This bike vacation is different for us. Usually we head out in a linear fashion, towing a BOB trailer behind the bike with the goal of getting from point "A" to point "B" in a prescribed amount of time. This trip we are taking our old RV, The Turtle, with our tandem, The Blueberry, hung off the back. We set out to ride over 100 miles of gravel trail across the state of Washington, through tunnels, over mountains, through farmland, and then through dessert. We will turn the 100 miles into 200 miles by doing out and backs or circle backs on the roads depending on which would work out best. Each night will have us back at the Turtle for a cushy nights rest.

We are so excited about getting out of town that we leave after work on Friday, getting as far as a rest stop in Olympia. This may be a first, because it does not appear that we have forgotten a thing. We have clothes for every kind of weather, food for an army, tools to fix just about anything, and even brought two seat posts adorned with different saddles for Becky to trade out to keep her bottom happy.

Saturday morning we wake up to - Rain - what else! To brighten the day, Louie announces that he has brought his bike bag filled with gifts for Becky to open one each day. Rain - who cares about the rain! That just bought Louie a whole bunch of relationship points that he can spend later doing guy things like having one too many beers or forgetting important couple event celebration days! Down the road a bit, Louie spies a Wal-Mart. Bec has been looking for a particular type of blueberry fabric that she used to make the curtains for the Turtle so that she can make matching seat covers. Wal-Mart was the only place that she had found it in the past. So Louie earns even more relationship points by stopping in to check. He is happy because he finds some little 4-H kids washing cars and gets them to wash the Turtle while we poke around looking for blueberry material. We don't find it, but we find other things we need so all is not lost and the Turtle is sparkling clean! Life is good.

We get to the first overnight without any trouble and head out to see if we can find the trail since the first campsite is near the trail, not on. According to the maps that Bec brought, there should be some forest service roads that will eventually cross the Iron Horse trail. The ranger told us that he saw an old broken trestle down one of the roads. Map and compass in hand we begin our search. The map says that we will have to cross three streams and then we should see the trial. The only problem is that there are no bridges. We have to portage the blueberry! We bounce and careen down the forest service roads with Louie using all his skills to keep us upright. We slip and slide over moss covered wet stones. All at once a man pops out of the forest. We try to talk to him but he won't even acknowledge our being there. He did not even break stride upon seeing us and continues to sulk along. Louie says quietly, "Some folks just like to be left alone. That is why they come to the forest." The road turns to a single track trail that heads straight up the mountain, but does in fact, end on the Iron Horse trail! Now that we found the trail, it is time to go back! We decide tomorrow to drive to the trailhead and start from there. That way we will get to ride the whole trail from start to end. We settle in for the evening, staying nicely warm and dry in the Turtle. Bec reads and Louie listens to the radio. We are usually very busy people, scurrying about doing this and that all the time. We rarely just sit and relax. We try to make rules about stopping doing stuff at 8:00 at night so we can have a few hours to unwind but many times find that it is 10:00 in the evening and we are still doing stuff that needs to be done. So it feels very strange to just have some time to just lay about with our feet up. There is nothing else to do, but relax. Louie says he feels very guilty about doing nothing. He says, "I can't just lay here. Maybe we should go out and straighten up the forest or something." Louie has this notion about everything being just perfect and uniform. Bec, on the other hand, likes a bit of chaos. "No way," says Bec. "Mother nature is much like myself in that she likes everything all scattered about in an interesting fashion. You would ruin everything by making all the trees the same, lining up all the wild flowers, and making all the forest creatures behave themselves! You are on vacation. Sit and relax even if it hurts!"

Sunday is our first day on the trial. It is hard packed with light gravel making it very ride able. It is spectacular. We ride over trestles that span huge gorges. We look out at the surrounding forest covered mountains and see that Mother Nature decorating them with garlands of clouds. We pass an area that looks like a moss forest where the trees are totally coated with moss. The air is cool and a bit misty but there is no real rain falling, yet. There are many people using the trail this morning, all kinds of bikes, families, boy scouts, horseback riders, walkers, runners, and people with their dogs. We look up and see a cat on the trail. "What is a cat doing here?" says Bec. Wait a minute. That is no house cat. It is a bobcat! That is the first time we have seen a bobcat in the wild. It was amazing. Louie wanted to take its picture, but bobcats are shy and barely allow pictures to be taken even if they live in a zoo. Wildflowers of all colors decorate the sides of the trail. Louie tries to capture their beauty on the digital camera, not an easy task, as it does not lend itself to that kind of picture taking.

We spend most of the ride in a river canyon with forest-covered walls. We can see the snow-covered mountain peaks in the distance. The views from the trestles are breathtaking. Bec even forgets about her height anxiety as she looks to the right to see a ribbon of a waterfall coming down to meet us and to the left to see a tree covered valley. We get off the bike and walk the trestle so that we can enjoy the view longer. This ride is not about covering miles in so much time. It is about taking out time to enjoy this rails to trails linear park.

Before too long we come to the main event that is written about in all the tail guides, the 2.3-mile bike tunnel. The tunnel curves so once inside there is no light. We will be unable to see the beginning or the end. We stop to put on our bike light and out of the tunnel pops a whole group of boy scouts and their dads all laughing and playing. Before we get settled out comes a family with dad and daughter on tandem. We chat for a bit and they tell us that it is very spooky inside and that there are people with dogs and even a couple of people with horses. In we go. It takes a while for our eyes to adjust even with the bright dual light set up on the bike. We see a set of eyes glowing in the distance - dog. It is very scary to see these eyes coming towards you and another very faint light bobbing up and down. The tunnel soaks up a flashlight. The people walking with flashlights say they are of very little use and wish they had our bike light. Bec has a light mounted on her helmet so she can look all around. The one on Louie's helmet pops off and then would not work once retrieved so he has to make do with the bike light on the handlebars. Soon this voice in the distance calls out to us asking us to stop and not shine the light on the horses or we would all be stuck here having a party! We stopped. "We are not moving," Bec tells the man. The horses pass without incidence. Whew! Water drips down on our heads. Way down at the end we can see this tiny oval light. It takes forever, but finally we emerge into the daylight. What an experience! We decide that the ride was so great that rather than go out on the road we would just take the trail back to the Turtle. We are very glad that we did because everything looks different going back. Plus, it is all down hill and we can coast. Just before getting back to the Turtle, the rains come. What a day! If you do this trail, the part from Cedar Creek Falls to the Snoqualmie tunnel is the very best part.

We decide to take the Turtle to Lake Easton State Park and spend a couple of nights there. That would allow us to explore the trail in two different directions by doing out and backs. On Monday morning we have to meander through the forest next to the campground to find the trail. We come across a sign that says, "Danger. Do not pass." So, we have to find out what is so dangerous and pass. The trestle that at one point had gone over one corner of the lake is no more. The trail ends with a drop into the water. We behave ourselves, turn around, and get back on the proper trail.

We are riding back towards the tunnel that we rode to the day before. We see a deer and fawn in the road. We stop and let them pass. They are in no big hurry. They look at us and twitch their huge ears. We come across the two bikers that passed us the day before on their way to Cle Elum. They are coming back today, just as they said they were going to do. We also meet a couple of hikers. But other than that, we see no one all day. It is very different from yesterday. This portion of the trail is not as popular. We stop at Hyak for lunch and read the information kiosk to find out we are in the sub-alpine zone. We were going to eat at the lodge run by the state, but it was busy with paying guests so we could only buy a pop from the machine and go on our way. There are picnic tables at the Hyak depot so it wasn't so bad.

On the way back down the trail we see lots of artifacts from when the electric train ruled the trail. We stop and climb up the hillside to look at some old wires and electric poles. The electric poles at one point fed the electricity to the train at intervals. We still see some of the electric switches and boxes cut down and tossed alongside the trail. We crawl around them and explore how they might have worked. We see one place where the train must have hung off the cliff. Most of the tracks have fallen, but a few still cling to their old ways. We continue riding until we come to a huge lake. It looks low having stumps poking up out of the hardened clay. One corner of the lake is filled with white driftwood of all shapes and sizes, some being huge stumps, roots and all. The wood is piled willy-nilly all over the place making it look like a bone yard filled with bleached white bones. They must have all washed up during some previous filling of the lake.

On Tuesday morning we go east on the trail. Because of the trestle outage, we have to bike into town and then find the trail again. Today we encounter heavy gravel, particularly on and near the trestles. At one point the gravel is so deep that the bike just stops and we have to push it up to the trestle. The forest has given way to meadows. It is a hard day for Bec, but Louie is happy. We had put on the knobbies to help with the gravel, but it made it very slow going. Louie let some air out of them to make the ride smoother. We come to an old station that a young man is spray painting. We ask him what he is doing and he says that he is restoring it to its former glory with the same color of paint and everything. We tell him that he is doing a good job. We ride on into Cle Elum and have lunch at a dairy queen. Then we try to find someplace to get a haircut. We ask at two barbershops and a hairdresser but no one will cut our hair.

Bec has fussed so much that we decide to take the road back to camp rather than the trail. We have a huge headwind. Traffic is heavy and noisy. The knobbies did not want to roll making it seem to Bec as if we were slogging through wet cement.

Louie stops the tandem, hops off, and then comes back with a 13 mm wrench. Strange, we usually find 10 mm wrenches! We continue until we meet up with a deer that wants to cross the road. It is a four-lane road filled with speeding cars and trucks. Bec talks to the deer to tell it that crossing this road is not a good idea. He needs to just go back the way he came. There can't be anything on the other side of the road worth a trip across. The deer twitches his ears. Bec keeps talking to him until he finally understands and goes back the way he came. We hope that he does not decide to cross at a later time. It could not have a good outcome for either the cars or the deer.

We go into the town of Easton to find some train cars that are left to rot beside the road. They used to be diners judging by the writings that still adorn the sides. "Hamburgers, hot dogs, coffee, milkshakes," the writings say. But now nobody cares. It looks like nobody much cares at all about Easton, as there are many abandoned buildings. We can tell that in the winter there are ski lifts and amenities for snow mobile riders, but right now no one does anything in what is left of town.

Back to the Turtle, we break camp and head out to a KOA along the Yakima River. We back the Turtle right up to the water's edge and eat our dinner watching fish jump and fuzzy tree things float by making it look like it is snowing. We watch the stars come out from the cool air-conditioned Turtle. Louie proclaims, "We have all the comforts of home except internet access. I guess thats why they call it camping."

On Wednesday morning we decide we are going to ride out on the highway and then come back on the trail. We hope to beat some of the headwind by starting out early. We see this huge aqueduct along the canyon wall. It has fallen into disrepair. It is amazing that something that must have cost so much money is left abandoned to rot. They must have a better system, now. We crawl up and explore one section of it. We can see the trail that we are going to ride back on the other side of the river. We did not have much luck in beating that headwind, because it sure is hampering our progress. Along side the road we see some lizards sunning themselves on the rocks. "Oh, snake!" Louie calls out. "Don't tell me that," says Bec. She does not care much to know we are riding past snakes! Louie thinks it is a rattler because it had all the right colors and designs to be so. We see many more deer and then we see a marmot. We have not seen one of them for a while. We see lots of quail and huge birds circling above being tormented by a bunch of smaller birds. What is with deer and roads! Now another deer is out in the middle of the road. Cars are coming towards it. We wave at both the deer and the on-coming cars. Finally, the deer decides to bound off the road to safety. Whew! We wonder how many become traffic statistics out here. We stop in Cle Elum again, only this time go to a bakery and sandwich shop. Louie gets to satisfy his maple bar addiction and Bec gets a muffin.

We start back on the trail. Not having gone far, we arrive at an old abandoned ranch. The sign says, "No trespassing," so of course we had to go explore it. We could see how at one time, it was a great ranch complete with houses for both the owners and ranch-hands. It has two big barns, a garage, and river front property. It goes to show that when a thing is going on, it can be really great, but once it is over, it is really over. Now only squirrels and rats live here disturbed by an occasional teenage party.

We get to go through two tunnels today. One of them is longer than we anticipated and we did not bring a light. We haven't met up with a single person all day, but once inside the bigger of the two tunnels we hear voices and meet up with about 4 other bikers. "What is this? Two people and one bike," says one of the riders. "Tandem," says Bec. "You don't have much farther to go," says another rider. We can barely see ahead and hope we don't run into the walls in the darkness. A few more steps and we see a sliver of light coming from the other end of the tunnel. It gets larger until finally out into the light we step.

Near the end of the day's ride we encounter some forest service workers cutting down branches and trees that wandered too close to the trail. We pass our exit road. Louie pulls out the "Optic Wonder" (A combination binocular, compass, and signal mirror contraption that Louie bought for 50 cents at some garage sale). We take a look and sure enough we can see that we need to back up and get on the road we just crossed to get back to camp. Saved by the Optic Wonder.

Thursday we head out the other way on the trail. We are going to take the trail out and the road back today. Now the trail borders farmland. The trail is heavy gravel and then deep sand. We find a small town, Kittitas, with an old man painting the train depot. We talk with him a while and he tells us that only he and his wife care about the structures. They spend their own money and many hours fixing them up. Sometimes people vandalize them and they have to come fix them again. He said they had to bolt all the boards back onto the building, strip off the old paint and paint them all again. He is on the last building to be done. He says they walk and ride the trail and pick up trash and fix things that need fixing along the way. He tells us that they had raised a lot of money to fix things near his town but that the folks in Cle Elum took the money and fixed things near that town. He says, "Nobody in this town cares about this stuff except me and my wife." We tell him that we care and that we have enjoyed the trail very much. He tells us about a big trestle that is the last one to be fixed. He says it extends across the freeway and will be very impressive when done. We say good by and go explore the town. We try to get a haircut again but the barber in town wants nothing to do with us. We come back and the old guy painting asks if we enjoyed the town. When we tell him that the barber would not cut our hair he mutters, "A guy can't even get a haircut in this town." We cannot figure out why no one in any of the small towns will cut our hair. We showered each day. We used deodorant. Our bike clothes are clean each day. We are on a fancy dancy bike wearing expensive bike gear so it is not that we look as if we cannot pay! The only thing that we can deduce is that people in small towns do not like strangers.

On the way back we stop in Ellensburg and look at an art house. It is covered with reflectors and has bike wheels as whirligigs. The sign out front says that the man who lives there got a grant to make art and that other local artists had contributed items to the yard. Ellensburg is a happening little town. It has a college and that seems to be what has made the difference there. Unlike any of the other towns we went through, Ellensburg is growing and thriving.

It is very hot and windy. We get back to the KOA and are loading up the bike when an old guy on a riding utility cart comes up to ask us if we have ridden the canyon. We tell him that we are planning to go out the trail and he says, "Why there is nothing to see up there but a bunch of desert. You need to ride out the canyon. Around here that is where all the bikers go. You will like it. Don't bother with the desert." Bec tries to get him to show her on the map where it is but it soon becomes obvious that the old guy cannot read. He has the map upside down. Finally he says, "Aw, you don't need any map. Just go on through town there and get on the road that leads to the canyon. You can't miss it."

We decide to take the old guys word for it and load up the Turtle to head for Yakima. We are going to spend the night in Yakima and then do an out and back in the Canyon. By starting from the Yakima side, we can have the headwind on the way out and a tail wind on the way back. We want to get a very early start so we can finish in the early afternoon. That way we can drive part way back to Portland on Friday and have Saturday to do a ride closer to home. We are very glad to have made this choice. The trail had become unbearable with the heavy gravel and the deep sand. We arrive at Yakima and find the state park. Just as we were entering a real turtle crosses the road right in front of us. Louie stops our Turtle, hops out and takes a picture of the real turtle. It is about the size of a big pancake! It reminds us of the turtles that we saw in the South when we rode to New Orleans.

The canyon ride was nothing short of spectacular. In the morning we had the shade of the mountains. In the afternoon we had a big tailwind. It looked like mountain sheep country just like the Snake River canyon. Sure enough on the trip back we see a man sitting by the road looking at something through binoculars. We stop the bike and see the mountain sheep on the side of the canyon wall. They are incredible animals. We stay and watch them for a while. They graze and then go down to the water to drink.

On down the road the basalt walls of the canyon look like totem poles to Bec. At other places, the basalt goes horizontal and crystal shaped rocks jut out from the hillside. We stop the bike and Bec climbs 1/2 way up a hill to look at a monument erected by a rancher for his deceased wife sometime in the 1930's. We stop at another monument dedicated to a geologist professor at the local university. It tells us all about the many times lava flowed over the canyon and that the river continued to flow though it all. No wonder the hills are baron but the edges of the river are lush and green. The canyon ride was everything the old guy said and more. We are glad we took the time to chat with him. He was right.

We took some showers and got back into the Turtle to head towards home. We want to finish up the ride the way we started, with a tunnel. We decide to camp at Hood River and do the Mosier Twin Tunnel ride. We head out early on Saturday morning to avoid the heat, but there was no avoiding it. It is hot! Seven-mile hill is as difficult for Bec as it has been in the past. The heat makes the 10% grade almost unrideable for her. But, she keeps on pushing the pedals until we get to the top. We stop at Mosier for ice cream and then head to the tunnels. They are great but not as spectacular as the 2.5 mile Snoqualmie tunnel.

Another bike vacation is done. We had a wonderful time. It was nice to get cool and comfortable in the Turtle at the end of the day and to be able to change our minds about where we wanted to ride. That is the great thing about doing unsupported tours - you can do whatever your heart desires and your legs can tolerate. We are not unhappy that we did not do the last 25 miles of the trail. It would have been horrible to ride through the dessert in the heat on the sand for that long. We would recommend the portion of the trail from Cedar Creek Falls to Cle Elum, but after that, things get more difficult for bikes. There are many free trailside campgrounds on this portion of the ride. They have pit toilets, tent sites, and picnic tables. Perhaps some day, the trail will be improved enough to be rideable on a bike for the whole way, but now, we have to admit that much of it past Cle Elum is just not suitable. Horses and hikers would fare better. It was a great ride and it was nice to do something this different.