On Thursday night after the kids went to bed Jenny and I sat down at the computer to plan out a route to ride the next day. These route planning sessions usually have two priorities and they go in this order of importance.
1. The route must pass somewhere great to eat.
2. The route must include mainly rural deserted roads with hopefully some great scenery.
Jenny had been to a small diner in Silvana years before that was surrounded with farms and rural roads so we decided to give this area a try. Neither one of us had ever ridden there before so we had to rely on www.mapitpronto.com for some good roads. This site allows you to plan out a route by viewing a map and clicking on the roads you would like to ride. Once you are done you can download of the road to your Garmin and you’re ready to go.
On Friday when we got up it was raining. Not surprising for the area that we live in but kind of a bummer anyway. We decided to still give it a try so we got all of our battle raingear on and headed out to Silvana. As a plan B we decided if we got there and the rain was really dumping we would just to out to eat.
As luck would have it the rain subsided on the drive to Silvana so we were good to go. We ended up parking by the diner and we headed out from there. The route started out on a nice level road for about a half a mile and just as we rode around a bend in the road we came to a really steep hill. Pounding up hills without much of a warm up isn’t my favorite thing to do but we both survived. At the top of the hill I saw the following clump of signs. Can it get anymore confusing that this? Thank heavens for GPS devices.
1. The route must pass somewhere great to eat.
2. The route must include mainly rural deserted roads with hopefully some great scenery.
Jenny had been to a small diner in Silvana years before that was surrounded with farms and rural roads so we decided to give this area a try. Neither one of us had ever ridden there before so we had to rely on www.mapitpronto.com for some good roads. This site allows you to plan out a route by viewing a map and clicking on the roads you would like to ride. Once you are done you can download of the road to your Garmin and you’re ready to go.
On Friday when we got up it was raining. Not surprising for the area that we live in but kind of a bummer anyway. We decided to still give it a try so we got all of our battle raingear on and headed out to Silvana. As a plan B we decided if we got there and the rain was really dumping we would just to out to eat.
As luck would have it the rain subsided on the drive to Silvana so we were good to go. We ended up parking by the diner and we headed out from there. The route started out on a nice level road for about a half a mile and just as we rode around a bend in the road we came to a really steep hill. Pounding up hills without much of a warm up isn’t my favorite thing to do but we both survived. At the top of the hill I saw the following clump of signs. Can it get anymore confusing that this? Thank heavens for GPS devices.
This portion of the route was really nice as we rode passed a lot of farms and tons of grazing horses. Up the road a little bit we encountered a sign that basically said we were entering a private road and trespassing wasn’t allowed. Yikes, this road was the only connecting road over to Marine View drive. Since we didn’t see anyone around we decided to brave it and ride on their private road anyway.
This private road turned out to be a great place to ride. It was a series of some steep hills followed by very fun descents. It was interesting to me that when you got to the top of each hill there were a couple of huge fenced houses that had great views of the valley. Then, when you got to the bottom of each hill there were smaller houses with an occasional trailer. These houses at the bottom of each hill didn’t the view of the large ones. I guess location is everything when it comes to real estate. Either way, this road was really fun to ride.
As we rode along it started to lightly rain. The rain wasn’t heavy enough to soak you but was present enough to know it was raining. This is the typical rain we get in Western Washington from October to early July. It actually felt nice to ride in this rain because it helped to cool us off.
The rest of the ride was uneventful other than spotting a lot of different animals. We don’t normally ride near farms so this was interesting. When our ride ended we went to the diner by our parked car. We obviously didn’t look like locals because our server asked us if it was the first time that we had been there. She did recommend the pancakes which turned out to be great. They were huge.
As we drove home the rain storm turned into a downpour. It was nice to have good timing.
Animals Spotted:
Horses
Goats
Sheep
Skunk (dead)
Cats
Dogs
Cows
Chickens
2 comments:
well its nice to know that you have great hits here.
On the dead skunk... have you ever noticed that they don't smell as bad when you're on the bike? I mean, you smell it, you pass it and it's gone. In the car, that funk gets sucked in the vents and stays with you for much longer.
Post a Comment