Back in the Saddle

I finally got back in the saddle today, on the road to visit our neighbors to the North. I forgot how good this feels, biking on the interstate, secure on my shoulder as cars zip by, semis pushing me forward with their drafts, stuffing granola bars in my face, finding my way to some stranger's home and then sharing stories late into the night. Are my legs sore? Damn straight. Does my troublesome left knee hurt? You better believe it. Will I hurt in the morning and hurt more by the end of the day? No question. Do I feel on top of the world? Hell yes.

My body is going to take time to reacclimate to this kind of continuous exercise, and in the meantime it's going to hurt, the same as it did when I started biking from Nebraska. But I'm ready for the struggle. After all my concerns and fears and resignations I've had lately, today finally doing a long ride again, all of that just melted away as I was able to experience and remember all the reasons this is so worth it.

I woke up early this morning, took the bus downtown, which arrived slow, and then missed my second bus by mere seconds. I tried to chase it down by bike, and almost succeeded. I instead ended up waiting 30 minutes for the next one that was supposed to be only 15. I was so antsy to get started, the whole wait and whole ride up to Everett.

But then I was on the road, up through Everett and on to I5, until it had a brief stretch I couldn't be on in Mount Vernon, and I switched over to the Old Highway 99 and didn't go back. It was a beautiful ride, and relatively easy too. And I have no regrets at all about getting a place to stay in Sudden Valley rather than Bellingham. It was worth going a little out of the way and up and down a bit. The steep drop to the pristine lake, trees thirty feet down the slope but still towering over the road, houses accessible by wooden walkways down the cliff, hills in the background beyond the lake... It's gorgeous here. And my hosts are fantastic. She's a writer, he's a civil engineer, and they met in Kenya while in the Peace Corps. As you can imagine, there were plenty of good stories to go around.

Tomorrow, on to Vancouver!