Life under the “Shelter In Place” quasi-quarantine in the pandemic of 2020 is not much different than “Real Life” for us. Having had home businesses over the last 10 to 20 years, we’re well-equipped to keep busy without leaving the house. We’ve settled in to our hobbies, Judy working on her art journals and me, well, mostly surfing the web, communicating on various forums, working on software and web sites, editing video from our bicycle outings, cooking, and a bit of cleaning now and then. And we have gotten out on our bicycle twice since the “Troubles” arrived at our doorstep. The only thing changed is we don’t see other people, except for rare forays out for food and necessities, armed with a short list to get in and out quickly. We are more fortunate than most people, because, as retirees, we have a guaranteed subsistence income, for at least as long as the government remains solvent and functioning. Our retirement savings are in free-fall with the market crashing, but we typically use those funds for travel, which isn’t happening for the foreseeable future. Also, because we are moderately active seniors, with no chronic diseases, we don’t fall into the compromised health conditions which make many people in our age group less likely to survive the pandemic.

The 2019-nCov/SARS-CoV-2 virus (AKA COVID-19, AKA Coronavirus) now sweeping the globe caught us more or less unawares. A few weeks ago, we heard of the outbreak in China, then an inexplicable outbreak at a convalescent home in Kirkland, WA., 200 km away, which we followed with interest, as we had visited a friend there four years ago when she was recovering from a life-threatening diabetic issue. Then, cases started popping up in communities near Kirkland. Containment appeared to be uncertain, yet, here in the South Sound, life and business continued as usual—for a while.

Monday, March 9, Judy had an appointment for a regular 2-year screening, so we blissfully headed to the clinic in Olympia. We were greeted at the door by a staff person handing out masks to people who declared a fever or cough. We, being healthy, declined. The hallway to the imaging department passes by the overflow waiting area for the Urgent Care clinic, which is always cause for concern. Seated in the waiting area for Judy to be tested, I began to question the wisdom of both of us going into the center, while only one needed to be seen.

In the next few days, the contagion spread, with cases appearing in isolated areas, including in counties adjacent to our remote one, tucked up in the forests and bays between the Olympic National Park and Puget Sound. The contagion spread among people who, like the patients at the Kirkland facility, had not traveled to China: the news reported that the incubation period before visible illness was long enough for people to spread the virus to many. And, it was also obvious that, unlike other zoonotic viral diseases, COVID-19 spread easily person-to-person, rather than animal reservoir to human. Nevertheless, on Tuesday, March 10, we went to yoga class at the Senior Center. The room is large enough for 2-meter spacing of mats, so we thought it would be OK. We even went out to dinner one day last week, though at a restaurant that is mostly take-out, with few eat-in customers. We may order from them as the nationwide isolation continues, if they continue to remain open.

On Wednesday, March 11, we delivered a refurbished bicycle to the current Holly House resident, an artist from Tucson, AZ. We’re on the board of Hypatia-in-the-Woods, a non-profit that maintains a cottage retreat for women in the arts, and help maintain the facility as well as meeting with the artists during their stay and keeping the web site up to date. We also had our 11-year-old grandson for the day, during parent-teacher conferences while our work-at-home son was on a business trip out of state and our daughter-in-law was busy with the final days of the state legislative session. We went for a walk, to Dairy Queen, and to the Senior Center thrift shop to look for craft items. There was talk of self-quarantine for people who might have been exposed. Since the spread of the disease seemed imminent, and children and travelers seemed to be carriers, we elected to start a self-imposed semi-quarantine, i.e., limit our social interactions to close associates.

On Thursday, we met with other members of our programs and workshops committee for the Olympia Weavers Guild at an Olympia Fire Station to reserve a meeting room for an upcoming workshop in late March, only to be told that, minutes earlier, they had been directed to not make new reservations, due to the growing move to limit social contact to slow the spread of the disease. The next day’s scheduled guild meeting in Tacoma had already been cancelled, and the cascade of cancellations was just beginning.

Over the next week, normal life came to a crashing end: A granddaughter, on vacation in Chicago for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, caught one of the last, nearly empty flights home to El Paso, after the bars and restaurants closed and before Midway Airport closed because of staff illnesses. She is in self-quarantine at home, as a precaution, since she works in a home-health agency. Meanwhile, the pandemic has arrived in El Paso. In all the organizations to which we belong: Tacoma Weavers Guild, Olympia Weavers Guild, Friends of the Shelton Library, Mason County Senior Activities Association, and Hypatia-in-the-Woods, a flurry of communication among the boards started canceling the rest of March scheduled events, then extended to April cancellations, then indefinite closures. Public libraries and community meeting rooms closed. Schools closed. We made a quick run to a local open-air produce stand to get fruit and vegetables, where customers tend to arrive one at a time. Word of hoarding of household supplies, particularly paper products, kept us from even trying to replenish our dwindling supples, going into rationing mode. We decided only one of us need shop at a time, and I made a quick trip to the grocery for dairy products, visiting only the one aisle and using the self-checkout, to reduce close contact with others.

The weather cleared on Sunday, the 15^th. And we went for a walk in our neighborhood, which has become a sort of springtime ritual with us in the ten years we’ve lived here. We walked down the middle of the streets (there are no sidewalks), up the steep hills to the summit at the water standpipe and the last street,16^th. We saw a few people, who waved from their yards, and spoke with a woman at the community garden, from a distance.

On Monday, we got half a tank of fuel for the truck and headed to the west end of the county to ride our bicycle, on a paved loop from the tiny settlement of Matlock (C-store, post office, and Grange Hall) north into the foothills of the Olympic Mountains. Meanwhile, the governor directed everyone over 60 to “shelter in place,” i.e., stay at home, don’t go out, get delivery, etc. This is not practical, of course, so we decided our “shelter place” is on our tandem bicycle, on empty roads. We went out again on Thursday, same place, different course. This time, we visited the still-closed Truman Glick County Park, with permission from the caretaker, with whom we spoke at a careful distance.

Life will not be the same. The pandemic is sweeping across the country, exponentially: it hasn’t yet been two weeks since the first of us decided we would all need to quarantine for at least two weeks after random proximity to groups of people. Quarantine can’t practically be complete. We still have a lot of stored food supplies, but not enough variety to assemble balanced meals over time, so we will still need to venture out for perishables and staples we run out of. To support the state ban on social interaction by senior citizens, the local grocery is reserving two two-hour time slots a week as a respite from the Elder Ban, as we call it, alternating with labeling it “house arrest.” We had a brief scare coming home from our bike ride when a sheriff’s car behind us pulled our van over just outside town. But, it turned out he was just signaling to let another police vehicle pass, on its way to a call, and he pulled around us and continued on. The “Elder Ban” is not put in place to protect us older citizens, but to protect inadequate medical facilities from being overwhelmed by patients most at risk for dying from the disease. In some parts of the world, bicycling has been banned on the premise that bicycle crashes are common enough to overwhelm the medical facilities.

In less than two weeks, we have gone from “normal” life with scheduled activities and travel plans to nearly virtual shutdown. All our activities have been canceled at least through May, libraries and dine-in eating establishments shuttered, schools closed, and travel ground to a halt. Early on, we canceled a planned vacation that was to have started on March 22, and the resorts have all shut down by now, anyway. We have no illusions that these drastic actions will stop the pandemic, The social isolation practices will merely slow it, so that when we do get sick, and we will, that the medical facilities will have the equipment necessary to keep the staff safe and provide adequate treatment to those mostly likely to survive.

Meanwhile, we will continue to maintain contact with our social circles and organizations by email, Facebook, and other electronic media. We will continue to ride our bicycle, on isolated country roads. We had a list of cycling events scheduled this summer in which we were thinking of participating. We’ve participated in those before, and put up with the crowds more than socializing, riding on our own rather than groups, so we may just take the route maps and ride the routes at some random time, and hope that too many others didn’t have the same idea. We have our van outfitted for camping. Unfortunately, we don’t have self-contained sanitary facilities, so will need to take precautions when using public facilities, if indeed the established campgrounds remain open through this crisis. Or, we could opt to revert to the bucket of wood shavings and peat moss we used at the Montana cabin as a litter box for people. Difficult problems require creative solutions.

It’s been over 100 years since the last major pandemic that touched the lives of most of the country. My grandfather, Grant Goplen, a young potato farmer in sparsely-populated northern Minnesota, died in the 1918 pandemic, but my grandmother, mother, and two uncles survived, their lives changed forever. My grandmother moved away, remarried, had another son and daughter, and lost her second husband to an infection that would be treatable today. She raised her five children alone during the Great Depression, running a boarding house for railway workers. Her children grew up: one son became a successful corporate businessman, two started their own construction company, and my aunt became a nurse and served during World War II. My mother, the middle child, became a housewife, marrying her oldest brother’s best friend, a young man from another single-parent family that survived the pandemic but fell apart on the eve of the Great Depression for much the same reasons families fall apart in good times and bad.

Life will go on. Some of us will die, but the rest will adapt, and many will prosper. The pandemic of 1918 spread throughout the world because of the new mobility of steamships and world war that put populations in motion with soldiers and refugees, and touched everywhere despite the relative isolation of small towns. The pandemic of 2020 has the potential to be much worse because of the mobility of automobiles, jet planes, the much higher population density, and the length of the invisible infectious period. And, with the pressure of climate change coupled with population density, new viruses evolve rapidly, so this is only the worst so far of multiple waves of pandemics that have come and will come.

Economies will crash, governments will falter, maps will change. Fortunes will be lost, fortunes will be gained. Famine, war, and anarchy will follow the worst. And, through it all, climate change will continue, even if the fossil fuel economy crashes. Forest fires will continue. Survivors will heat and cook with wood or coal, once again. Processes started will continue unabated with no means for mitigation: glaciers and permafrost will melt, raising sea levels and pumping even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. One thing is certain: nature is forcing humanity to change in ways we were unwilling to do when we felt we were invincible masters of the universe.

Coda:

It is now Tuesday, 24 March, 2020. We’ve been mostly in the house, with a few forays out to walk to the top of our hill and back. The produce market is still open, and I went to the grocery this morning during the assigned Senior Shopping Hour. It was a bit more crowded than I would have preferred, but edging around others and not getting face-to-face with anyone seemed to work. I wore an exam glove on one hand to push the cart, open freezer doors, and operate the self-service checkout screen. Since it was mostly other old people, I didn’t have any competition for the self-checkout. I’d used it last week, but this was the first time to use it with loose produce that had to be weighed or counted, and I figured out why kinds of motions made the robot happy: don’t put your reusable bags in the bagging area until after scanning the first item, etc.

Our grandsons from Olympia needed to be out of their house when their house cleaner came yesterday, and both parents still need to be away from home for work, so we got the grandparent duty. Fortunately, they can drive themselves now, so they just showed up for the afternoon, and left when it was time to go home. It seems like yesterday we had car seats and booster seats for when we had to pick them up. There’s no school for them, of course. The younger one (11) has some on-line learning, and likes to do paper and bead crafts with Granny when he’s here, but the high-schooler (the driver, 16) is on his own, spending a lot of time in Multi-User Online Gaming with his friends. Goodbyes were awkward with the “no-hugging” policy, but Granny couldn’t resist a no-skin hug. Does this reset our 14-day isolation?

This week is rainy, limiting our opportunity for outings. We’ve ordered a few things on-line for parcel delivery, but toilet paper is completely out of stock, despite quotas at the wholesale club. I’ve been baking bread, and we have a good supply of flour, but the store shelves are empty of flour. The two trips I’ve made to the grocery since the lockdown started have been direct, pick up what’s on the list, and check out, as quickly as possible, so I don’t know how the other supplies are holding up. Produce is plentiful, and we buy other items locally that we would normally get at the wholesale club, to avoid trips to the city.

In addition to ordering things online for which we would normally go to the store, we boxed, weighed, measured, and purchased and printed shipping labels for a set of journals Judy needed to send to a vendor in Tennessee, and dropped it on the counter in the post office, avoiding the six-foot spacing marks in the line and face-to-face time with the clerks. We’re doing what we can to reduce the number of bullets in the chamber in the Coronavirus Roulette game. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most of the infections spread through random close encounters. Minimizing those encounters is a strategy to slow the spread of the pandemic until the medical supplies can catch up with demand. Eventually, continued exposure, no matter how brief or infrequent, will put a viral bullet under the hammer.

The social obligations in this brave new world are sorting themselves out. Email has been a staple, but some of the organizations in which we are on the board or in small special-interest groups are talking about video conferencing, so we’ve installed Zoom on all our devices in preparation, and I’ve revived my dormant Skype account for one-on-one alternative to Apple Facetime, which we also haven’t used since Judy’s brother-in-law died last year. Yet another way life will change. But, we’re ready for that.  We have the technology.

Day 7, Fathers Day: Prince George, BC.  We are up early, the first in the breakfast room at the hotel, then pack out and head for the Hart Highway, BC 97 North. We stop at Sav-On for more groceries and Starbucks for our morning coffee. Heading north, we stop for fuel before leaving the Prince George metro area, then cruise the long empty road north. We stop at Mackenzie Junction for a lunch of convenience store fare: muffins, bottled Frappaccinos, potato chips, and yogurt from our grocery stop. I am stuffed, and have used up most of my daily calorie allowance in one take.

After Mackenzie Junction, we pass the roadside notice: “Check Fuel, no service for 148 km.” We’re still good, and press on over Pine Pass in some of the most spectacular mountain scenery this trip, through the foothills to Chetwynd, festooned from end to end with fantastical and whimsical chainsaw carvings, the fruit of many years of contests. We stop for photos at Carver’s Row, then off to Tim Hortons. I get a cappuccino, Judy gets a pastry, and we use the WiFi to phone ahead for directions to our hosts, Janet and Dwight. We make the turnoff, but overshoot the driveway, doubling back just as they prepare to drive out to intercept us at the highway.

Janet and Dwight recently sold a B&B south of Dawson Creek and have moved into their weekend cabin off the grid west of Dawson Creek. But, they have built a utility shed near the road and brought in power, so we have power for our refrigerator and phone recharging. There isn’t any level place to park, but we do the best we can and put up with a slightly tilted bed. Their main cabin is deep in the woods, cozy, but has only solar power. No well, so they truck in water and ration it. We’ve done worse, at our former cabin in Montana, so we’re in luxury compared to that.

Day 8: We explore Dawson Creek, taking in the visitor center, where we collect lots of maps we should have already had, and get some ideas of what to see in the area. The local art gallery is first, with an excellent pottery display from the local potters guild, and a historical photo display of the Alaskan Highway construction in 1942 by the U.S. Army (with coöperation from Canada) to deliver war supplies to Alaska by land. We’re interested in several bridges: the first is a railroad bridge south of town, in the village of Pouce Coupe, [Poose KooPAY] which we eventually find and venture out on part way: it’s perfectly safe, as railroad trestles go, but the gaps between the ties are unnerving, so we don’t cross.

The second bridge to explore is the Kiskatinaw Bridge, on the old Alaska Highway, the last wooden bridge to survive from the 1942 wartime construction of a land supply route to Alaska. It’s curved, as many wooden bridges are, to add stability. The deck and trestles are still sound, but the timber curbs along the inside edge are worse for wear, possibly from vehicles sliding into them in icy conditions, and partly from dry rot. We park in the turnout at the near end of the bridge and walk across. Local traffic zooms across like any normal modern bridge, but we don’t.

Turning around, we head back toward Dawson Creek, with heavy weather looming to the west. We turn off the highway into the downtown to photograph the “Mile 0” post in the center of town, top off the fuel, and head back west to continue our visit. We retire to our van fairly early: our hosts have been busy working on the buildings. The rain starts as we settle in.

Day 9: We’re on the eastern edge of the Pacific Time Zone, so it’s light out at 4:30 am. Camping in our host’s large rural compound means we don’t close the curtains, so we’re up before 5:00. We had tentatively planned to visit a dinosaur site to the south, but decided $50 worth of fuel and most of the day to look at dinosaur footprints wasn’t worth it. We elect to move on, then, and explore a bit more of Alberta instead.

We pack for travel and the four of us head into town for breakfast. Surprisingly, the fast food franchises in Canada offer plant-based sausage alternatives with the egg and muffin (no, it isn’t that franchise, the one with the clown, but one we don’t see often anymore in the U.S.–A&W) A statistic I read the other day says that 10% of Canadians are vegetarian, so it now isn’t surprising to see vegetarian options at most eating establishments, unlike the U.S., where many people view not eating meat as unpatriotic and unwholesome, or just plain weird.

Too soon, we part ways, heading toward Alberta, where we stop for a photo-op with a giant beaver statue at Beaverlodge, then off the freeway for a hike through Saskatoon Island Provincial Park, which hasn’t been an island for almost 100 years. We have decided to check out Grande Prairie, the largest city on our route: the Rotary has a campground near a bike trail. We check in to the campground shortly after noon to make sure we get a good site, then head downtown for lunch at a Pita Pit, which one can find in almost any Canadian city of reasonable size. Like our penchant for stopping at Starbucks when we travel, we know what’s on the menu and we don’t have to guess if they will have food we are willing to eat.

After lunch, we take in the historical museum, including pioneer buildings collected to save them from the ravages of time, decorated with the trappings of everyday life of the period. We also track down the pioneer hospital museum. Surprisingly, the first hospital in Grande Prairie opened in 1911, in a log cabin, with six beds in a tiny cabin, later expanded into a large log home after a proper hospital was built. The new house was still log, but covered with ship-lap siding and plastered inside so it looks like a “modern” stick-built house, a treatment that was fairly common in the early 20^th century as log homes became associated with primitive living and hardship.

We had considered taking time this afternoon to ride the bike trail, but the 40-km/hr winds that had buffeted us since leaving Dawson Creek and continued full strength for the rest of the afternoon discouraged us, so we settle into our campsite: tomorrow promises calm, but cool weather, ideal for us for a long-overdue bike ride.

Day 10 dawns overcast and cool, but the wind has subsided, so we dress in our cycling kits, break camp for breakfast at Starbucks, and park at the museum we visited yesterday: the bike trail runs in front of the museum. We could have ridden from camp, but we didn’t want to be rushed to make it back by check-out time. This turns out to be a good choice: we do a warm-up loop around the reservoir, where the campground is the highest point, then head down the creek under the main highway and westbound rail bridges, across the creek, then up and down, climbing high above the creek bed, then crossing and climbing up to the city streets. We decide to make a loop instead of retracing the up and down route through the canyon, following a bike path toward the downtown, then on less-busy streets through the city center, around the provincial government complex, and back into the park north of where we parked.

Back to Starbucks for lunch: there are other places to eat, but we know the menu and they have electrical outlets for computers and decent WiFi, so that’s where we end up often on these road trips. After lunch, we top off the fuel tank, restock our tiny 12-volt refrigerator at Sav-On and head south on Route 40, 173 km of no services. We pass many natural gas wellheads and drive through several large road construction projects, where passing lanes are being built on this lonely highway that rolls up and down across the Rocky Mountain foothills. Dark clouds gather, and we drive through a few rain squalls. Snow-capped ridges and peaks appear ahead through breaks in the clouds.

As the GPS counts down, we pass a coal mine, an industrial facility on the banks of the Smoky River. The hillsides above the highway are deeply terraced, with nearly vertical coal veins sprinkled across the gouges in the mountain. The road crosses the river and climbs steeply into the town of Grande Cache, the only settlement in the middle of this 325-km-long stretch of highway. We stop, check out the municipal campground, which is gravel, with a long walk uphill to the washrooms, and the WiFi winks out as we approach the nearest available site. The weather report predicts several days of continuous heavy rain. Unpaved roads in Canada tend to turn to gumbo in rainy weather. We walk back to the office, thank them for their time, and drive back over the hill to the information center, where we check motel prices on their WiFi and settle for one of the more inexpensive ones with good ratings.

We  find we have a kitchenette unit, so we cook dinner from our food stores and have plenty of room to spread out our electronics for work and recharging. We plan the road ahead: The weather forecast calls for extended rain all across the northern Rockies, so we plot a course to take us far enough into British Columbia to the south to drive through the worst of it, farther than we intended, but sight-seeing in Jasper National Park in heavy rain and cloud doesn’t seem a good plan.

Day 11 sees us off toward Jasper. Less than 20 km from Grande Cache, the rain turns to snow. Southbound traffic is far enough ahead of us that the tracks are faint, but we follow them as best we can. The snow gets heavier as we go, but tapers off about 30 km from the junction with Highway 16.

The run into Jasper is uneventful, slow at times because of road construction. Highway 16 runs through the National Park, but bypass is permitted without an entrance fee as long as one does not leave the highway. We do, at Jasper, for coffee and fuel, but are immediately stopped by a slowly-moving passing train. Trains in Canada are often several kilometers long, and this is no exception. After the long wait, we fail to find a parking spot near the Tim Hortons, so just top off the tank at Esso and move on.

Before we get too far, there is more road construction, and another delay, with a one-lane temporary bridge slowing traffic. The rain continues into British Columbia. We pass Mt. Robson, the highest point in British Columbia, but can only see the lower half of the mountain. We turn off onto BC 5, headed south. At the first town, Valemount, we spot a sign for espresso, so venture into the town and find The Gathering Place, which has good espresso and irresistible desserts.

Down the highway, we brake for a young bear ambling across the highway right in front of us. We intended to stop at Clearwater and camp, but it’s only 3:30 and Kamloops is an hour and a half away, so we make reservations at a hotel and continue on, through intermittent light rain, following the  North ForkThompson River into the city. Kamloops is a large city in central BC, with major industries including paper, plywood, and copper. Its central location also makes it a favorite for regional sporting events and academic institutions.

We check in, then walk up the street to the nearby Coast Hotel, which has an attached sports bar, Romero’s. We select a couple of vegetarian appetizers to share, a dark beer on tap, and top off with crème brûlée for dessert, skipping a main dish. It’s been a long day, and a wearing one driving in snow, slush, and rain. We’d intended to spend a bit more time around Jasper National Park, but the rain hid the mountains and, with the solstice coming up tomorrow, the summer tourist season is well underway, snow or no snow, rain or not, and we’re not comfortable around crowds, preferring to explore off the beaten track.

Day 12: We shoulder through the tour bus crowds at the hotel breakfast bar, stop after breakfast for coffee at a nearby Starbucks, and head for the Coquihalla Highway south. The truck has been running rough at idle and difficult to handle in city driving, so we’re glad to be out of the city. Kamloops is exploding up the steep hills to the south, making for crazy navigation between commercial centers terraced between residential housing.

Our relief is short-lived, however. As we climb up into the mountains in the empty wilderness, the “Check Engine” light comes on. The truck is running smoothly at highway speed, but the lack of any services for 115 km ahead and the few U-turn exits on this speedway between the widely-spaced cities gives cause for concern. A bit more than an hour later, we drop down to the junction city of Merritt, low on fuel and running rough. At the fuel stop, I notice the vehicle next to us has an auto parts logo, so I ask the driver about repair shops. He sends me next door to his shop, which, unlike the Napa parts stores in the U.S., is a repair shop. They’re busy, but refer me to a tire store on a back street that does repairs. After an hour’s wait, they hook it up to the analyzer and deliver the report: an EGR (Exhaust Gas Recycler) sensor alarm. Not an immediate emergency, but the engine will run rough at idle and dump too much nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. We elect to move on, as the repairs would mean removing the engine cover inside the passenger compartment and maybe delay us the rest of the day.

The warning light stays off as we climb up the next series of mountain passes and stop for lunch at the only roadside rest area on the route. At last, we reach the Coquihalla Summit and wind steeply down the mountain river valley to the flat alluvial plain of the Fraser River delta. We stop at Chilliwack, having planned an afternoon bike ride along the Fraser through the sloughs and farmland where it begins to spread between the mountains. It’s 3:00pm, late in the day for us to ride, but we’re determined.

The route twists and turns through residential neighborhoods, then on farm roads and finally onto a dyke, designated a non-motorized trail, part of the Canyon to Coast Route. It’s gravel, but fairly hard packed, except for 2 or 3 kilometers in the middle, past the hops fields, where the gravel is looser. The view opens up as it runs along the river near the mouth of the canyon ahead, then drops us onto a paved road that used to run to the ferry landing where the BC 9 bridge stands today.

We turn around under the bridge and head back, into the wind that consistently blows up the flat valley from the Georgia Straits, 100 km away. We follow Camp River Road, a paved farm road and alternative part of the trail, along the Camp Slough, sheltered a bit by the cottonwood trees, but it’s a hard grind against the relentless wind. At last, we leave the farms and the smells that identify this one as dairy, that one, pigs, and the other one, chickens, before we even see the barns. The road becomes more residential, and has a shoulder, of sorts, that dodges around utility poles and trees. Then, we’re through neighborhoods we rode before and back to the park and our van, 31.5 km (19.5 miles), a flat ride, but hard work after a tense day traversing the mountains in a cranky old truck.

We retrace our route back to the freeway and a short 20-minute drive to our hotel, hot, tired, and ravenously hungry. We throw our bags in the room and head for the on-premises restaurant, still in our cycling clothing. By the time we’re settled in and showered, it’s late, and we collapse into bed. Tomorrow, we head across the border toward home. Summer has come at last, and the roads, campgrounds, and hotels are filling with tourists, making travel less than idyllic. Time to be home.

Day 13: We’re up early. No complimentary breakfast in this old but upgraded motel, since there is a restaurant on the property, so we make do with microwave: reheated leftovers from dinner and instant oatmeal. We’re less than 5 km from the U.S. border, so getting there doesn’t take long, but the lane we’re in is slow: there’s only one checkpoint, while the other lane fans out to four. The Check Engine light comes on again as we creep forward over the next hour. Unlike the Canadian crossing, where the border agents are mainly concerned with your destination, whether you intend to leave anything in Canada, and whether you have weapons, the U.S. border agents want to know how long you were there, where you went, and why, and what you brought back. It always seems they aren’t happy we left the country and even less happy that we came back.

Once across the border, we continue south on WA Highway 9 instead of following the GPS route to Bellingham, stopping in Sedro Wooley for coffee and a pastry. At Arlington, we finally turn on the GPS and join the I-5 freeway flow to the Edmonds – Kingston ferry, where we wait through two sailings before we end up the first car on the next sailing, which makes the drive to Poulsbo relatively painless, at the front of the ferry traffic from Kingston. The rest of the trip is just a long jaunt down WA Highway 3 to Shelton and home, where we quickly unload and put things away, to settle in for the rest of the summer.