Just Add Water - The Instant Mystique of the PacNW

Late whiskey-fueled jams, a wedding, this giant squid bike rack.

The ride north out of Seattle is 30 miles of smooth bike trail in light rain. We are blissful singing impromptu songs and laughing for no reason. All wet as we roll into small town Mukilteo on the Sound.

Diamond Knot Brewery – possibly the best chowder in the multiverse, some pizza, a beer devised by Michael "Whip" Wilton of Queensryche.

The next morning we ferry to Whidbey Island and shortly after Z’s rear tire pops, the rains come thick.

Z takes off with her for half an hour and I stand on the roadside in the rain, smelling the trees and singing songs. When they come back, the woman gives us chocolate chip cookies, says something about how the island isn’t what it used to be, but helping people out is what you do on the island, and then dots away down the highway through sheets of rain.

We posts up at a motel in Freeland for the night, accruing just 10 waterlogged miles for the day. At the nearby China City, an ornate refurbished Victorian mansion gone Chinese restaurant and sports bar, we have noodles and cocktails talking to the bartender and a local who brings up conversation as we laugh out loud at the Whidbey paper’s police reports showcasing the mundane trespasses of the island: a twelve-year-old isn’t obeying his mother. Some teenagers are talking very loudly about how “high” they are. A man looks suspicious as he crosses the street. Someone almost drove over the speed limit.

“It’s a safe island,” our barmate says. “Every once in a while you’ll get a murder. Every few years.”

He goes on to tell us about a man who was found shot dead in his car one day on his way to pick up the kids from school. Found by a jogger on the roadside. No leads. Nothing. The wife moves away and the case sits for years until one day someone slips a few words and the story gets around and the scope of things comes together all at once. His wife is arrested in Nevada on a boat bought with the life insurance money called, no kidding, “Off the Hook.” The hitman was apprehended in Ensenada.

Then our barmate tells us about how his dog just dug up a mountain of jewels buried in the back yard of a house he was sitting for a neighbor.

“The jewelry belonged to my neighbor’s grandmother, who buried them three decades ago and forgot about it due to dementia,” he said. “Sometimes she'll look for them in her drawers for hours. So I figure we give her the old pearl necklaces and gold bracelets she buried thirty years ago and see if it rings a bell.”

And as an afterthought, “People are pretty honest around here.”

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written by  chaddeal on May 26, 2012 from Freeland, United States
from the travel blog: Two-Wheel Heart Attack Fuck the World West Coast Bicycle Ride-A-Thon of the Millenium
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