Biking in Seattle

I didn't get to bike as much as I hoped in Seattle even though Alex's father Kim graciously loaned me his mountain bike and Abby let us borrow the bike we bought her for her birthday. There were just too many other interesting things to do. Seattle is very bike friendly. Lois and I rode about 23 miles one of the first days on the Burke Gilman trail. It's a rails to trail path.  It supposedly went a good bit further but we were about done biking for the day.

One highlight on the bike though was successfully biking up Dravus Street. Alex had introduced it to us the night before in the car. He said locals know it as Hill of Death. I know this is a little hard to see in the accompanying picture but this is my iPhone with the app that acts as a level showing the slope on the street as 16.5%.  It probably wasn't quite that steep averaged over a foot. I biked up with the mountain bike in the "granny" ring in front and the lowest in back. It felt like I was ratcheting up the hill as each down stroke took me a bit farther up and I nearly stopped in between each stroke. I wished for my road bike several times but I don't think I would have made it up this hill as it isn't geared low enough.

The additional picture to the right shows a garage opening on to the street. You can't see from the picture that there is a bit of distance between the street and the garage door but it still looked like a challenge to get a car in there.

Going down I felt like if I braked hard I would fly right over the handlebars so I was pretty cautious and didn't let it gain much speed. The steepest part was only one or two short blocks long but the whole hill was at least 6 or 8 blocks.  I might not have been able to control the bike on the nearly level cross streets if I let it to to full speed.

Seattle trip

As I start this post we are on Amtrak Empire Builder about an hour from Chicago returning 17 days after leaving on the same train the other direction to Seattle.  Because travel time is about exactly 2 days each way, we had just one day short of two weeks there. We had a great time.  Abby took off the middle Friday and we rented a car to spend the weekend on San Juan Islands. This is a group of islands in the Puget Sound about 2 hours north of Seattle.  


While we spent most other evenings with her, the rest of the time we were exploring on our own.  Abby had helped us create a list of things to see.  Also the last meal on the train before arriving in Seattle we happened to sit across the table from a couple from Seattle. When they found out we were about to spend two weeks there, they created a whole list of things not to miss.  They overlapped with Abby's list a lot. We got to most of them.  


One highlight for me was getting to spend an evening with my first cousin Rich Nafziger (uncle Ezra's son), his wife Kristen and Ez's widow Margie. They live in Olympia about an hour south of Seattle. I don't remember ever meeting Rich before. Some time ago Eldon suggested him as a friend on Facebook.  I contacted him a couple weeks before leaving. I was surprised to hear that he spent a term with MCC in Washington DC.  He also connected more with Melville but also had fond memories of Dad. He said Dad took him back to college one time when Dad was visiting uncle Ez while Ez was battling cancer. Interestingly, Abby met someone at a conference while we were out there that knew him. He teaches economics at Seattle University.