At the end of my last post I forgot to mention that Kate and I decided to sleep in on the second day of our journey. Instead of getting up at the crack of dawn and catching the bus we got up at 9:00 am. This proved to almost be our undoing, well not really but it was unwise as you will see later.

Before leaving Kate's mom's house we reviewed our itinerary: first take King County Public Transit to Everett Station, then take the Everett Express to Mount Vernon, then ride our bikes from Mount Vernon to Anacortes, and finally catch the ferry to Orcas. We headed off at 9:45 am and quickly found our bus to the Everett Station.

Once we arrived at the Everett Station we were in for a surprise. The bus that goes from Everett to Mt Vernon only runs at 8:30am and 4:30pm, neither of which would work for us. So we asked a few locals and soon sorted out a much less direct route to Mt Vernon on about 5 different buses and stopped for a "meal" in Stanwood.

The entire trip from Seattle to Mt. Vernon cost us $5 for both of our bus fare mostly because many of the Skagit County buses are free! Their transit acronym is SKAT, which does not reflect the high quality and friendly service they provided. They let people bring bikes on the bus when the racks were too full and even helped us bungee our bikes in place.

The next leg of our journey was a 25 mile bike ride from Mt Vernon to Anacortes, most of it along Highway 20 which is a very busy road that fortunately has about a 10 foot shoulder and a pedestrian path on the side of the bridge you have to cross.

Although we did get to ride down some country roads and ponder the road use issues folks in these parts face.

This route is very easy, but it is with a TON of traffic and on our return trip we were turned on to a much better route by a fellow Portlander on the ferry, but I'll save that for another post.

We finally got to the ferry and threw our bikes on with all of the others.

If you have driven your car on to a ferry, but never ridden your bike, try it by bike – it is so much quicker and a ton more fun.

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