DAY 1: Seattle > Shelton

greeting from the Shelton Washington wal mart. I'll elaborate why we are at wal mart later.

we managed to actually leave Seattle on time this morning and caught the 10am ferry to Bremerton. it was a nice relaxing start to our trip to hang on the ferry a while. I tried to eat a muffin on said ferry, but for some reason I don't want to know the answer to the muffin tasted like gasoline. it was fucking disgusting.

we got to Bremerton around 11am and promptly started riding. everyone was feeling good and we made many stops in the initial 20 miles so everyone could adjust their bikes to their liking. totally excellent.

we were originally anticipating riding 40 some miles to belfair, but 20 miles in we realized we were IN belfair. Woops! I completed forgot I factored in that we were staying 20 miles closer to the Seattle ferry than I originally planned for. anyway, it was a pleasant surprise so we decided to keep on pushing forward and be ahead of schedule. I also thought I saw there was a different camp ground option 20 miles ahead at Shelton.

very shortly after leaving belfair we encountered a STEEP hill. this shit was a total soul crusher. it was only a mile and a half, but it was brutal. since my gasoline muffin was a piece of garbage, I really hadn't eaten much of anything all day. so not long in to the climb I started bonking hard and had to stop and pound half a sin dawg to get my strength up. SIN DAWGS!!!

we raged on for a bit more up and down smaller hills. we stopped to take a break at a gas station about 7 miles out of Shelton and I realized the camp site we were going to stay at was 15 miles back. oops. at this point we were scrambling on where we were going to camp because there isn't really anywhere to do so in Shelton. we searched the internet for options when tod came up with the brilliant idea to see if there was a wal mart on Shelton. sure enough, there is!

for those of you looking for pro tips, wal mart has a policy that you can sleep in their parking lot over night. so here we are, camping on a patch of grass next to a meth RV filled with ex-cons. it is actually pretty awesome for our first night. everyone has been running in throughout the evening grabbing shit they forgot to bring.

anyway, now that we are ahead of schedule we are going to take it easy again tomorrow to let everyone have another chill warm up day.

time to hit the hay! peace easy world.