Skagit Tulip Festival

Looking forward to spring . . . this is an old photo.  I am second from the left, in yellow.

In 2007 I signed on with Team in Training, to do a fund-raiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.  We raised money for LLS, while training for the Seattle-to-Portland ride in July.  This ride, in April, was the first time the team rode more than 50 miles together.  We stopped for lunch in LaConner, then toured the tulip fields near Mount Vernon.  A Japanese tourist took this lucky shot with his cell phone and emailed it to one of my teammates.

Feedback

Google gives me some very limited information about visitors to this site - nothing I could use to track anyone down, just the country they're from, their computer operating system, nothing too personal.  I've been posting for almost five months now, and in that time almost four hundred people have landed on my page.  Most of them, around 325, are from the United States; about 25 are from Canada.  The rest, in alphabetical order, are from Belize, Brazil, Germany, Israel, Japan and Slovenia.  It's intriguing to know I have such a broad international audience.  I'm going to be keeping a watch out in the next few years for Slovenian bicyclists passing through Bellingham.

Hovander Park

This is not actually Hovander Park.  It's a raspberry farm with Mt. Baker in the background.  I just thought it was time to add some color to the page.  I rode out this direction Saturday, on Northwest Avenue near Pole Road.  I wanted to do a flatter ride, but it's been cold and windy this week, and the headwind as I rode north made it feel like an uphill ride.

Hovander Park is in Ferndale, about 12-14 miles from the Civic Athletic Complex, near where I live. Hovander House is a historic farm house, and there is an herb garden, boardwalk and wetlands nearby at the Tennant Lake Interpretive Center.

In June the Bellingham Highland Games, the largest gathering of Scottish clans in the Pacific Northwest, are held at Hovander Park.  It is my usual birthday custom to ride my bike to the park to hear the pipe bands and treat myself to a scone with strawberries and whipped cream.

Samish Way to Lake Padden

Last week we had a mild, sunny spell for about a half-day, when I took a break from job- and apartment-hunting to ride up Samish Way to Lake Padden.  This is a challenging hill-climb, definitely a Cat. 2 on the Tour de France scale, to a park that is pretty out-of-the-way for me since I junked my car, so it was a nice change to visit the lake again.  Lake Padden is really a pond, only a little more than a mile around, with a wide packed dirt and gravel trail, and some side trails heading off into the woods.  It's an easy bike ride around the lake on a hybrid, but there is usually a lot of foot traffic, so it's best to go slow and enjoy the scenery.  Another odd thing about Bellingham:  it seems to be the kind of town people leave on holiday weekends, which is fine for a mobility-impaired local like me.  One Fourth of July weekend I rode up to Lake Padden, planning to spend a day reading on the beach and paddling in the water.  When I arrived there was a group of five or six people doing yoga on the lawn near the swimming area, and after they left the place was pretty much all mine all day.

Starting from the I-5 overpass at Exit 252 it is two miles to the entrance to Lake Padden Park, where the road dips down slightly, then climbs a half-mile to the entrance to the public golf course clubhouse.  The top of the climb is 3.7 miles from the start, just past the pull-out where mountain bikers leave their cars when they head for the trails in the woods around the lake and on Galbraith Mountain.  I like to imagine the muddy guys in the parking lot are giving me congratulatory smiles as I pass on the way to finishing the long haul up the hill.

The uphill side of Samish Way has bike lanes all the way, but the downhill ride is not so nice - the pavement is cracked, uneven concrete sections and the shoulder ranges from narrow and soft, to loose gravel, or dirt and weeds, or concrete gutters, frequently crossed by various kinds of driveways.

During a windstorm over the weekend some power lines blew down next to the parking area, and four or five cars burned.  It must have been wild riding the trails during that storm, but then to get back to the parking lot and find your car burned up - not the kind of risk you expect to take.

p.s.  Photos from the 2010 Chilly Hilly are posted on my first blog entry of September 3.

Northwest Avenue - commuter's note

Northwest Avenue has paved bike lanes north (or northeast actually) of W. Bakerview, but there are no streetlights and few lights from houses along the way.  When I first began riding that way in January of 2009 it was dark in the morning and evening.  I was nervous about riding home after work, because there can be a lot of rush hour car traffic and the speed limit is 50 mph.  Also, the road was closed because of flooding for a couple of weeks that winter, and for flood control work last summer.  The alternate route is Pacific Highway, which runs parallel to I-5 and is reached by turning left at the intersection of Northwest Ave. and W. Bakerview, then right just past Fred Meyer, before crossing the freeway overpass.  This road has an unreliable shoulder and several rollers, but it gets light from I-5 and the airport on the other side of the freeway.  I rode home on Pacific Hwy. for the first few months until the daylight began to last past 5pm, then I switched to riding Northwest all the way home.  Oddly, the following winter the darkness didn't bother me.  I guess after riding all summer I knew all the  bad spots in the pavement, driveways, mailboxes and other landmarks.

Last summer the section of Northwest Ave. between the freeway and W. Bakerview was closed for several weeks while the city of Bellingham put in bike lanes and a roundabout at the freeway ramps.  This made my morning hill-climb much smoother and easier, but the configuration of the roundabout makes the return trip a bit tricky.  The roundabout is oval-shaped and bulges out to the right, where two car lanes merge on to the freeway entrance.  Apparently the engineers couldn't figure out exactly how to route the bike lane through the roundabout, so they used the common expedient of just making it go away by not painting the line on the pavement.

On Monday the 7th, the forward-thinking and socially responsible Bellingham City Council voted to put in bike lanes on the rest of Northwest Ave. from the freeway in to town.  Maybe they will figure out a solution to the roundabout problem, too.  Maybe something modeled after a railroad crossing would work.

Hill-Climbing Lesson #2

The Chilly Hilly is coming up sometime in the next few weeks, but I'm not going to attempt it this year.  For one thing, last year I actually rented a car, hit the freeway to Seattle at 5:30am, drove ninety miles, and waited in line for more than an hour for the ferry to Bainbridge Island.  For a 33-mile bike-ride.  Silly.

Besides, last year I'd had a year of a double-dose of hill-climbing on my commute.  In January of 2009 my job moved north to Slater Road, three miles farther away.  Instead of turning off to Maplewood Ave., I continued up Northwest Avenue, under I-5, across W. Bakerview, continuing on to Slater Rd., where I turned left off Northwest, crossed the overpass above I-5, and arrived at work just past Rural Ave., making an eight mile ride.

In the morning there was a hill-climb of about .7 miles on Northwest Ave., beginning roughly at Shuksan Middle School to the hilltop just before W. Bakerview.  On the other side of Bakerview there is a long, straight down-slope with a nice, wide bike lane where I could put my head down and race (as much as possible on a hybrid) for just under a mile; then two small rollers on Slater Rd. before crossing the freeway.  Going home I had a gradual climb of a bit less than a mile from Cornwall Church to W. Bakerview, then a downhill stretch under the freeway and back in to town.  But there is a freeway interchange, several intersections, commuter and bus traffic along this stretch of Northwest so it's not a good idea to race too fast unless you're fearless about competing with cars.

With this longer commute, I was riding eighty miles a week and had hill climbs morning and evening, five days a week.  Plus, last year we had a spell of warm, sunny weather in January, so I was getting out for 25-35 mile hill-climbing rides on the weekends.  The Chilly Hilly is rumored to be a pre-spring test-ride for old farts - that explains the hot cider, chili feed and flatulence jokes (helps to make it up the hills, but stay down on the lower deck on the ferry ride home . . . . ).  But I was ready for it.

This year I'm not.