I edited together a video combining photos and video from the bike touring trip.  Hope you like it!

Best to click through to the Vimeo site so you can watch it in high definition.

Day 4 – 30 miles, Day 5 – rest/travel

We were up at the 6AM alarm call to strike camp and be on the road by 7 so that we could make it from our camp site to Friday Harbor in time for the 8:45 ferry. It was a foggy and cool morning, but a gorgeous ride as we cruised four miles back in to town.

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Day 3 – 53 miles

We got up at a reasonable hour at our campsite and I grabbed a shower. The site continued to impress me as one of the cleanest and best maintained campsites that I’ve encountered. After some breakfast we chatted with our site neighbors, who were hardcore touring folks. We unloaded Chris’s panniers and unhooked my trailer, and set off for a day of unloaded bike touring.

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Day 2 – 32 Miles

We woke up at our first campsite, which turned out to be very quiet overnight, but the air was extremely damp, so everything got soaked. I got up and had some breakfast, a quick shower (for the low low price of one Looney coin), and made with breaking camp.

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Day 1 – 53.9 miles

We got up at 6AM today, loaded the car, grabbed some Starbucks and headed for the Anacortes ferry terminal to catch the 8:15 to Sidney, B.C.

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San Juan Islands / Victoria B.C. Bike Trip – Travel Day

Got about 3.5 hours of sleep last night after packing and before I had to get up and head to the airport to catch my 6:50 flight. Fairly long travel day – nothing too exciting of note, except on the long leg of the flight I swapped seats with a guy who wanted to sit with his family and ended up in an extended legroom seat, which made for a much more comfortable flight.

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I decided a somewhat brutal ride (for my current physical condition) was in order for a gorgeous Friday, so I decided to combine a round trip road ride (a bit over 8 miles each way) with some moderate mountain biking at Lowell/Dracut/Tyngsboro State Forest.  I packed a quick lunch of cheese sandwiches along with some hummus and carrots, and made up some impromptu trail mix with cashews and chocolate covered espresso beans.  Once suitably outfitted, I headed out of the house and made decent time on the road to the main LDTSF parking lot.   Had a bite to eat and then hit the trails.

I’ve ridden at LDT a few times, but I still find the collection of old doubletracks and service roads combined with twisty singletrack to be a bit confusing, and I have ended up mildly lost every time I’ve ridden there.  Even with a map, it’s easy to get confused, especially in the areas that don’t (yet?) have markers at the intersections.  The park seems to have a lot of trails that aren’t on the map as well, so it’s easy to end up somewhere unexpected.  Every time I ride there I am certain I’ve missed the best singletrack, though I manage to find some of it.

It was also quite wet, which is no surprise given the weather we’ve been having.  Many deep mud puddles and pools of standing water, and the water was quite high in the various bodies of water in the park.  Ran across what looked like a beaver dam towards the end of the ride and got a couple of shots of that, along with the incredibly glassy water.  Also ran across a series of trees with burlap banding around them and spray painted numbers on them.  Not sure what the deal is – diseased trees, perhaps?

The ride back was definitely tiring, and indeed my legs were basically done as I pedaled back up the hill to my house in granny gear.  Got typical roadie heckling riding over the Tyngsboro bridge on the way back too (“sidewalk’s over there!”).  I’m beginning to see why roadies curse the cagers.  Aside from that, it was a good ride, and it was nice to finally do an out-and-back from my house instead of getting in the car to drive to the trailhead.  I don’t know why it took me almost 5 years to do it, but there you go.

Photos this time around are crappy cell phone camera pictures, but better than none.  I did take a GPS track log, but between giving away my house location, and losing signal a dozen times in the forest, it’s not really worth it.  Best distance estimation was about 16 miles of road riding and about 8 miles of mtb.

Logged 16.5 road/rail trail miles on the bike on Saturday riding from my house to my friends’ house for their 4th of July bash, then capped off the weekend with 12 miles of sea kayaking from Long Wharf on the Jones River in Gloucester out to Halibut Point Quarry and back.  On top of a bunch of games of volleyball at my own 4th3rd of July party on Friday, it was a nice active weekend.  Most importantly, the sun actually made an extended appearance!  It’s about time, after that miserably wet June!

For future reference, a possible fun trip might be to follow the Blackburn Challenge route to nearly circumnavigate Cape Ann

Sea Kayaking GPS Tracks

	#	Elevation	Distance	Time	Movingtime	Speed	Movingspeed	Max Speed	Climb Up	Climb Down
	1	25 m	0.000 mi	0s	0s	-	-	-	-	-
	2	8 m	12.058 mi	4h 28m 32s	4h 28m 32s	2.69 mph	2.69 mph	5.78 mph	495 ft	551 ft
Summary			12.058 mi	4h 28m 32s	4h 28m 32s	2.69 mph	2.69 mph	5.78 mph	495 ft	551 ft

Download GPX File