By bus, boat and bike, a Port Townsend excursion is relaxing

“That sounds tedious,” said my friend Dave, who had called to wish me a happy birthday and found us on the ferry from Mukilteo to Clinton.

What sounded tedious to him was our itinerary for the day, a trip to Port Townsend.

Not the Port Townsend part, just the bicycle ride from our house in Everett to a bus stop at 41st Street and Rucker Avenue, the ride to Mukilteo, the ferry to Whidbey, the bus to the turnoff on Highway 525 to Keystone, the three-mile ride to the ferry landing, the ferry ride to Port Townsend and a short few blocks on bikes to our motel.

Well, I guess it does sound tedious when you put it like that, but it really was a relaxing, scenic and car-free journey beginning at 10:20 a.m. at our house and ending a little before 2:30 p.m. at the Tides Inn on Water Street, a handy and moderately priced place to stay, with a deck to stash the bikes on at night.

Considering that our total round-trip transportation costs came to about $20 for two people, it's not a bad option at all for getting from Everett to Port Townsend. It helps that Island Transit buses are free, and if you are completely afoot, you can transfer to a bus in Coupeville that loops down to the ferry landing.

There are many good reasons for a trip, even a “tedious” one, to Port Townsend, including interesting shops, art galleries, bookstores and live music venues.

You can trip over a place to eat on just about any block, and most serve passable fare, from pub grub to ethnic, moderate to expensive.

On Saturdays through Nov. 21, the Port Townsend Farmers Market is on Lawrence Street, five blocks up the hill from the waterfront in what the locals call the “Uptown” business district, with more shops and dining options.

And don't forget to look at the historic buildings and homes all around you, uptown and down.

Downtown sits between two marinas run by the Port of Port Townsend. To the southwest is the larger Boat Haven, with most of the permanent local moorage and repair facilities. To the northeast is Point Hudson Marina, where most of the transient boaters pull in for a day or two.

Here you can find the Northwest Maritime Center in an impressive new building that also houses the Wooden Boat Foundation, sponsor of the Wooden Boat Festival held here every September. Drop in during the week and you might find people working on a community boat-building project now in progress.

It's all very walkable, but we brought the bikes along to expand the area of exploration a little bit. We wanted to ride the beginning of the Olympic Discovery Trail, a 4-mile (with more to be completed) section known as the Larry Scott Memorial Trail, named after a Port Townsend bicycling advocate.

We also wanted to bike through the streets and neighborhoods of the town and work our way over to Fort Worden State Park.

By the way, if you take bikes to Port Townsend and need anything, check out PT Cyclery, downtown at 252 Tyler St., especially if you want information on local bicycle trails. They'll give you free maps that show not just dedicated bike trails, but color-coded streets and highways indicating density of traffic and width of shoulders.

Our ride on the Scott trail began midmorning the day after arrival. A short distance southwest of the motel, we left Water Street, rode side streets a few blocks to get to the Boat Haven and worked our way through the marina to a haul-out area at the end.

The trail starts here, hard-packed dirt and gravel, running along the bay to the paper mill, about a mile away. This is a popular walking area as well, with nice views of the water and a detour, if desired, on trails through a small wetland.

Even the mill is scenic in a weird industrial way. Maybe that was just its association with “An Officer and a Gentleman” and Debra Winger. Come to think of it, our Tides Inn motel starred in that movie, too.

From the mill, the trail cuts back through woods, and much of the rest of the way is through what is almost a leafy tunnel. A welcome tunnel, it turned out that day, because it started raining. Protection from the overhanging branches kept us from getting soaked.

The Cape George Road trailhead is near the end of the 4-mile finished section of the trail, where we turned around for a quick return, since the gentle uphill we had been pedaling became a gentle downhill.

After riding back through the Boat Haven, we cut over to the nearby Port Townsend Food Co-op at 414 Kearney St. It's a great place to pick up supplies for a picnic lunch, which we did before heading to Fort Worden, where many scenes of you-know-what were filmed, not that we cared.

The co-op and Worden are both at sea level, a nice, easy ride. Oh wait, there's a 200-foot hill to go over on the way. We coped with it by climbing a bit, zigging for a level block, zagging up another and so on. About halfway up we ran out of options and had about a quarter-mile of nothing but up.

The grade down is steeper, covering a shorter distance to get to the park and sea level. (Studying the map more closely later, I realized there was a less hilly, though somewhat longer route around the backside of the hill.)

With the sun going in and out, and rain threatening again, we rode out to Point Wilson Lighthouse for the view and back to a picnic table reasonably sheltered from a rising wind and had a midafternoon lunch.

It's an easy ride around old artillery emplacements and through the military housing area surrounding parade grounds. An artillery museum is on the north side of the grounds.

On the return, we repeated the zigzag route on different streets to see some more of the neighborhoods and old houses.

Some buildings to look for on the upper streets include the Port Townsend Library (a Carnegie Library built in 1913) on Lawrence Street, the Jefferson County Courthouse and Clock Tower (1891) on Jefferson Street and the Post Office (1893) on Washington Street. All are magnificent stone structures, the latter two in Romanesque style.

After breakfast and a stroll through downtown the next morning, we packed up and caught the 11:15 ferry to Keystone, reversing the sequence of ferries and buses, arriving home about 3:30 p.m. Naturally, our rainy day of biking had been sandwiched by two marvelous sunny days.

We plan another trip to the Olympic Peninsula, this time to ride the longest completed section of the Olympic Discovery Trail, from Port Angeles to Sequim Bay.