Day 70: Hiking through Oak Harbor

August 18: In the morning, Amanda drove me back to the trail where she had picked me up the day before. The weather was gloomy and overcast, but no rain was in the forecast and the silver lining to all the gloom was that temperatures were much cooler today.

Today would be almost entirely of road-walking along often busy roads.

Which was especially nice since nearly the entire day was a 15-mile road walk with little shade.

Several miles into my day's hike, for an hour or two, it seemed like an endless parade of fighter jets flew overhead which I found increasingly annoying. Whidbey Island is home to the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station so it's not at all unusual to find fighter jets flying around the region, but the endless fly-bys of deafening jets wore me down. They seemed to be doing nothing more than flying in endless circles, one after another after another, almost directly overhead of the route I was following. The cattle in the nearby fields seemed unaffected by the noise--I'm not sure if that's because they just got used to it or if it was because they had all gone deaf years earlier.

The PNT is routed mostly around the edge of Oak Harbor rather than through its downtown core, and if I didn't have anyone to pick me up off the trail, I probably would have veered into downtown for a night at a hotel. But I had support at the moment and stayed true to the primary PNT.

Near the end of the day's hike, I finally escaped the road walk at Joseph Whidbey State Park, but the trail through the park lasted all of about a half-mile before it dumped me back out onto the road again. It was a nice little park, though, and I even saw two snakes in that short distance.

Then it was back onto the road walk where I finished the day at the start of a long beach walk. The beach walk didn't provide a lot of access points for Amanda to pick me up again, and I needed a low tide to get through which was happening in the morning. It was much too late in the afternoon for me to get through. So the rest of Whidbey Island would have to wait until tomorrow.

Near the end of the day's hike, the gloomy weather started to clear and improve. Not that I could enjoy it much as I was nearing the end of today's walk!

Amanda hadn't arrived yet--I probably walked faster than she expected given my small daypack and fast, easy road-walking. So I gave her a call to let her know I had finished and sat down to wait for her arrival.

She arrived maybe 10 minutes later and we headed back to Wise Wanderer's place for another relaxing evening. Amanda ordered a pizza and salad for the three of us at a nearby pizza place for dinner and that was that for the day. 

Dugualla Bay (at low tide)

There must have been a hundred fighter jets flying by, one after another, for an hour or two.

I'm not sure I'd want to live in a house next to a road that gets water and debris in the roadway at high tides!

We spent a second evening enjoying the company of Wise Wanderer. =)