Bicycles, Bridges, Ferries And Islands. OH MY!

Yesterday was a fantastic day in the Northwest. The temperature got up to the low 70's and the sun was out. I decided that it would be a great day to do a long bicycle ride to a location I have never been before. I had been planning to ride to Anderson Island for some time.

I was up at 5 and on the road by 0615. My plan was to truck the bicycle to the Gig Harbor park and ride and continue from there. I was on the bike by 0706 and heading down the Cushman Trail toward the Narrows Bridge. This is a nice paved trail that was the old powerline service road. It makes a nice way to get to the Narrows Bridge and beyond.

After reaching the Tacoma side, I continued south on side streets that lead me to the ferry dock at Steilacoom and boarded the 0900 ferry. It is a twenty minute ferry ride to Anderson Island.

I have never been to Anderson Island before, so I had actually preplanned a route using Google Map. I chose a route that took me as much as possible around the periphery of the island. As it was, it was only 12miles around the island. The island seems very rural and quiet. There was very little traffic on the roads. The roads are mainly rough chip seal and there are many hills. I wondered about a "town", well, there really isn't one. The only businesses I saw was a General Store(with fuel pumps), Coffee Shop and Country Store all located together in the approximate center of the island.

I was back to the ferry for the 1130 sailing back to Steilacoom. From there to Gig Harbor I again followed the secondary roads and trails. I did divert through the Chambers Creek golf course facility that has several paved multipurpose trails. I was back to the truck by 1230. Total distance:39.1 miles.

A short video of my day trip.



This has been a frustrating post to write. Blogger has updated their interface and I was unable to write a post. Their "Help" is hard to use, but I finally found a setting in my browser that was easy to correct. Their original error message was that my browser was incompatible, so use ours! Right! I was about ready to abandon Blogger and I opened an account in Wordpress.