Determined to knock out the the last few yards of Kitsap County, we woke up at 2 am so that we could be ready to catch the 4 am ferry from Bainbridge Island to Seattle. This would allow us to miss as much traffic as possible and hopefully get out of the downtown area before things got busy. Trying to save some time, I skipped breakfast and figured I’d hit a restaurant on our ride as there would surely be somewhere to eat along our route. Tired and hungry, we arrived at the ferry port, ready to start our day. We rode up to the ticket booth and were waved through as apparently bikes were free during the Covid pandemic. This meant that, had I known this before, we could have ridden by the ticket booth on our last ride and had finished out the county and been done with our rides.

I thought about calling it a day and heading back to bed, but the draw of sharing adventures with the dogs won over as I realized they had never been on the ferry before and might enjoy the boat ride so we soon found ourselves boarding a 4 am ferry, heading over the salty waters of Puget Sound towards Seattle. The dogs weren’t used to being up so early in the morning and so they spent most of the ride sleeping. I would have loved to have joined them, but there was nowhere to sleep on the cold, metal deck of the ferry. Besides, the sun was just coming up, giving some wonderful views of the city and beyond, including Mt. Rainier to the south.

(click photos to enlarge and see descriptions)

We arrived in the city around 5am and it was unsurprisingly empty. We had the streets and trails mostly to ourselves and were able to take a leisurely ride along the wharves as we headed north. Seattle is home to many steep hills, but I had planned our route to avoid all of them, hugging the shore to begin, following the Elliott Bay Trail. The plan was to make this our final ride, so I wanted to go out with a bang and make it our longest day yet, 40 miles. To do so, we would wind up some 20 miles north of Seattle in the town of Bothell. We would be following a patchwork of different trails including the aforementioned Elliot Bay, the Interbay, the South Ship Canal, the Burke-Gilman, and ending at the Sammamish River Trail, not to mention a few city streets as well. I was pretty impressed that such a large city could be crossed almost entirely using bike trails.

The ride itself was pretty uneventful other than realizing that just because the trail went through a city didn’t necessarily mean it would have easy access to food, so around mile 30, I was starting to struggle and by mile 35, I’d given up hope and settled for a couple Gatorades and some gas station food. But more importantly, as the day went on, the trail got busier and busier. We’d never been on such a busy trail before! This put our “busy” day in Sequim to shame. We’d seen maybe 50-75 people that day and it had felt like we met everyone in the entire town, but today, we were easily passing that many people every 5-10 minutes!

Previously, when we’d come up to another biker, Dogzilla would bark a little, and if we saw another dog, both Zilla and Captain would go crazy, but that all changed today. We easily wound up passing several thousand people on the trail in just a few hours, including hundreds of dogs, and even an entire squadron of military recruits marching in formation. It was so much stimulation that Zilla and Captain had sensory overload. They couldn’t process all the sights and smells after a while and wound up wearing themselves out and relaxing. Captain even went so far as to just go to sleep for the last few miles, which were some of the busiest as we returned to the ferry port. At that point, we had to fight through all the tourists walking along Seattle’s famous Alaskan Way, marveling at the ships. It was like a concert had just let out which, made navigating through the people quite hard on bike, especially with the added bulkiness of the trailer.

The one thing that really stood out though in the throngs of people was us; of all the thousands of people that we passed, not a single other person was riding a bike and pulling a dog trailer. We were very unique; we were also very popular. Nearly everyone that we passed throughout the day either smiled and laughed at the dogs in the trailer, mentioned how cute the dogs were, made a joking comment about how the dogs should be the ones pulling me and not the other way around or about how lucky they were to get towed around. I’d never felt like the center of attention before, and truly I still wasn’t. it was the dogs, but I came to the realization that the thought I’d had back in Sequim about the dogs being ambassadors wasn’t a fluke, they really were ambassadors. Practically everyone was excited to see the dogs and wanted to interact with them in some way, even if only for a fleeting moment. It was an incredible way to end our long journey by bike, not just the day’s ride, but the entire ride across the Olympic Peninsula via the Olympic Discovery Trail and across Kitsap County via the Sound to Olympics Trail.

We finally boarded the ferry, exhausted from our 40 mile ride, being around all the people, and foolishly not bringing enough food. The dogs were both passed out before the boat even set sail across The Sound. I was tired as well, but began reflecting on a lot of things in my life. I thought about how fortunate I was to be able to take care of the dogs with all of their medical issues while there were undoubtedly millions of other animals throughout the world that would never get any kind of medical care for even the simplest of problems and this made me really sad. I thought about how much I loved travelling with my pups, sharing new experiences with them, and letting them explore the world and how it was bittersweet that our long bike journey had come to a close. I also reflected on the immense popularity that the dogs had with everyone we met and how people were drawn to them.

With all these thoughts sloshing around in my head it hit me, we could use our unique travel method along with the dogs’ natural charisma and medical histories to shine a light on the millions of animals in need across the globe and raise money to help them! And with that, the idea for Pedals4Paws was born, sort of….