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

Leaving Vancouver was harder than I expected. R and I had two great weeks together, and this was the moment the trip started to turn south in earnest. We always joke that the traveler has the easier goodbye. I’m not so sure this time. This goodbye was hard after so many good adventures in Washington this trip. I’m transitioning to the downhill slope of my trip that I’m not quite ready to end yet.

I’d also spent good time this trip with Corey, a former colleague turned good friend, and his wife and I had been chatting for a few days about his journey toward his first motorcycle. The plan was simple: show up for his Kickstart course. Kickstart is the beginner class that gets new riders on a bike for the first time in a low stakes and low pressure format. I wanted to surprise him. His wife was in on it.

Finding a Way Across Washington

I didn’t want to ride I-5. I’ve slogged across it on the freeway at least six times, and I wasn’t doing it again. Finding a better route turned into its own small project. Washington doesn’t give you the grid of state highways California does, so finding a way across took some work.

The border guard laughed when my NEXUS card didn’t scan through my riding suit the way it had going north. I was a touch caught off guard, lol. He asked a few more questions and handed over a tip I hadn’t asked for—get a shoulder strap so the card scans easier next time. He was a good dude and in good humor about it.

Leaving the Canadian side, I passed the “Canada: Yours to Discover” sign, and I’ll admit in that moment I wished the U.S. side gave visitors that same welcome. Even getting into the national park, R and I had to figure out whether it was one of the ones that charges non-residents an extra $100 per person just for not being American. Being the visitor for once makes you think differently about the visitors back home.

My first stop was the northernmost post office in the contiguous United States, in Blaine—a postcard to my neighbor and a T-shirt from R to CJ, who runs the Rivian club. It was a small errand in the momente, but it’s the kind of thing that adds up and turns a trip into a story later.

Small Roads and Slow Speeds to Mount Baker

Northern Washington is a long network of small paved roads with no clean line from Blaine to Mount Baker, and Washington has this habit of shaving 5 to 10 mph off a road that would carry a higher limit back home. R and I had talked about Mount Baker for years—he’s had the magnet on his fridge the whole time—and somehow, between all that talking, we’d not made a trip to see it together. He’d seen it, Now I wanted to see it.

Fires burning in eastern Washington were pushing smoke our way, and I spent a few miles trying to pick the mountain out from the freeway. I think I saw it, but the haze made it hard to be sure. The state highway gave way to a farm road, and the farm road gave way to gravel chip-seal construction with “motorcycles use extreme caution” signs—the ones that show up at every job site in this state, so I got some practice navigating loose gravel whether I wanted it or not.

Climbing Mount Baker

Washington 542 up the mountain is genuinely great—technical, well-surfaced, and a climb that could be an athletic ride. The drivers on it were a different story. I moved five, ten, sometimes fifteen miles an hour below a speed limit that already seemed unnecessarily low. First there was a Prius. Once I got around it, there was an Avalon a few miles ahead. Pass one rolling obstruction and the road would offer another, as if Washington had placed them at measured intervals to keep motorcyclists from becoming overconfident.

Still, near the top, the road became everything I’d hoped it would be. The turns tightened. The landscape opened. The long sequence of farm roads, construction, slow cars, and questionable navigation finally paid out in mountain and sky. There it was: a beautiful peak rising above everything, apparently the reward for having made the effort to come all this way. Once up there, I wanted R there. I could feel the distance in our long-distance relationship. You can’t share every moment by design. You have to choose the ones that matter, and sometimes the ones that don’t seem to matter catch you by surprise.

I stopped at the ski lodge and wandered into the gift shop. The cashier said hello and instantly brought me into conversation. He was remarkably knowledgeable, which is how I learned that the mountain I had been admiring—and photographing—was not Mount Baker. It was Mount Shuksan, the mountain everyone apparently mistakes for Mount Baker.

I was shocked.

He laughed.

It was a useful correction. Until then, I’d been looking at the landscape without really understanding how the pieces fit together. He helped orient me, not only by explaining which mountain was which, but by giving the place a shape beyond the obvious view. I spent the remaining time trying to get decent shots of the road, Mount Shuksan, and Mount Baker. I was glad to have the bike instead of the truck; the lot was oversubscribed and felt way more manageable on two wheels instead of four.

Back Across Washington

Heading back, I noticed the same thing I had on the way out—this part of the state feels underbuilt for how much infrastructure is actually here. There were barely any turnouts and barely any passing lanes, even on roads like Washington 9 that carry the signage of a real corridor without the substance to back it up. I was getting antsy for a break when I ran into two riders from Montana who had pulled into a Food Pavilion. That was as good an excuse as any to stop for ten minutes. I’d learned that lesson in Oregon.

Crossing Back to the Coast

Once I got past I-5 and into more coastal Washington, it was a completely different place. The cars around me behaved like Seattle commute traffic: aggressive, impatient, not unlike California, if I’m honest. The sea breeze that followed felt like a reward for making it through: the mountains, the high desert, the whole interior stretch of the state, all of it behind me now.

Coastal Washington felt closer to home in a way I wasn’t expecting—the trees slightly different, the plant life slightly different, the coastline slightly different, but carrying clear markings of home all the same.

Whidbey Island was cool. The road moved between farmland and glimpses of the water, and the sea air made the whole place feel closer to home. Deception Pass was even better—the narrow channel, the current moving hard beneath the bridge, and the coast opening up on both sides. It was one of those places where I was glad to be on the motorcycle because I could pull over, find a small place to park, and take it in for a few minutes.

The Ferry Sprint

By the time I reached the ferry, I had to pee like a racehorse, and I genuinely didn’t know whether to stop for gas, use the bathroom, and risk missing it, or just go for it and sort out gas on the other side of the channel. I went for it. Made the ferry, which was running a little late—and for once, I was completely fine with that.

There were about 60 minutes left to Bainbridge, and my mind kept circling the same question the whole way: was Corey actually going to be surprised, or had something slipped through in all those texts with his wife? Sometimes friendships sneak up on you like that, and they’re often the best kind: organic, the sort you don’t have to work at the way you do with others. My time with Corey has always been organic and unhurried.

I took a break at the floating bridge and watched a fully electric Amazon van roll past, which got me thinking about the Rivian and about home. Mostly, though, I just marveled that a floating bridge actually works.

When I pulled into the garage, Corey looked from me to his wife, trying to understand how the two of us had managed to pull it off. He was shocked that I was there, but beneath that was something deeper: I had made the time to show up for him.

He also couldn’t quite understand what I expected to get from sitting through a beginner motorcycle course—but that wasn’t really the point. I wasn’t there because I expected to get something from a basic course. I was there because Corey was getting on a motorcycle for the first time.

Corey was surprised.

Score.