Tulip Tour Revisited

It's hard to go wrong taking photos at the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. My favorites from this year:

Pretty, but not really a safe bike route

Unfortunately, the bike-riding aspect of the trip was a disappointment. I was aiming to break fifty miles, but only rode 47, including ten miles each way just getting between Ferndale and the Bellingham Transit Center, where I caught the 80X bus to Mount Vernon. The weather was iffy on Friday, so I went on Saturday, when there was much more car traffic around the fields, and a long back-up on the Mount Vernon freeway exit. I should have got off the bus earlier, at the Chuckanut Transit Center, then biked to the tulip fields by way of Josh Wilson Road. Instead, we were stuck on the off-ramp for about a half-hour, and I didn't get started riding until after one o'clock. I ate a Clif bar before I hit the road, but no lunch, and besides I'd cooled down and stiffened up while sitting on the bus.

To get my legs charged up and get away from the car traffic, I took off on a smaller farm-road, and ended up on Summers Road, in these two photos. The Skagit River and many smaller branches, creeks and tributaries wind around the flat farm country, often with diked roadways running next to them. These roads are pretty and interesting to ride, although you never see much of the river because of the dikes. Unfortunately it's often very unsafe for cycling - narrow lanes, with little to no shoulder, blind curves, and speed limits as high as 35-50mph in places.

Several years ago I came within inches of being side-swiped by a big 4x4 truck pulling an empty trailer at 50mph. I was riding next to the high, sloping dike bank, with a barbed-wire fence about halfway up, and two inches of gravel to the right of the car lane. An on-coming car left no room for the truck to move left, which was just as well because that would have caused the trailer to swing to the right toward me. All I could do was look ahead along the white line and try to stay steady and not flinch as the truck blew past less than a foot from my sleeve. It wasn't the truck driver's fault, he just had nowhere to go to give me room. If I had known the road conditions, I wouldn't have taken that road, and now I stay off those winding river roads unless I'm riding on the open side, away from the dike bank.

The Festival also features kite-flying and balloon rides

I had to ride hard to catch the last bus back to Bellingham. I ate another Clif bar, but the two energy bars and a bottle of Powerade was all the nourishment I had all afternoon. I cooled down again on the bus ride back, which made the bike ride home to Ferndale kind of a drag, and I ended up feeling very stiff, sore and tired.

On Sunday I took a hilly 18 mile ride at an easy pace, and I rode 15 miles to and from school today, but still don't feel quite recovered. Another lesson in bad planning and poor dietary habits.