for but the name suggests this was a guy you don't want returning to his earlier proclivities. Bread was pretty good.
   By Tuesday night we worked our way to the top of the Olympic peninsula where we found a great spot overlooking the harbor in Port Angles. Dinner and a walk through this working/tourist town was fun, especially since the shops were closed and Robin was limited to window shopping. An early visit to the Visitor Center of the National Park gave us our Washington NP stamp. On our way back down, the plan is to go back out there for a longer stay and a decent investigation of this remarkable NP.

Violent river mouth in Oregon

Scot's Broom. . .pretty but not native

Not a display!

Large herds near Rt. 38, oregon

View from our motel down to Port Angles

Wild cats!

The ferries to Seattle run every hour or so from Kingston to Edmunds, just above Seattle. We crossed the lift bridge, rode into Kingston, and straight onto a nearly full ferry that pulled out two minutes after we boarded. Splendid timing! An hour south and we were n downtown Seattle, in the rain, and at the Klondike NP commemorating the launching site of many prospectors during the gold rush. A second NP stamp, a nice visit with the staff, a look about, and off we were to the Ride West BMW shop where I had an appointment for oil change, new front tire, and a general once over service. All that went well though clutch slipping symptoms had started and the tech confirmed that clutch failure was up the road a piece, maybe where nothing was. With the bike up on two lifts, it was also easy to see that the sidecar tire needed to be replaced also. Hummmmm. No tech time until next Tuesday was the bad news. Good news: they had the necessary parts. We began to plan a four day stay in Seattle when the Service Manager (Mark, originally from Fairbanks) thought it all through and offered to do the job himself if one of his assistants was able to come in today. All that worked out, we got the sidecar tire replaced at a car tire chain, and we stayed the night across from University Village near the U. of Washington. Most of the evening was spent at Barnes & Noble, right across the street from our motel. And, Robin had a discount coupon! Seattle is expensive so that was a real plus to the budget ledger which was about to get clobbered by the clutch replacement. So, here we sit right now (2:15pm, PCT, Thursday) in a nice coffee shop waiting for the clutch replacement to be completed. The Ride West staff couldn't be more helpful and the shop is big. They claim to be the US number one retailer though it seems that only four techs (plus the Service Manager) are working. But they have apparel specialists, two assistant service managers, and a legion of sales people. If there are no hangups, the bike will be ready in a couple of hours and we'll head north toward the border which we'll probably cross tomorrow morning. With some good fortune, it won't be long before the real Alaska trip begins in earnest. The sun is shinning!