Confirmed Cool @ Olympic National Park
Today is the day we return to our birth land. We will cross the border via Ferry from Vancouver Island. Our 9 days in Canada taught us a lot, but mostly Canadians are just Americans with funny accents.
We slept in until 9 or 10; savoring our final fleeting in Canada. However, it was time to go. We packed up camp and made our way to the town of Victoria. Unsurprising in hindsight, but the town of Victoria has the large number of beautiful victorian-style homes. We motored through downtown and to the ferry check-in point.
The customs officers again directed us past the cars to the motorcycle parking. They then told us to be back at our vehicles by 1:30. Having an hour to kill we got off and walked around a bit. As we left we noticed signs that said be at your vehicles 90 minutes before departure, this was our first sign that getting back into the US was going to be a longer journey than our Careful Canadian Crossing (see previous blog post).
We wandered around and stopped for a sweet and salty latte from Nourish. The building was a beautiful Victorian mansion that had been renovated into a cafe. As we shared sips of the delicious latte we remarked how Nourish would have felt at home in San Francisco.
We made it back to our bikes with time for more biker small talk. We met one man who was rejected entrance into Canada because of a DUI he received 25 years ago. He was obviously in a bad mood but was still excited to ask us questions about our bikes and brag about how much he loved his fancy BMW with its famous Bison-attracting boxer twin (jk that’s another callback to a previous post) and its telelever suspension that prevents fork dive when going into the corner.
After the small talk, it was our turn to talk to the customs agent who asked the obligatory questions like “where are you from?” and “what were you doing in Canada?” We did our best to answer consistently without sounding too nervous, going back to our middle school roots of trying without trying too hard so that you can land a seat at the cool kids table, because the US is really just the cool kids table.
As the officer periodically called “Next!” over the intercom and we inched our way closer to the end of the line our nerves grew. We both realized that neither of us sat at the cool kids table and feared that even a simple freudian slip could doom us to a lifetime of Tim Horton’s breakfasts. Despite our fears we were granted passage back home, meaning that we are, in fact, confirmed cool.
Once on the boat we parked our bikes and made it to the sun deck and took a few pictures.
After an hour or so we arrived in good ‘ol US of A around 6, a surprisingly long journey that we both agreed was not as pleasant as the Canadian ferry to Vancouver Island.
Low on energy we stopped at a local Vietnamese restaurant to split a large pho and plotted our next move. For the first time in our trip we did not book a campsite ahead and the for the rest of journey we’re going to be taking it day by day.
After some debates we decide to make our way up a pretty road into Olympic National park. Fortunately there were several open campsite so we made camp and then used our last moments of day light to ride the motorcycle up yet another beautiful mountain road to the peak of hurricane ridge.
After taking in the views we went back to camp for a quick camp fire and bed. We debated what to do and decided upon a large hike tomorrow. It’s bound to be our most exciting hike yet…
P.S. we apologize but we added more stickers to our top box and forgot to tell everyone. We’ll do our best to keep everyone up to date on every sticker addition from here on out.
