Victoria BC - Rest Day

On this trip I allowed an extra "rest day" in Victoria, but I did so much walking around the city that I was more tired at the end of the day than I had been after riding 65 miles on the Galloping Goose Trail.

At right is the Legislative Building. Canadian official decorative motifs are much more interesting than American ones.

Craigdarroch Castle

Finally, I got to see the inside of Craigdarroch Castle. The house was built by coal baron Robert Dunsmuir, who unluckily died just before construction was finished in 1890. His widow, Joan, moved in, but traveled all over Europe and America in search of art and furnishings for the house, including exotic wood work, and stained and leaded glass windows. The house is full of beautiful parquet floors, wood trim and panelling, with brilliant stained glass at every window - lovely to see in person, but unfortunately that made it difficult to get good interior photos.

The tower room at the top of
Craigdarroch Castle

The tour proceeds up stairways on one side of the house to a small tower room at the top, then down the stairs on the other side. One of the upper floors which was used as a ballroom was roped off when I visited because the floor's supports had deteriorated so that it would not bear weight. A display case held souvenirs, fans, dance cards and programs from social events, and mannequins displayed suits or dresses from the late 1800's. I was surprised at how small they were: the women must have been less than five feet tall, with tiny wasp waists, and the men looked to be only about five and a half feet tall.

Tile flooring in the tower

Bikers in the family

After the deaths of Robert and Joan Dunsmuir, the family became mired in disputes over inheritances and division of property. Some of their children and grandchildren apparently grew up to be very colorful and bohemian: one young woman became fascinated with the actress Tallulah Bankhead, joining her entourage and following her around Europe, to New York and Hollywood, according to displays of photos and tabloid stories. I believe she eventually died on the Titanic, but I might be confused.

The house is partly restored with original furnishings, but some rooms that were used as a convalescent hospital for WWII soldiers will be restored to that state, to commemorate the history of the house. Later it was taken over by Victoria College, and was crowded with returning veterans after WWII. The Victoria Conservatory of Music operated there until the late 1970's, when it was taken over by the Society for Preservation & Maintenance of Craigdarroch Castle.

Just like home

After coffee and a scone at the castle gift shop, I walked a few blocks to Government House and rambled in the garden there, then left the grounds to explore the city neighborhoods. I had a city map but kept getting enticed down interesting-looking side streets until I got a bit lost. At last I happened upon a Starbucks on Cook Street. The afternoon was getting hot, time for an iced coffee break.

I walked to Beacon Hill Park, enjoying the water views from the bluff, then walked down a steep staircase to the beach for a rest, before walking back to the hostel by way of the waterfront.

For dinner I found a funky little Mexican place with a tiny seating area, where I ordered the fish tacos. They were OK, smothered in salsa and chipotle, but made with frozen breaded fish filets. Disappointing compared to the dinner I had in Swartz Bay at the end of last summer. It's never as good as the first time.

Next morning I started out early, riding back to Sidney on the Lochside Trail, aiming to catch the noon ferry back to Anacortes. Arriving with an hour and a half to spare, I locked my bike up to a fence and walked a few blocks in to Sidney to get coffee and ice cream, and idle around the shops and Sidney waterfront. I walked through the US border control station with my bike, but then had to line up in the car lanes to wait to board the ferry. I left my bike at the fence for a few minutes to take a bathroom break, which might have raised official suspicions, because when the line started moving, an officer called me inside a little office (to the left in the photo) where I had to show my passport again and answer a few questions. But they let me go and I boarded the by-now familiar old Washington State ferry to Anacortes.

Remembering Summer

At long last, here are the promised photos of my ride on the Galloping Goose Trail the summer of 2018.

By-the-Sea B&B, Sidney BC

The place for maps in Sidney BC

On this trip, I caught an afternoon ferry in Anacortes, arriving in Sidney BC at 5pm, staying overnight at the By-the-Sea B&B, an elegant antique-filled Art Deco ( or Bauhaus?) house with a sleek curving stairway to the comfy second-floor rooms. It is located along the bike trail a bit south of Sidney, about a 40-minute walk back to town for dinner. But a generous breakfast in the morning, more than I could finish. (No donuts, though.)

Big 10-inch donuts

McNeill Bay  from Harling Point, a former indigenous village called Chikawich, meaning "big hips".
This viewpoint is at the top of a short but memorably steep bump in the road that made me regret my big hips.

After breakfast I headed out on the Lochside and Seaside Routes to Victoria BC. The Seaside Touring Route branches off from the Lochside Route at (more or less) Bay Road near the Cordova Bay Golf Course. It's kind of a real estate tour for much of the way but there are some stunning water views here and there. The distance between Sidney and Victoria is only about 20-25 miles, depending on your route, side-trips or detours, and exact start and end points. I usually ride it in two or three hours. After idling at the viewpoints, parks and along the Victoria BC waterfront for a couple of hours, I checked in at Ocean Island Inn, the same hostel where I stayed last summer. In the morning, after another luscious Nutella-on-toast breakfast, I headed out for the trail.

OceanIsland Inn, Pandora St., Victoria BC

The route start in Victoria BC

I got another bear warning along the way, but this one was a little more plausible. A retiree-couple who lived by the trail stopped me, to say they had seen a black bear in an apple tree a little further on. They pointed down the trail, and I could see a tree shaking wildly beside the way. On second look, though, the tree seemed a little small to bear the weight of a bear, so I decided to risk it, riding as close as possible to the opposite edge of the trail, and got by safely. I'm not sure whether it was a prank, or NIMBY's trying to scare off tourists, or maybe they just wanted to chat.

Mechtosin Valley farm from trailside

Seeking a closer view of Lake Matheson, I left my bike leaning against a tree and followed a footpath to the edge of the bluff, where I walked up and down a bit, then sat on a rock for a rest break. When I turned to go back to the trail, I didn't recognize the break in the bushes where I'd come out. Since all paths only went one way, I just chose the biggest opening, but coming back from the opposite direction the rocks and fallen trees on the way didn't look familiar and I was a little worried for a moment that I could get lost when barely out of sight of the rail-trail. Embarrassing, but I guess it was a good reminder to check for landmarks.

Views of Lake Matheson from the trail.


















And here is a bad photo of the notoriously bad road crossing near Green Man Bicycle Shop, which was improved this summer. The old route followed the path on the right, leading to a Y-intersection with fast, heavy car traffic and no marked crossing. Now the trail branches to the left around the triangle-shaped building, coming out at a T-shaped three way intersection with a stop-light and crosswalk with a signal. Simple solution, but not quite perfect. For one thing, the Green Man Bike Shop is set pretty close to the street edge, which is convenient in a way, but riders who don't want to visit there have to make a sharp right turn to get back to the trail. More important, when the crossing light changed and I stepped into the crosswalk, three drivers making left turns passed in front of me without stopping, giving me that "what are you doing on my road?" stare.

I had stopped at a grocery store in the town of Colton to buy some lunch, so I was able to ride past Gillespie Road this time. The trail drops down sharply and I had to walk my bike a bit near Rocky Bay, but then I got on to the stretch of trail I had missed the summer before. I'm glad I made the return trip: the water views along Sooke Inlet are gorgeous, easy to admire from the wide, flat rail trail.

End of the trail

In the end I was frustrated again, though: the trestle bridge at Todd Creek was closed for repair. A detour required carrying bikes up a steep, rough dirt trail, and it was already mid-afternoon when I got there, with a 33 mile ride to get back to the city. Time to turn back. A better plan would be to ride a trail bike capable of carrying camping stuff to stay overnight at the regional park camping ground at the far end of the trail. That way I'd have time to explore and find some of the famous Sooke Potholes. I would also like to see a live Sitka Spruce . . . another summer.

Last Summer (2018)

What's left of the old Georgia Pacific plant, summer 2018

Smith Rd. & Northwest Rd.

The wise Kurt Vonnegut, once said "Never forget that we were put on Earth to fart around." And I did a lot of that last summer, along with working (where I don't fart around much, strangely).

Near the end of August Whatcom County had a spell of hot weather, along with smoke from wild fires in the North Cascades, Olympic Mountains and lower BC. The haze from the fires smothered the county for several days, making me feel sick and sluggish. A lot of people I know were putting off biking, running, hiking and other outdoor activities because of worry about the health effects of the smoke. A few rainy spells in September dampened the fires and cleared the smoke a bit. When the weather turned mild and sunny again I decided to take a last chance vacation and return to Vancouver Island, to finish what I started last summer, and ride the complete Galloping Goose Trail. It was the last week of September, exactly one year from my previous trip.

Passing Through Anacortes

Last summer I passed through Anacortes coming and going on several trips between Ferndale and Friday Harbor, but usually I just had time enough for lunch and a walk up and down the main drag in town, before hopping back on my bike to ride three short miles to the ferry terminal. A year ago the city was paving and adding bike lanes to Commercial Avenue, making the ride smoother and safer for bike tourists this year. This summer the timing to catch the ferry to Sidney BC was a little different, allowing me to spend a little more time walking and biking around town. Usually I come in to town by way of Fidalgo Bay Road and R Avenue, which runs through a working waterfront area. The street bends to become Q Avenue, which continues along side a more scenic recreational marina area with views of the rocky bluff of Cap Sante Park.

Cap Sante from Seafarers Memorial Park in Anacortes, with an oil refinery in the distance

There are foot and bike trails up to the top of the bluff, but I only rode out to the tip of the point, where I watched hummingbirds buzzing up and down above the manzanitas on the steep slope. I stopped to chat with an older couple of retirees who seemed concerned that I might be a transient planning to set up camp in the park, but I was able to convince them that I was only a harmless flake. I generally try to keep my gear nice and dress up-scale enough to look like an Adventure Tourist, not a bum, but sometimes these class distinctions are hard to maintain.

Sculptures and poems printed on plaques are on exhibit beside the landscaped walkways by the water, including a poem titled "What the Fisherman Knows" by Samuel Green, a former poet laureate of Washington state. I found it moving and mysterious, my main requirement for poetry.

Causland Park

After a hearty sandwich and coffee at one of the many lunch spots on Commercial Ave., I biked around at random on neighborhood streets, until I happened on Causland Park, a one square block garden spot at the intersection of 8th Street and M Avenue. The walls, paths and stairways, the bandstand and memorials in the park are mosaics made of various colors and textures of local stone. The stone works were designed and built in about 1920, by a former French-Canadian named Jean Baptiste LePage, apparently a mostly self-taught artist and architect, who was influenced by the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi. The park was later re-named for Harry Causland, as a memorial to soldiers from World War I. The place is a curious and fascinating retreat in an out-of-the way little town, worth looking for if you have time to kill while waiting for the Anacortes ferry.

Bandstand at Causland Park

Some second thoughts . . .

Rethinking my previous posts from the summer past: of course, the world is full of men who were traumatized by childhood outdoor experiences, when they were terrified by noises in the night or creepy, slimy creatures, or were ridiculed and made to feel incompetent by a Dad, uncle or Scout troop leader, or were led astray and endangered by an incompetent Dad, uncle or Scout troop leader. But girls/women mostly don't encounter those bad experiences until we begin to push our limits as adults, after spending our younger years avoiding outdoor hardships, risks and creepy slimy things.

That's OK, it makes us feel young and fresh to challenge ourselves and discover new things.

I finished off my summer by returning to Vancouver Island to ride the Galloping Goose again. This time I brought a better camera, packed a lunch for the trail, and rode almost to the Sooke Potholes, but not quite as far as I had hoped to go. I am writing a supplemental post with lots of photos, but keep running out of high-speed wifi. Soon I will finish.

It's the rainy season now, but for anyone thinking of a holiday trip to the San Juan Islands or Vancouver Island, at least three of Washington State Ferries' boats have been out of service and under repair, and ferry runs have been severely cut back. All service between Anacortes and Sidney BC was cancelled in mid-October through mid-November, and last I heard there were only two runs a day from Anacortes to the San Juan Islands. Check the Washington State Ferries website to plan your travel.

Not-So-Wild

Silver Lake Park

Like most girls, I grew up fearing the Big Bad Wolf in the woods. Rationally I know solo travel and camping (with caution and common sense) is almost always safe, but it still has been hard to take the first steps. I thought joining a group overnight would ease my way, but after missing a meet-up in June, last week I reserved a mid-week camping spot at Silver Lake Park, a Whatcom County park in the Mount Baker Forest foothills beyond the town of Everson.

I have bicycled to this park in the past, but this time I was on my 28 pound hybrid bike, carrying 25 pounds of luggage, including tent, sleeping bag and pad, rain gear and some snacks and water. It's about seventeen mostly flat miles from my place in Ferndale to Everson, where I stopped for coffee and pastry, and bought a SubWay sandwich for dinner. I had remembered it being about eight miles from there to the county park, but it's actually more like eighteen. Everson's Main Street becomes South Pass Road at city limits, then about a half-mile past Oat Coles Road, South Pass Road curves to the left and starts climbing for a mile or so. I hadn't ridden my bike at all for several days before leaving that morning, and my legs weren't ready for hill-climbing with a loaded bike. I had to push the bike up the last bit of that hill, and also a couple of short-but-steep bits farther on. The weather was overcast and muggy, and I arrived at the park tired and sweaty after riding 37 miles in about 3.5 hours.

Base camp

I stopped at the park office, but since I had made online reservations no further paperwork was needed and I went straight on to my campsite. I probably could have saved the $13 reservation fee and paid only $24 for a drop-in site, but I hadn't wanted to take a chance on the camp being full. Most of the spaces were taken by RV campers, but there were also some car-campers sleeping in tents.

The camping area is shaded by Douglas firs, maple and cedar trees, with a pretty understory of fern, bracken, salal, huckleberry bushes and all the usual native plants. There are gravelled foot paths, and some bare dirt paths where little kids were riding junior mountain bikes. I locked my bike up to a tree and put up my tent right away, because I'd felt a few sprinkles of rain. I had set up the tent in my living room before, but this was the first time I'd used it outdoors, and actually staked it into the ground. It went up quickly, easily and stood firm all night, though I did have a lot of leftover stakes and tie-downs. Luckily there was no wind that night, or rain either.

It still wasn't even five o'clock yet, and I wasn't quite hungry for dinner, so I tucked away my things and went walking around the park, admiring the lake views and woodsy walks. There is a small swimming beach, with canoes, kayaks, paddle boards and pedal boats available for rent, and a little kids tot-lot with climbing forts and swings. A bath house near the beach is open 8am to dusk, with four minute showers for 75 cents.

Logging equipment at Gerdrum House

Across the road from the park is the historic Gerdrum Family farmhouse, where I walked around and peeked in the windows, and an exhibit of old logging and lumber milling equipment, now overgrown with saplings and bushes.

Back at my campsite I decided to start a fire. A previous camper had left some half-burned logs, and I'd brought a half-dozen old charcoal briquettes, a utility candle and a book of matches. With these and some sticks and twigs I was able to get a little fire going, to create a cozy atmosphere while I ate my SubWay sandwich. But I turned my back on the fire too long, until it began to produce a lot of atmosphere, in the form of smoke, and nearby campers started coughing theatrically. I tried to build the fire back up, which mostly produced more smoke, so finally I broke the coals up and went to bed around 9pm. The campground was very quiet, with no eerie noises in the night, except for someone who unloaded two or three cases of empty beer bottles in the recycling bins sometime after 10pm. I am comfortable sleeping on hard, flat surfaces, but I had some kinks in my back, and my left leg had some sore, out-of-joint spots in the hip, knee and ankle, and after a while my legs began to feel hot. I unzipped my sleeping bag to cool down, and finally fell peacefully asleep, with no nightmares or anxiety attacks.

Morning dew on the grass

At about four in the morning I heard the first bird-call. Pulling my sleeping bag tight around my ears, I went back to sleep until six-thirty when the full chorus began, and I lay awake to listen for a while. The muscles in my back had loosened up, and all the sore spots in my leg were gone. Finally I got up for breakfast - a quad-shot of cold espresso and two Clif bars. After another little morning walk to the bath-house for a blissful four-minute shower, I packed up my camp to head home.

South Pass Road curves northward from Everson, running almost within sight of the Canadian border at one point. I never can spot the place where it comes closest to Canada, which is shortly before the road turns southward toward Silver Lake Park. Leaving the park that morning I looked to my left, and saw a tempting downhill stretch heading south. I had never ridden that section of the road before, but according to my map, South Pass Road loops around to intersect with Mount Baker Highway (Hwy. 542), where I could turn right to get to a section of the in-progress Bay-to-Baker bike route that would put me back on South Pass Road, heading in to Everson, by-passing some of the rolling hills I'd ridden the day before.

Mount Baker from South Pass Road

I made the left turn and tried the unknown road, which turned out to be a much easier downhill run than the rolling hills going up to the park the day before. I saw two dark, shaggy young alpacas munching grass by a fence, and caught a distant view of Mount Baker. I flew down the last hill on South Pass Road before the level stretch heading in to Everson, where I stopped to rest a bit at Riverside Park, before the familiar fifteen-mile home-stretch to Ferndale.

The ride home was 38 miles in three hours, for a 75 mile round-trip. The whole over-night trip was probably more than 24 hours, but that would be because I took a long lunch-hour in Everson, and took my time in the morning, listening to birds and dawdling with packing up my camp.

Mount Baker (zoomed in)

Postscript: Once I left Everson and headed into the hills I got no signal on my AT&T cell phone - zero bars and the AT&T logo didn't even appear in the top left corner of the screen. Kind of strange because there used to be a lot of complaints that people were being charged for international calls when their signal jumped to an AT&T tower in Canada.

Updates & Caution

Trailside composition

A word of warning for anyone who might have been inspired to take a bike trip to the San Juan Islands via the Anacortes ferry this summer: a construction project is getting underway on Hwy. 20, at the three-way intersection turn-off to Deception Pass. The state highway department will be building a traffic roundabout at this major intersection between the towns of Mount Vernon and Anacortes. Bicycling may be the best way to get through this choke-point during construction - car traffic is sure to be backed up, but cyclists should be able to squeak by in the bike lane, or detour toward March's Point on the Coast to Cascades Route or Tommy Thompson Trail (I have never tried these routes, but they are marked on my Skagit County Bike Map).

Since early April I've been working at a new sports gear and clothing retailer in Bellingham. It took me a few weeks to adjust to working again. I caught a cold my first week, and was very absent-minded and scatter-brained at first - lost my keys, lost a lens from my glasses, then broke my back-up pair, then left my back-up keys in my locker at work and had to turn right around and go back to get them. I was commuting by bike at first, but the wardrobe change facilities weren't very convenient, and once the store opened my work hours matched up with the bus schedule pretty well. Most days now I ride the bus, but on weekends I get out for 25-35 mile rides, and I'm still planning some little overnight trips, after my failure at joining the Adventure Cycling group.