Joel and Jess's Epic Bike Ride

Joel and I decided to go on a bike ride Saturday afternoon to burn off some energy and get out in the sunshine. We left the house at about 4:00pm and headed to the Burke Gillman Trail. We decided to head west on the trail toward Seattle. We stopped for a water break at our usual turn-around spot, the Matthews Beach Park.


Ready to get started on our bike ride!

After sitting in the sunshine and enjoying ourselves, we decided to go a bit farther down the trail and see if we could ride all the way to Husky Stadium and the U-Village. I want to remind readers, that we live in Kenmore, so riding to Husky Stadium would mean a 13 mile bike ride one way. But we were game and eager to give it try. We got back on the Burke-Gillman Trail and continued toward our new goal. It didn't seem to take us very long at all to reach the stadium. We were so thrilled with ourselves that we decided to go just a bit farther.

It wasn't long before we found ourselves at the entrance to Gasworks Park! What! We had biked ourselves into the heart of Seattle! We figured at this point we should just keep going. Neither one of us had been to the Ballard Locks, so we decided now was just as good a time to visit this local favorite than any. So we kept riding. Yes. You are reading this correctly, we rode our bikes all the way from Kenmore to the Ballard Locks. We had a great time. We didn't spend too much time at the Ballard Locks, but we did get to watch a couple different boats go through the entire process of crossing the locks.

By this point we were starving, so we decided to get some food to give us the energy to bike all the way home. I guess in all our fun we forgot that we would have to bike all the way back home. We decided to just stop at the first place along the travel that caught our interest and we ended up here. The food was pretty good and the milkshake tasted so great! We figured we deserved a treat for riding our bikes so far, so why not!

After getting a bike to eat and talking ourselves out of finding a bus ride home, we painfully got back on our bikes and started on our journey home. I say painfully because four hours of riding on a bike seat starts to get a bit uncomfortable! We were only five minutes down the road when I started shivering from the cold. Dusk was setting in and I had not dressed to ride my bike at night. So we stopped at a Fred Meyer to buy a couple long sleeved shirts. Feeling much warmer, we got back on the trial for the long ride home. We made a quick stop at Gasworks Park to see the city at night before deciding we needed to get home before it got too dark.

Nine hours after we started our journey, and an hour of riding in pitch darkness, we finally arrived home. I have never been so thankful for lights on my bike until riding for an hour in the darkness of the Burke-Gillman Trail at night. I can't believe how many people were out riding on the trail at night in the dark without any lights. They would just all of a sudden appear and twice I thought I was going to crash with someone! I have never been so thankful to be home. I was so tired and it felt like my legs were still peddling, even though I knew I was laying on our front steps.

So tired, so thankful to be home!

I think we will make this ride again, although when we do, we will leave much earlier in the day! I am pretty proud of myself though, because I never got very sore. I thought for sure after such an extensive bike ride, without doing anything of the kind before, I would be sore. Must be a sign that all the effort I am putting in at the gym is working!

The stats from our bike ride. Joel tracks his rides using Endomondo - it is pretty cool!