Getting There (and Back)

Island Bicycles, on Argyle Street in Friday Harbor

It was March when the owners of Island Bicycles came to meet me in Ferndale, after I replied to their job posting on United Bicycle Institute's website. They were very friendly, positive and encouraging, but I had a hard time visualizing what the shop and job would be like just from discussing things at Wood's Coffee Shop. So I made a couple of trips to San Juan Island to check things out, and in April I decided that I would never get a better offer, and I'd regret it forever if I didn't take the chance.

Early spring at American Camp

An excursion to the San Juan Islands has been on my "places-to-go" list for years, though I would have chosen better weather for the trip - this year April and May were cold and rainy. Besides, I had always been a bit daunted by the logistics. To get to San Juan Island you take a Washington State ferry from Anacortes, which is fifty or sixty miles from Ferndale; I had always considered this a day's ride, plus the ferry trip. Instead, I planned to ride my bike to the Bellingham Transit Center (ten miles), then catch a WTA bus to the Chuckanut Park & Ride lot near Mount Vernon; from there I could take two Skagit Transit buses to Anacortes, then ride five miles to the ferry landing. This way, I left home at about 8am and arrived in Anacortes a bit after 11am, leaving plenty of time for a nice lunch before the ferry sailed at around 2pm. The ferry trip to Friday Harbor takes a little more than an hour, so I would arrive mid-to-late afternoon.

Walk-on passengers arriving in Friday Harbor

The timing of the connections is a little tricky - both the bus and the ferry are scheduled to run mainly in the morning and afternoon, with gaps in service at mid-day. But after a few trips back and forth I got the route and routine down pretty well, and when the weather got better I discovered that it was not too difficult to ride my bike between Anacortes and Mount Vernon (twenty miles or so), riding the WTA bus between Bellingham and Mount Vernon. Over the summer I returned home to Ferndale about once a month, and it was basically a three-day trip - a day of travel home, a day at home, and a day returning to the island. By late summer I was even riding the whole distance between Ferndale and Anacortes, which made for a long, tiring day but gave me a chance to do some scenic touring on Chuckanut Drive and through Skagit County farmlands.

The worst obstacle along the way is the bridge over the Swinomish Channel on Highway 20 near the Swinomish Casino. This high arching bridge has a separated bike and pedestrian walkway on the westbound side, and bike lanes going east or west, but the traffic is heavy and fast-moving, there are often gusty cross-winds, and a lot of sharp metal, glass and gravel on the road. Bicyclists can use the bike lanes, or use the separate sidewalk, going the "wrong" way on the "wrong" side to cross the bridge going east, but it is difficult to get across Highway 20 at the ends of the bridge, whichever way you choose. I rode this route several times over the summer and finally decided the best eastbound route is to ride the wrong way on the separated sidewalk. There is a highway crossing not far from the end of the bridge and the highway is divided with a wide, grassy median, so it is fairly safe to cross the westbound lanes, wait at the median for traffic to clear, then cross the eastbound lanes. After that I would ride about two miles in the wide bike lane on the highway, then take the first exit to LaConner, turn off to Young Road, then to Highway 536, a two-lane road that goes all the way in to Mount Vernon.

The route is survivable, but the bridge section is ugly and dangerous and needs to be improved. Otherwise, having made five or six trips this summer, the ride is much less daunting and I hope to make more pleasure-trips to the islands in the future.

A tribute to my Cannondale Synapse: I bought this bike untested from the REI online catalog thinking it would be a moderately-priced, light, quick, well-fitting recreational road bike. The bike is designed to dampen road vibration, with specially shaped aluminum tubing on the rear triangle and very flexy wheels. It is smooth and comfortable to ride, but not meant to carry luggage. It doesn't even have rack mounts, but I attached a rear rack to the fender mounts and seat post anyway. I rode it loaded with twenty or thirty pounds of baggage in my panniers, and used it for weekly trips to the grocery store, and took it on 50-mile gravel trail rides, and the bike hummed along happily all summer with no trouble at all. It came home looking pretty dinged up and battered, and now I feel bad for treating it so roughly when it served me so well.

August Already

A previous post for August somehow got over-written when I tried to add in this photo via my Kindle and wifi at the public library, but I will try to reconstruct some of it.

This map appeared outside of my favorite Friday Harbor coffee shop, explaining the wifi trouble I've been having. It appears that much of San Juan Island is composed of large hunks of volcanic rock, which disrupts phone and wifi signals. Early in the spring I was getting unreliable wifi at the house where I'm staying, but by late summer it's mostly non-existent. Sometimes I can't even get a phone signal, but one evening when I went for a walk around the neighborhood, on a hillside a bit south of the house, I connected with Rogers Communications in Canada.

So this makes the island a perfect place for digital detox: no wifi, no phone, no internet, no problems!

Also, no GPS or Strava, if you need that for navigation. But I did read that island emergency services have built a network of transmitters for 911 calls.

We expect the shop to be busy over the Labor Day weekend, but then business should fall off quite a bit and I will be heading home to Ferndale for the winter. I'm actually getting a bit homesick.

Where I'm At

The morning commute

I got a job! For the past month I've been working in a small bike shop in Friday Harbor, on San Juan Island. The shop has been in business year-round for more than thirty years, although most of their business is during the summer tourist season, when they offer rental bikes to tourists and summer people, in addition to serving locals. It's a bit grubby, but the owner is a thorough and meticulous mechanic who has an amazing ability to fix, find, or patch together parts on older and new bikes.

This isn't an easy career change for a middle-aged woman to pull off so I'm very happy to have this opportunity. In the almost six months since I completed the mechanic training course at UBI, I got a little vague about a lot of the material I haven't had a chance to practice and I've been fumbling about a bit. While classroom training is valuable, there is no substitute for hands-on experience. But I'm confident about the things I do practice regularly, like cleaning and tuning drive trains, adjusting the brakes, fixing flats and so on.

(Parenthetic note: I'm amazed at the filth and grime on some bikes that come in: CLEAN YOUR BIKES, PEOPLE! THEY WILL BE SO MUCH EASIER TO RIDE! AND FIX!)

Waiting to board the early ferry back to Anacortes

I actually started work in April, after arranging to rent a room in a house three or four miles from the town of Friday Harbor. I had been thinking of giving notice at my place in Ferndale, putting all my stuff in storage for the summer, and taking my chances on finding a new place come autumn. Good thing I didn't, because after one week the manager of the Mobile Estates Park informed me I had failed their background check: the landlord from my previous apartment had reported that there was still an unpaid judgement against me after the eviction drama of 2010 (refer back to the early posts at the beginning of this blog).

I didn't want to make trouble for the lady I was renting from, and needed to check my legal docs back home to clear things up, so I headed back to Ferndale, thinking I would have to leave the job if I couldn't resolve the housing problem. Luckily I had court records showing there was no unpaid judgment, the managers and my landlady changed their minds, and the bike shop owner emailed to say he really wanted me back, to be ready for tourist season. So at the beginning of May I returned.

Nice place to free-load on wifi while waiting for the ferry

Friday Harbor is a pretty, quaint little town that suddenly comes to life whenever a ferry comes in. The rainy days of early spring have been a bit slow and dull, but with the sun returning and Memorial Day weekend coming up, things will be lively again until fall. There does seem to be a strong and close-knit year-round local community, but I haven't been around long enough to get to know it well yet. On my days off I've been out on some lovely rides around the island, developing my hill-climbing legs on the rolling roads and steep descents down to beaches (and climbs back up . . . )

Now I'm back at my place in Ferndale for a few days, after a month away. I decided to keep my apartment here over the summer, despite the double rent, so I'll be sure of having an affordable place to return to. It was most upsetting to have that old legal trouble come back on me after more than five years, and to almost lose my job because of it. Both times I've returned to Ferndale, when I rolled in to the parking lot, I was half afraid I'd see an eviction notice on my door, or find the place had been burgled, or squatters had moved in and trashed it. I can always think up new things to worry about.

I'm still deciding whether, or how, to follow up on that bad background check report. At this point I'm not sure who is at fault, whether my former landlord gave false information, or the screening agency did a sloppy job. At least I should make sure to get things cleared up before I apply for rental again.

Nevertheless ......

(This blog is sort of on pause while I try to chart my future plans, but I will post an occasional note whenever I'm moved to do so.)

When the phrase "nevertheless, she persisted" first started turning up in my online news feeds, I thought, "yes, that's the thing." To me, it didn't seem like a political statement. That's the only way I ever get anything done - persistence.

Then I read the context farther down in the news stories, and the message became even more important.

So I had to buy the t-shirt. I had to search for it on Amazon, too, because it's not available in stores, at least not around here. Are retailers and shoppers so easily intimidated that they shy away from wearing or carrying even such a mild statement?

Spring Forward, Fall Back

One important lesson every beginning mechanic must learn is: "Lefty loosey, righty tighty."

To which I reply, "I before E except after C, and when sounded like A, as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh'."

Also:

Thirty days hath September,

April, June and November.

All the rest have thirty-one, save February,

Which one year in four has one day more.

How can anyone forget that?

United Bicycle Institute - Portland, Oregon

My bike, waiting to board
Amtrak at Portland Station

After a month at United Bicycle Institute in Portland, I'm home again. Our class results will be mailed to us, so I don't know whether I passed the certification test yet. But I will report on my experience now without letting that influence my opinions, or worrying that my comments might affect my results.

The days and weeks of class went by fast. The instructors are knowledgeable and well-organized. They would lecture for an hour or so, then demonstrate how to take apart and reassemble various bicycle components, then turn us loose to work on demo bikes or parts, but were always available to guide, assist and answer questions. Their written exams are open-book and multiple choice, and not too demanding, but as the teachers often pointed out, these days everything is available on the internet. In real life, they said, any mechanic will often see components they've never handled before, and have to search online for instructions or specifications for particular parts, or contact manufacturers or dealers to trouble-shoot.

I already feel more confident about working on my own bikes, although I still would need more training and supervision to work in a bike shop. Probably many people could learn the same material by hanging out in some bike fanatic's garage shop, but I don't know anyone like that and wouldn't feel comfortable loitering in someone's garage, or making a pest of myself in a bike shop - it's just not a welcoming environment for middle-aged women. Most of the other students in the class had more experience than I have, even several years working in very responsible positions in bicycle businesses. I sometimes wondered whether they felt the class was below their level, but they never acted superior. I think they also learned new ways of doing things, or had misconceptions corrected, and often met with instructors after class with more advanced questions.

Classes meet Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm, with an hour-long lunch break that gave me plenty of time to try out the many very good (but kind of pricey) restaurants on N. Williamson Street. Unfortunately that didn't allow a lot of time for exploring the city, especially after an early autumn storm hit. I had been hoping to escape the first of Bellingham's October drenchings, but I guess it was a big weather system that covered most of western Washington, Oregon and northern California.

St. John Street Bridge, Portland OR

Sometimes I was able to get out for an hour or two after class and ramble ten or twenty miles around nearby streets, which are well-marked with designated bike lanes and routes. On a few weekend days there was enough sun for some 30-40 mile rides, including a ride on the East Esplanade along the Willamette River, and along North Willamette Drive on the bluff above the river.

On one Sunday ride I took a wrong turn-off and ended up riding a short stretch on the freeway, which had a marked bike lane. I kept my cool and made it to the Broadway exit, then rode through the edge of downtown and along a stretch of wide industrial/waterfront roadways. There was very little traffic on the weekend and I even saw several deer grazing in vacant fields and margins near railroad tracks. It wasn't at all the route I'd planned to take but at least I got a good cardiovascular workout.

I crossed back over the river on the St. John Street Bridge and found a small harvest festival street fair in progress in the St. John neighborhood. I liked this area, which is a little more modest and earthy, less upscale (and less expensive) than some of the city's other redeveloped areas. If I get back to Portland I'd like to explore more and get to know it better.

Back to School (again)

This coming weekend I leave for United Bicycle Institute in Portland. I will probably be riding my bicycle in the rain to catch an early train at the Amtrak station in Fairhaven. I'm getting nervous, worrying that I'm not prepared for the class. It's been six years since I took UBI's week-long intro class, and except for about six weeks at the Birch Bay Bike Shop, I've only done basic repairs and maintenance on my own bikes - my old K2 Tradewinds hybrid, my Surly CrossCheck, and my new Cannondale Synapse.

I've been doing a lot of cleaning and housework, including sorting through my collection of bicycle paraphernalia, old parts, and tools. I wrote up a tools inventory and found duplicates of a few things like cable cutters, and an assortment of hex wrenches of different sizes. And a couple of things I've never used and don't recognize (crank puller? free wheel remover?) I guess I'll find out soon.

I also found this collection of old keys, clamps, clips and devices for attaching lights and accessories. Back in my days as a commuter, it took a lot of trial and error to find head and tail lights that would last more than one rainy season. Rain or condensation always seeps in to corrode the contacts, so every autumn I would end up buying a new set. Often the lights came with more than one type of attachment, to give the customer options for mounting. But the fittings are not interchangeable so I'm stuck with a bunch of mysterious, useless black plastic parts.

Would it be possible for designers and manufacturers to invent a universal attachment, maybe using zip-ties? Please?