On a bike-train-bus-bus-bus-bus-ferry-bike trip to Lopez Island
My spouse Kelli, seven-year-old child and I woke up Tuesday morning with a plan to get to Lopez Island with our bicycles and camping gear using only public transit.
There are a handful of fun options if you can bike 30 or so miles on roads, but that's a bit too much for our kid to do on her own bike. So we're sort of in an awkward middle transition phase for bike-riding car-free families where she's a little too big for me to carry her long distances on my road bike, but she's still building up her own biking range and abilities. How then are we supposed to get to the San Juan Islands with our bikes if we don't have a car?
A public transit marathon!
For some reason, there is no direct transit connection between Seattle and the Anacortes Ferry Terminal. However, there are a few ways that you can string together a series of transit rides to get there. The downside is that you have to transfer a lot. We decided to try a route using Sound Transit and Skagit Transit.
We started by biking from our home to U District Station to catch the light rail to Lynnwood. It was easy since the train was mostly empty headed northbound in the morning.
Next step was to transfer at Lynnwood to the Sound Transit 512 to Everett. This was our first bus, and making sure we can get our bikes on the bus is the main source of anxiety for our plan. Buses only have space for three bikes on the front. To give ourselves wiggle room, Kelli is riding a Brompton folding bike. If one other person has a bike, then we can still get on the bus. But if two people have bikes, our plan could fall apart. Luckily, nobody else had a bike to put on the 512, so it was on to Everett.
There was someone else with a bike at Everett Station during our 20-minute or so wait for the Skagit Transit 90X bus to Mount Vernon, so it was a good thing Kelli could fold up the Brompton and bring it on board. We all got on with our bikes and headed to Mount Vernon.
The driver of the 90X gave us some great advice. We were going to wait at Mount Vernon for the 40X, but he suggested getting on the earlier 615 if it had bike spaces open, which it did. The 615 is a winding local bus that goes to La Conner and Shelter Bay on the Swinomish Reservation. It was a beautiful bus ride, and though it added some extra bus time to our day, it also got us to March's Point about 10 minutes earlier.
At March's Point, we could have biked the rest of the way to the ferry, though there are stretches of SR-20 that might make me a little nervous with a seven-year-old. We decided to stick with the plan and had a very short wait before transferring to our final bus: Skagit Transit's 410 to Anacortes and the Ferry Terminal. Our 410 driver was wonderful and gave our kid a guided tour of the sights outside the bus windows, pointing out the wrecked ship covered in trees (La Merced) and Rusty the dinosaur sculpture.
At noon on the dot we rolled into the Anacortes Ferry Terminal with our bikes and camping gear, good timing to catch the 12:30 ferry to Lopez Island. It cost us $16 altogether to get the three of us from Seattle to the ferry, and it took 3:50 from leaving our house to rolling into the ferry terminal. That's about 2:20 longer than it would take to drive, but we had a lovely adventure on the way.
That's the most important thing to keep in mind if you are considering a trip like this: The journey is the destination. If you're just comparing time, of course the car is going to be the clear choice. But we met a bunch of nice people, saw parts of Skagit County we'd never seen, and saved a bunch of money. You have to think of the transit rides as, well, rides. People travel long distances and pay lots of money to go to theme parks and ride on the train that goes in loops around the park, but these buses cost far less and actually go somewhere.
After lunch on the ferry, we were finally biking again. Lopez Island is a wonderful place to bike. The roads are very low-traffic, and pretty much everyone in a car slows down and gives plenty of space when passing. It's the perfect place to go when you need to remind yourself that there's no need to rush.
When we got to our reserved campsite in Spencer Spit State Park, it was swarming with yellow jackets (it's a bad wasp year across the island, it seems). But since we biked, we had a backup plan: There's an amazing hiker/biker site down by the beach. Sure enough, it was available and beautiful as ever. But by some kind of bike magic, it is also one of the only sites in the park that is not swarming with wasps.
I'm sitting there now pecking this out on my phone, listening to the waves softly wash against both sides of the spit. Birdsongs from the wildlife sanctuary a few feet away are constant. In the morning I woke to the blaring of a ferry's fog horn, the sound sustained for seconds and seconds and seconds and seconds as echoes returned to my tent from every San Juan island shoreline, some horn waves perhaps crossing the sea to Canada before crossing back to us, and I wondered if the warbled horn echoes would ever end completely or if we just can't hear them as they silently vibrate across these waters until the end of time.
