An 8 AM call to Bike Friday solved the bike problem. The morning was spent tweaking the bike and the load and by 1:20PM I'm fed, hydrated, greased, well rested and ready to start east over Snoqualmie Pass. I've grown fairly comfortable with the load and slow pace now. It is now possible to get from Seattle to North Bend without getting on the freeway anywhere. However this does take some searching and considerably more effort. Trails are not an unmixed blessing. They are often not fully paved which slows you down a bit, but my bike takes a compacted dirt or gravel path pretty well. They tend to have flaws in their signage and when the signage is inadequate it leads to either wandering around looking for the way to go forward or in some cases a simple dead end and then some amount of back tracking. Often one can find someone to ask about trails, but it seems there are a lot of people around who know of trails, but who have never actually been on them or at least not to their ends. This leads to assurances about the surface, or distance or completeness, or destination that do not always prove to be accurate. On the other hand trails often contain really pleasant riding opportunities, especially as compared to a freeway as was true yesterday.
With not too much misdirection I reached the outskirts of Preston, but there the trail disappeared with not a hint of which way to go to look for it. I asked a guy with a bike waiting for a bus (the best source of biking information is a biker) and was directed in the right direction to pick it up again, but in fact I missed it and was riding slowly and perplexedly as I looked. What I found, or rather who I found was Colleen. I asked if she knew of a trail to Snoqualmie and she replied that she lived there and was on her way. She is working on using her bike to commute to her job in Issaquah. She graciously invited me to join her and off we went. Much of the ride with her was improved by pleasant conversation, but just as we seemed to be getting close to our goal the trail along the old railroad tracks stops abruptly and we had to backtrack about half a mile and then resort to pushing our bikes up a steep and narrow walking trail over Snoqualmie Ridge. At the top you come to the back side of the big housing development of the same name. It was a hard couple of miles, but from there on, downhill and flat into historic Snoqualmie. To celebrate we went to dinner at a nice Italian restaurant. Colleen accompanied me to the trail head of a short flat path to North Bend where we said goodby. The ice cream store in North Bend was just closing when I slipped in the door. A cone and a shower at the nearby motel ended my day in comfort.
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