This article is part of the series Recalculating, a 28-day motorcycle journey along the Pacific Northwest coast and through its volcanic landscapes.

Two hundred and fifty dollars doesn’t buy what it used to – especially at the Timberline Lodge. It turns out it doesn’t even buy a toilet or a shower. Both were down the hall, until I paid another hundred for the upgrade and got a private bath and a view that almost made the nickel-and-diming worthwhile. Dinner was good, though the bar had zero overhead lighting and I ended up squinting at my plate with illumination from my iPhone.

Sound travels in that old lodge, lord. By 6:15 the walls were doing nothing to stop a pack of ski bros narrating their own hype reel in the hallway — dude, the snow is going to be awesome. Dude, the snow is going to be epic! By 7:00 it was babies and toddlers taking their turn. There was no rest for the weary. I’d written just yesterday about recovery time not being optional on this trip, and here it was catching up with me from the other direction — this staying up late then wanting to sleep in math just doesn’t work.

I spent longer than I’d like wrestling with the day’s plan over that breakfast. Vancouver was 375 miles out, and the options were: push through and call it a big day, cut it short in Tacoma or Olympia (I wasn’t sure how I felt about the neighborhoods in Tacoma late at night), or bail on the interstate entirely and meander up WA-11 along the coast. Money made the decision easier than I expected — Timberline had already been spendy, and I had a new battery calling somewhere on the trip, so saving a few bucks and banking an extra rest day off the bike in Vancouver won out. A straight shot on the 5 it was.

I called my home dealer, SoSo Cycles but in the Tacoma location, to see if they had room to swap the battery while I was still within striking distance. The service manager didn’t have the capacity. Bummed — I’d wanted to knock it out at Timberline and stop carrying that particular worry — but I still had Seattle and Vancouver in my back pocket if it came to that.

Highway 26 down the back side of Mount Hood could not have been more different from the climb up. Pine forest lined the highway the whole way. It opened to genuinely epic views of the mountain if you’re lucky enough to be headed east instead of west like I was. I kept the throttle mellow the entire stretch — the trooper from yesterday was still very much on my mind. Keep it mellow.

Somewhere on 84 I passed a Can-Am trike running both US and Canadian flags off the back, and a little further up the 5, another group waved Canada and Mexico flags at anyone who’d look. Whatever’s going on with the border talk this year, apparently a lot of Washingtonians wanted you to know exactly where their loyalties sit. The weather, for what it’s worth, could not have been better all day.

Washington’s Interstate 5 was rough going. A bad accident had the freeway closed outright, with detour signs strung out for miles. I pulled off for lunch at a Taco Bell and used the stop to run through some PT exercises for my throttle arm, since I knew a long grind was still ahead. Funny to think I was running my own version of a border run — rather than the ones the marketing execs at Taco Bell imagined.

I wanted to see Marcus — that part was deliberate. Marcus moved up to Tacoma a few months back and I’d missed his going-away party, so this felt like the right way to close that loop — congrats, best wishes, a good catch-up with a good dude. He’s the one who helped me get the bars fitted on the GS back in the early days, and I hadn’t forgotten it. After the long grind on the freeway, I also needed some real decompression time — same cue I’d taken the day before with the trooper — so I found my way to SoSo Cycle’s outpost in Tacoma and got to say hello.

Leaving Marcus’s shop, the math hit me: I was only about halfway to Vancouver, and it was Friday at 5 p.m. I was staring down Seattle. I decided to take the 405 around through Bellevue instead of fighting the 5 through town. I hit the express lane without a Good To Go pass loaded. Washington doesn’t have an agreement with California. I’ll never understand why we can’t standardize tolling the way the East Coast does with E-ZPass. For once no traffic blocked me. The irony that the 405 is the best traffic on the entire trip.

From there it was gas in Marysville and a grind the rest of the way north — no HOV lane and two construction zones back to back. The second was a 25-minute grind up a mountain grade with massive amounts of clutching zipper merging right after a sign insisting the lane wasn’t closed. Riiiiight….it was closed, on a Friday. I made a conscious effort not to let the frustration ride shotgun the rest of the way.

Once I got into the far north, the frustration gave way to something better. Three days and roughly 900 miles after leaving the Bay Area, the border was the milestone that mattered. The NEXUS card sat in my left Aerostich pocket, scanned clean on the first try. The guard asked a few questions, waved me through, and that was it. I was here. I was in Canada.

Sunset over Vancouver was awesome. It was good to be here and I was GoodToGo. Today was a rough day, a long day, and a day that deflated me more than once — but not one that came close to defeating me. I was here.

The rest day gave me a chance to finally deal with the battery. Vancouver Motorrad got me in and swapped it without fuss — matter-of-fact and quietly efficient about the whole thing. A cool contrast to Concord, to San Francisco, to Marcus back in Tacoma, even to the shops in Roswell and Marietta that had patched me in with a smile. There was no small talk, no story swapping, just business.

Sitting there waiting, I found myself wondering why I’d bothered — the old battery kept testing fine, right up until I handed it over. But there’s fine, and there’s not having to think about it anymore. A new battery meant I could stop reading tea leaves into a 12.3-volt reading every morning. It was worth the money just to get it out of my head, and a better trade than saving a few bucks and finding out the hard way somewhere with no cell service. Batteries have a habit of failing at the worst possible time.

Wandering the neighborhood afterward, I kept running into hydrangeas — big pink and blue mopheads spilling over every fence. I’ve tried growing them twice, once back east and once in the Bay Area, and killed them both times. Out here they grow like weeds. Small thing, but it felt like a fitting punchline to a stretch that started with too much friction and ended with things finally falling into place.

Phase one is in the books. Phase two means heading back down to Seattle to spend some real time with R and a few good friends — no battery anxiety, no border math, just people I actually came up here to see.