Winter was on the outs, making way for a beautiful spring in the Pacific Northwest. The dogs and I had no clear goals in mind at the moment, so we busied ourselves by being mostly less than busy. We spent lots of time soaking up the slowing returning sun by sitting out on the back deck, watching the boats go by (including the occasional submarine) and a very distant sighting of a pod of orcas! There were also some short walks on the beach as well, but Dogzilla seemed to be a bit out of sorts, his movements were becoming very stiff and rigid, he would cry when getting picked up, he wasn’t eating but had vomited, was panting a lot, and appeared to have difficulty breathing at times. I took him to the emergency vet and he was admitted overnight.

(click photos to enlarge and see descriptions)

After a restless night for me, the vet told me that Zilla had perked up quite a bit and that I could pick him up the following day. I went to visit him and spoke to the doctor who told me that there was no specific diagnosis for what was causing Zilla’'s problems, but that they found a number of troubling diagnoses that were contributing to his decline; these included Cushing’s disease, an inflamed gall bladder, a narrowing spine impacting his ability to move, and a 1” x 1” tumor in his abdomen, though it appeared to be non-cancerous, thankfully!

Needing some time to process all of Dogzilla’s new medical issues, I turned back to the bike and decided to pick up where we’d left off on the east side of the Hood Canal in Kitsap County and just ride with no destination in mind. There were only 2 choices of directions to go on the highway, one of which always had a ton of traffic, so we turned northeast to follow the slightly quieter route. This wound up being the right choice for a number of reasons, the first of which was that it went right by a small park we hadn’t visited before, Salsbury Point County Park. This park wasn’t much more than a boat launch and a small playground, but it also had some nice views of the Hood Canal and there were several animals out to see including eagles, seals, and porpoises.

The second reason this wound up being the right choice was that our route followed the Sound to Olympics (STO) Trail. This trail is relatively short at approximately 20 miles and crosses the entirety of Kitsap County from west to east. At the time we discovered it, the trail was more an idea than an actual trail as only 1 mile of it had been developed and the rest followed roads, so it was really more of a choose your adventure route, but I figured that since we had already crossed the Hood Canal Bridge and started crossing Kitsap County, we might as well do all 20 miles of it and finish off the county.

Being a moderately busy road route, we didn’t stop for many pictures. The mood was also soured by our first encounter with a driver who took issue with our also being on the road. He pulled up next to us in his obnoxiously large diesel pickup truck and then proceeded to “roll coal” on us by purposely blanketing us in a gigantic black cloud of his exhaust. I took extra offense to this as the dogs were being smoked out as well and with Dogzilla’s recent stay at the vet for breathing issues, I had more than a few choice words to yell at the truck as it sped off.

The rest of the ride was fairly uneventful. We timed our crossing of the Agate Pass Bridge on to Bainbridge Island to coincide with sunrise on a Sunday so as to avoid as much traffic as possible as the bridge was not designed for pedestrian traffic and looked pretty intimidating to me as I’d never crossed such a long bridge without a shoulder on it before. The island itself was very bike friendly with wide shoulders and even some dedicated bike lanes. Soon, we found ourselves rolling down the final hill to the ferry port, the end of the STO, the end of Kitsap County, or so I thought… In order to get to the actual end of the county, we’d have to get down to the water, but to do this, we’d have to go through the ticket booth for the ferry, presumably paying for a ferry ticket in the process. I could has just said that this was close enough and called that the finish line, but as someone with Aspergers, the meanings of words are very important to me and something I can’t get around. So if I was going to say that we had “finished” Kitsap County, then we would actually have to finish every inch of it.

We could have paid the toll and finished it right then and there, but being frugal by nature, if I was going to have to pay for a ticket to go to Seattle, we were going to go to Seattle. So with Seattle looming in the distance across Puget Sound, we turned around and cycled back towards home….