M and took our first day trip on the Sportster today out to Poulsbo and then Port Gamble out on the Kitsap Peninsula. It was the longest either of us have ever been out on the Harley (a little less than 60 miles round trip). We both really enjoyed the trip – we set out with no plan other than to get food in Poulsbo and to find our way from there. We took off around noon via the Bainbridge ferry and headed straight to Poulsbo.
In the immortal words of Bill Murray, ‘We Came. We Saw. We kicked it’s ass!”
It’s 200+ miles from Seattle to Portland by bike. It’s fun. It’s kinda insane. And I definitely want to do it again. The Cascade Bicycle Club does a great job putting on this event – particularly considering the 10,000+ riders participating. It went really well, and had a great time riding with my Windows crew.
It was a challenge to keep up with my group on several of the stretches (particularly the up hills!), but I was impressed with how fast we could get going as a group drafting off of one another. We had splits where we averaged 17.7 MPH across spans of 2 hours!
We split our ride into two days, stopping at Castle Rock at the end of Day 1:
Day 1 – 135+ miles, about 8 hours in the saddle (16.1 MPH Average)
Day 1 GPS Tracks Here
Day 2 – 65+ miles, about 4 hours in the saddle (16.9 MPH Average)
Day 2 GPS Tracks Here
Given those numbers, I’m tempted to try to do the whole 200 mi in one day next year. I think if we keep our stops to a minimum (we stopped for a total of 4 hours on the first day) we could make it happen.
