Tour de Lavender 2022

On the first weekend in August, I caught the ferry from Edmonds to Kingston and drove to Sequim. I was meeting up with my friend, Kim, and camping with her in her RV at one of the lavender farms.

The last time we camped together we used tents and spent a weekend at Cape Disappointment State Park. Since that weekend, her husband had passed away and she needed time to grieve and settle his affairs.

Photos from the lavender farm where we camped

Since we were already in Sequim, we didn’t have to get up too early for our bike event that Saturday morning. The Tour de Lavender wasn’t scheduled to start until 8am and we were shooting for an 8:30am start and meeting up with some others from our bike group, the PNW Cycling Sisters.

After eating some cereal and a banana, I was ready to go. Rather than take the RV, I loaded Kim’s bike onto my rack along with my own bike and headed to the starting point. There were around eight of us from the bike group. All but one was planning on doing the metric century (62 miles).

I had ridden in this event in 2021, but the others hadn’t done it before. The route was a bit different from the previous year, though, because of storms that required the repair of the Dungeness River Bridge. I was really disappointed that my favorite section of the Olympic Discovery Trail wouldn’t be used on the route this year.

At some point, Kim and I lost the others. I think we made a wrong turn or something, so they were about 15 minutes behind us when we ended.

I also hit 1000 miles on my Rad Mission during the ride.