Twin Harbors State Park (near Westport, WA)

After riding for 9 days, we have finally reached the Pacific Ocean! We've been following bodies of water for most of our ride so far---mainly the Strait of Georgia and the Hood Canal---but from this point on, we pretty much follow the coast all the way to Mexico.

Over the past few days, we biked around the east side of the Olympic Mountains, since it's supposed to be drier than the west side. We cycled past Anacortes, down through Port Townsend and Hoodsport, and then over to the ocean.

Nature has certainly thrown a few impediments in our way: On Thursday and Friday, we had pretty significant headwinds all day, and we've had to deal with rain every day, but the rain has been intermittent, much better than what we had to deal with on our second day.

Now that we're back to camping, we've started to run into other people who are also biking down the coast. On Friday we camped right next to a middle-aged couple who are on their way down to Monterey; today, we ran into two cyclists our age and a whole group of high school students who are heading down the coast.

The coolest event of the past few days has to be the pirate festival, though. We took a rest day today and biked a few miles to the nearby town of Westport, where there was a pirate festival this weekend. Apparently there are these pirate clubs up here, which seem to do a mix of social and community-service activities. Anyway, the local pirate club was having a festival this weekend, so there were lots of people dressed up as pirates, there were pirate ships in the harbor having mock battles, and there was even a dress-your-dog-like-a-pirate contest. I wish I had the ability to post pictures now, but that will have to wait until we stop at an internet cafe some day.

Total distance so far: 528.1 miles