**Internet has been terrible everywhere we check. Please forgive us the lack of pictures, as soon as we have a decent connection, we’ll be able to upload photos. Thanks!**
Tonight will be mine and Jodi’s last night beside the ocean for months. We are tucked in our small tent beneath towering, mossy conifers with the Pacific Ocean a little more than a hundred yards away. We are in Anacortes, Washington at Washington Park and tomorrow morning we will mount our bicycles and leave the sea, heading into the mountains.
It’s been years since I spent any significant time away from salty spray, ring-necked wrens and distant shores. The last time, in fact, was hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2007. Since then, Jodi and I have lived and worked by the sea, our rhythms ebbing and flowing with the tide. Less than an hour after we arrived in Seattle this past Sunday, we found our way down to the Pacific Ocean where it washes right up to the edge of the Seattle Skyline. We sat there, looking out at the ocean, looking back at the mountains, this transitory world where tectonic plates and glacial scores underscored our own changes, our own unknowns, our own remoteness.
Yesterday, our boxes arrive. At our campsite, we had our world spread out. All of our nylon and hardware. Rebuilding the bikes, it was the first time I felt whole since we had boxed the bikes up and shipped them out, a week earlier. All of the pieces began to come together, and then, at once, our trip was ready to begin.
We don’t know what the interior will look like. We don’t know what the mountains and farmlands will feel like. We’ve spent time traveling through those areas. We’ve driven through the four-way stops with cornfields on every side. We’ve crossed the continental divide and breathed the thin air. But, beginning tomorrow, we will begin to feel those places. We’ll feel their own relationship with water and land. We’ll feel the rivers and settle into the lakes. We’ll roll along a land shaped by the Ice Age, a reminder of our watery world. We’ll breathe the air in fields struggling for water and be soaked by afternoon rains.
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