ROUTE: Edmonds – Woodinville
DATE: Wednesday 17 April 2024
DISTANCE: 15.7 miles
Human Traffic: Moderate
Vehicle Traffic: Moderate
Sometimes a grand adventure starts with months of meticulous planning and research. Sometimes it starts in a bathrobe the morning of. This is the latter kind of adventure.
The morning of April 17, 2024 began innocuously enough. I was sitting at my office desk at home, in my bathrobe, drinking coffee and reading the news on my computer. Same as any other morning, really. The sun was shining through the window and I could already tell it was going to be a nice day.
I moved to Washington state in 2020, during the peak of the pandemic. People warned me that the winters would take their toll, but after nearly a decade in the San Francisco Bay Area I was ready for a change and I dismissed those concerns. For the first three winters everything went fine. But the winter of 2023-2024, everything went wrong. I don’t know what happened, but I got clinically depressed and wound up fleeing to sunnier places like Hawaii and New Zealand to try and break the funk. I spent most of February and March as a snowbird, but April found me back home and ready for the departure of the Great Winter Murk. All of this to say, on this particular morning in April, I was unusually receptive to the overtures of a spring day.
As I sat there at the desk, I became aware of the dappled sunlight twinkling through the emergent leaves, and the cloudless blue sky. Spring had not yet really arrived but it was putting on a one-day-only preview and it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss. Somewhat idly I opened Google Maps and discovered that I could get all the way to Edmonds, on the other side of Puget Sound, for $2. The bus would pick me up at the bottom of the hill and convey me, eventually, to the ferry at Kingston, which in turn would take me over to “the other side.” There was just one catch: due to limited transit connections, if I wanted to arrive in Edmonds with time to do anything, I’d need to get dressed, prepared, and out the door in six minutes. I spent two minutes debating whether I ought to go for it, as the clock ticked down to four minutes left. Finally, feeling rather like Mole in The Wind in the Willows, I said “to hell with it” and began the mad dash to prepare.
As it was out of season, I didn’t have my “go bag” ready, but I quickly tossed in a liter of water, some sunscreen, two pairs of earbuds, my ORCA (transit) card, and a credit card. Most importantly, I added my Old Man Hat. I am officially an old man now and I need my bucket hat to keep the sun off. A much-loved, well-traveled, long-sleeved shirt from Columbia, some Kuhl hiking pants, a Garmin Fenix 6 Pro Solar watch, woolen socks, and my trusty Merrell Moabs completed my kit, and I was out the door and rushing down the hill. I arrived at the bus stop one minute before Kitsap Transit 212 did.
There’s not really much to say about Kitsap Transit, which is a good thing. The bus was on time and conveyed me along the mildly scenic shoreline of Dyes Inlet to the Silverdale Transit Center, where I had a five minute transfer to KT 332, which took me to the North Viking Transit Center in Poulsbo. I had never been to this particular transit center before, and it’s pretty nice as such things go. There are a few hundred parking spaces, free EV charging, and so on. Most importantly, though, there are buses to other places, including some exotic options I wasn’t used to seeing. One in particular caught my eye. There was a Jefferson Transit bus standing at one bay, an agency whose buses I had never seen before. Naively, I assumed this was the fabled Strait Shot service to Port Angeles, but it was not. Little did I realize it at that moment, but I would become intimately familiar with this bus in the coming days. That, dear reader, is called foreshadowing.
After a brief 5 minute transfer I was once again on my way, and KT 307 dropped me off at the Kingston ferry terminal at 10:50 AM. There was a crowd of perhaps 20 people randomly milling around in what passed for the queue and I engaged in some idle chit chat with a few of them.
