My Next Cycling Destination: LaConner, Washington
For many years, my wife's parents ? who lived in suburban Seattle ? had a place just outside LaConner, Washington, on the Swinomish Indian Reservation's Fidalgo Island, up a skinny lane called Pull and Be Damned Road. Nancy's father was a world-class do-it-yourselfer, and he hand built the sprawling, multi-winged family "beach place" out of pieces and parts that he procured throughout the Pacific Northwest, through a combination of buying, borrowing, and bartering. (I should say Walter hand built the place with assistance from a never-ending parade of friends and relatives, as he had an aversion to things like tall ladders and sloping roofs. Walt was a charmer who could've persuaded Tom Sawyer to pay him a quarter for the privilege of pounding nails.) I recall the drive getting to the beach place, once we left Interstate 5, as a rural feast for the senses. Over the Skagit Flats we would go, past truck farms and ? depending on the season ? fields filled with yellow daffodils, white snow geese, and a rainbow of tulips; produce stands overflowing with crops like corn and cauliflower; or bright-orange pumpkins dotting the otherwise drab, you-pick-'em flats, just waiting to go home with someone to be transformed into Halloween jack-o'-lanterns. Which is a long-winded way of telling you why it was a pleasurable, nostalgia-filled experience yesterday when I opened an email from Tom Beckwith, who has a consulting firm in LaConner. Attached to Tom's email was a file holding a new 20-page booklet (pdf) from the LaConner Chamber of Commerce highlighting the many outstanding road and mountain bicycling opportunities the area has to offer. Photographs of subjects like the arching Rainbow Bridge and LaConner's quaint downtown took me back to the beach place. I could almost hear the gulls calling and inhale the pungency of tide's-out mud flats. All in all, it makes me want to go back, with bicycles in tow. Tap into the map booklet and I predict that you, too, will soon be plotting a plan to visit lively LaConner and its lovely surroundings. Photo by Michael McCoy -- BIKING WITHOUT BORDERS is posted every Monday by Michael McCoy, Adventure Cycling?s field editor, and highlights a little bit of this or a little bit of that ? just about anything, as long as it?s related to traveling by bicycle. Mac also compiles the organization's twice-monthly e-newsletter Bike Bits, which goes free-of-charge to more than 41,000 readers worldwide.Source: http://blog.adventurecycling.org/2011/08/my-next-cycling-destination-laconner.html