September 1, 2024. Guemes Island, Washington, USA
Something that’s always on my summer to-do list is a motorcycle camping trip. If I can tie some gear down to my bike & do even a single overnight with it, I feel pretty fulfilled.
Victor and I are starting ~wedding planning research~, and we wanted to check out a spot on Guemes Island. We packed a few bags with camping equipment and lashed them down to our bikes with bungee cords and elastic nets, and booked a campsite on Hipcamp. Since it was a holiday weekend there were few options.
There is only one store on all of Guemes island. The ferry takes 10 minutes to get across the water from Anacortes, but it runs a surprisingly frequent schedule (which you can see taped into my sketchbook above) for such an unpopulated place.
Guemes is about 100 miles away from Seattle, which is about the maximum distance I want to be riding in a day. Basically, it’s a perfect excuse to ride our motorcycles!
Motorcycle camping is something I’ve been doing since I started Riding back in 2019. I’ve done it with friends, alone, and now with my fianceé, but the feeling of freedom and compact self-sufficiency is always the same kind of satisfying.
I spent a lot of the pandemic days doing motorcycle trips; roads and campgrounds were much emptier then than they are today. It definitely helped keep me sane back then. And all that experience added up into some good knowledge of which routes are safer and more beautiful to ride — avoiding the big interstates is compulsory when your vehicle has a maximum speed of about 60 mph going downhill.
So we took the ferries. There were 6 total: from Seattle to Bainbridge, Port Townsend to Coupeville, and then Anacortes to Guemes. And then back the same way.
With the ferries, you get to skip a lot of the tedious, scary, boring roads of the suburbs and exurbs and jump right into glorious rurality. Another benefit is that motorcyclists get to skip the ferry line. Driving past a literal mile of parked cars on the shoulder is a true joy. And you never worry about not getting on; there’s always space for a bike.
This was my first time riding out of town on my new-ish Honda Supercub, a 125cc mini motorcycle. Before, I was riding my Aprilia Scarabeo scooter, which has a bigger engine and is automatic transmission.
Just about every time I go out on the Cub, someone will comment on it, which is a nice change — I’ve never had a ‘cool’ vehicle that people notice. People would ask only one boring question about my scooter: Can it go on the freeway? The answer: yes it can, but no it shouldn’t.
With the Supercub, the people who engage with me had one 50 years ago and can’t believe people are still riding them — the design has barely changed over the decades.
One the spectrum of scooter to motorcycle, it seems somewhere in the middle. The Supercub is the most produced vehicle in world history, though you can scarcely find them in the USA. We fell in love with its retro, colorblocked charm in Seoul, where they are ubiquitous. Example: postmen use Supercubs to deliver the mail:
The max speed of the Supercub is about 60 mph, which feels fast as f*ck when you’re essentially sitting on a chair blasting down the road. At high speeds, the wind is loud, and the frame vibrates, and I worry about impatient car drivers behind me, and my shoulders and neck ache from tensing them so much, and yes I do think about what would happen if I fell off the bike at those moments.
So wherever possible, I turn off of the highways and other fast roads to look for the side routes. The ideal is a twisty (a real term in motorcycle world), with no cars, rural surroundings, and enough curves to be really fun to ride on. I have a mental map of my favorites around Seattle but I’m always looking out for new ones.
This trip, we found a really good one on Bainbridge: Port Gamble Road. It takes you through farmland and groves of trees on a relaxed curves. The sun shone through a shady cathedral of bigleaf maples and there was no other traffic to make us feel stressed or rushed. Perfect, ideal. Wish I could exclusively travel on roads like these, but it is not the world we live in. It makes me savor them all the more.
Sad summer is basically over, but so glad I got a chance to do a good long ride. Almost all my bucket list items for the season were checked. So much happened but it still went by so fast! I’m now preparing for some big trips that start in a couple weeks. Much to do.
✌️Eleanor 🛵 — see my link tree for other things I do.
Nice read about a nice ride. Thanks!
Such a beautiful area for riding or driving small nimble convertible sports cars (my ride of choice). I envy your camping - and your artistic talent with sketchbook journal.