Chapter 20

Charley’s turn:

We’d kept riding through most of the winter, though our rides were shorter during the colder months and restricted to weekends, since it grew dark early. As the days got longer, we started going out after work again, interspersing bike time with kayak outings when the winds allowed.

On weekends, we began doing longer rides. After building back up to it, we often hit my 100K route. At other times, we went over to Whidbey Island to get a real workout — the roads around the periphery of the island gave the impression of being little more than a series of hills connected by more hills.

With the longer rides under our belts, we felt good about our decision to do a bike tour for our honeymoon. The problem came when I did some research on camp sites that allowed tents. There just didn’t seem to be as many as I’d have liked on the first leg of the trip. We were looking for tent oriented camping sites, preferably in small campgrounds with as few RV/trailer spots as possible, and spaced no more than twenty-five or thirty miles apart.

“I’m sorry, love,” I said. “It doesn’t look like there are enough places to camp, unless we want to go for the guerrilla option.” She shook her head — we’d discussed that approach to camping before, and neither of us was comfortable with the idea. “We’d end up doing some longer days, fully loaded, and I’d rather have fun than be exhausted all the time.”

“Do you want to call off the trip?” she asked, disappointment tinging her voice. “I’ve been looking forward to it for months, now.”

I shook my head and smiled at her, then kissed her nose. “No, but I think we want to use hotels instead of camping. We’d be travelling much lighter, without the set up and teardown time, so we can do longer days if we need to.”

She looked thoughtful for a minute, then brightened. “Hot showers after riding in the rain. Clean sheets. Pillows for you to chew on.” She dodged my mock blow. “Okay, that has some appeal. Does that mean we’ll finish earlier, or do we want to ride further?”

We devoted the next several hours to checking out maps and ride reports before deciding to take the same two weeks, but go all the way around the peninsula and back home. The following day we spent making reservations. There were some complications caused by us waiting so long, but we worked through the problems until we had an itinerary that we thought we could handle.

The second Monday in July, almost exactly one year after I’d visited Bill and Terri’s backyard and saw their tall, cute, pink-headed granddaughter, found us riding down Highway 12, away from Packwood on the south-east side of Mt. Rainier. In the rain, of course. The first day would be the most mileage of any on our trip, since accommodations were scarce between Packwood and Chehalis, but our legs were fresh, so we didn’t foresee any problems.

When we rode into Chehalis at 5:30 we decided to see if Bill was still in the office. Amber saw us as we pulled up and unlocked the door to let us in.

“Hey, don’t I know you two drowned rats?” Amber asked.

“Hi, Amber,” Claire said. “How’s it going?”

“It’s going pretty well, actually,” she said, just as her dad came out of his office.

“Wow! You look like you’ve been riding in the rain,” he said. “What are you two doing here, dripping on our floor?” Everyone’s a comedian.

He was smiling, so I wasn’t worried. “Isn’t it obvious, we’re on our honeymoon!” I said, getting a laugh. “We started in Packwood, we’ll go out to Ocean Shores, then continue around the peninsula to get home. Hotels all the way, too.”

“Good idea, though the weather is supposed to clear up here later this week, so maybe you started a little too early,” Amber said.

Claire shook her head, saying, “We need to be back for the wedding of a couple of friends, so it was either leave now or shorten the trip.”

“Well, at least you look like you’re dressed for it. Where’re you staying?”

“The Best Western,” I said. “Which reminds me, we should probably head over there and check in, not to mention cleaning up.”

“Why don’t you give us a call when you’re done. We’re going out to eat tonight anyway, and we’d love to have you along.”

Claire looked at me and grinned. “You’ve got yourself dinner companions,” I said. “Figure it’ll be an hour and half before we’re ready. Should I just call here?”

Amber shook her head. “No, let me get you my cell number.” She jotted it down on the back of one of her business cards and handed it to me.

“Thanks. We’d best get over there, then. See you shortly.”

We headed back out into the rain, though it had lightened up in the last couple of hours, and made our way to the hotel, where we dripped on their carpet.

“You should have a ground-floor reservation for Charlotte Lewis-Black,” I said to the clerk.

She didn’t even bat an eye at my condition. Chehalis was on multiple bike routes, so she’d probably seen it all before, at least twice.

She checked the computer and set up a couple of key cards. “Here you are, Ms. Lewis-Black. Just around the corner there. They’ve laid down a runner for your bikes per your suggestion.”

The room was just as advertised, and it had a carpet runner down that looked like it had served the same purpose many times.

After a quick shower, we inaugurated our second honeymoon bed before cleaning up again and calling Amber.

“Well, you two look a lot more comfortable,” Amber said when we slid into the back seat of Bill’s pickup.

“We are, but really, it looked worse than it was,” Claire said. “We’ve got good rain gear, and it’s warm enough, so we were about as comfortable as we could be riding in the rain. It’s nice to be clean, though.”

Sitting in the restaurant, Amber asked, “So how is your transition to the UW going? Did you end up taking some tests to get past some of it?”

“Uh ... yeah, it looks like I’ll wind up bypassing the math requirements,” Claire said. “I’ll probably do the same for a lot of the programming classes and most likely a sizeable chunk of the CompSci theory classes.”

“All of the math?” Bill asked.

Claire nodded. “Right. Actually, Professor Steinberg said that I’ll only need a few classes to finish the requirements for a bachelor’s degree in math, and he thinks those can be handled on an individualized instruction basis instead of sitting through a quarter’s class time. For as much as I dreaded the math test, it was actually kind of fun, in a demented sort of way. Honestly, I think I left a fifth of the answers on the last half of the test blank, but some of that stuff was way, way out there in grad land.”

Bill just shook his head. “I was good at math, but I still had to work to get past some of those classes.”

Claire shrugged her shoulders and said, “If it’s any consolation, I’ve decided to double major with civil engineering. I’m going to need to take a lot of classes for that.”

“So, other than those?” Amber asked.

“When we get back from this trip, we’ll move to Seattle. Then before school starts, they’ll have a series of tests for me. After that, I’m planning to be a full-time student, though I’ll be taking several fuzzy classes to broaden my understanding of the world.”

“Like what?”

“I’m aiming to take some dedicated history type classes, definitely art history and probably technology. Maybe even military history. I’d also like to take some philosophy. Linguistics will help with computer science, but I might take some beyond that as well, maybe look at how language has helped to shape cultures. Maybe some anthropology, too. I plan to actually sit through a lot of those classes rather than talking them into doing individualized study, since I’m pretty sure they’ll cover more in class than what’s in the texts.”

Amber squeezed her dad’s hand. “I wasn’t planning to take many soft classes, but Dad insisted. He said I’ll only be an engineer eight hours a day — well, maybe more like twelve hours — but I’ll be a human being all twenty-four, so I should work to be as good a person as I can be.”

He reached an arm around her and hugged her tight before saying, “I’m glad I did, too.” Then he changed tracks. “Do you have any idea where you’ll be living?”

“We do,” I said. “We finally decided that better accommodations trumped being super close to the school, so we’ll be renting a small, fully furnished house on the north side of Ravenna Park starting next month.”

“I told you I can still walk, sweetie,” Claire said.

“I know it’s close enough, but let’s see how it feels before you decide to walk. We’ll still get you a bike locker, so you can ride whenever.”

Amber asked, “What about driving if it’s too nasty out?”

I reached over and took Claire’s hand before she answered. “When I get my license, we’ll think more about it.” At Amber’s questioning look, she said, “I’m still only fifteen until next month. We had to have a judge sign off on us getting married because my mother was trying to regain custody of me and, well, it probably would’ve been very bad if she had.”

“Oh, wow! I knew you were younger than Charley, but I had no idea how young. It looks like you’re happy with how things have turned out, though.”

“I am. I’m as happy as I can imagine being. We were already engaged before that, but we expected to wait until I turned seventeen.”

At that point, Bill changed the subject back to our trip. “So, where are you heading from here?”

“We were planning to take the Willapa Hills trail out, but it doesn’t look like a pleasant route if we’re not camping, and we didn’t feel like hauling the camping gear around for just that part of the ride. Instead, we’ll just follow the river out to Aberdeen. Then we’ll skirt around to Ocean Shores.

“We’ll do three nights there, then we’ll head north along the coast, trying to avoid 101 as much as possible, though we’ll make a side trip to Quinault. After that, we’ll catch the Olympic Discovery Trail most of the way back home.”

“What’s there to do in Ocean Shores for three days?”

“Thursday we’re planning to rent a kayak and muddle around in the bay. Friday is still open. We originally intended to only do one night at Ocean Shores, but I checked out some ride reports from people who’ve toured in that area, and they suggested waiting until the weekend to run the coast. The logging trucks are supposed to be more ... unpleasant ... during the week. This way we’ll make the ride to Lake Quinault on Saturday, and then on to Forks, Sunday.”

Claire got Bill talking about engineering after that. I could just tell she was soaking it up like a sponge. I tried to catch the check, but Bill told me I’d have to arm wrestle him for it, and I decided to keep my arm attached.