Teriyaki Donut is my son, Omar Barnes (age 6), and me, Greg Barnes. I ride a mountain bike with Omar in a Trail-a-Bike behind, and we compete in the 3-hour family bike division.
My wife, Elizabeth Walkup, did the three-hour foot Scramble with our 3-year old, Emmett, who insisted on walking the whole way. Needless to say, they did not win any awards, but they did see a lot of downtown Everett.
Based on my sketchy knowledge of Everett (basically: the river area to the east is flat, downtown is pretty flat, Forest Park and further southwest is not), and because hills are particularly hard with the Trail-A-Bike, we decided we'd concentrate on the flat areas with the highest point values: due east, Lowell, downtown (not a lot of high-value checkpoints, but a lot of checkpoints in a concentrated area), and the two 50-point checkpoints on the western waterfront. We also figured we could climb one hill, so we chose the Forest Park checkpoint and the reservoir checkpoints. The rest (far south and southwest) we would skip.
My original plan was to get the two checkpoints to the east, then make a counterclockwise loop, heading east from Forest Park to the Lowell checkpoints (crossing I-5 at 41st), then returning via Smith Ave. This was mostly based on the notes in the flyer about crossings of I-5. If we had time, we could pick up 55, which is reachable along the Interurban Trail, and head into Lowell at 52nd instead of 41st.
On the way back from 57 (Ebey Island), I decided a better plan was to postpone the north loop until the end, since the south checkpoints seemed to be worth more. Furthermore, we found you couldn't cross back under I-5 at Hewitt (east to west), so we just headed west on Pacific. Instead, we should have headed east on Hewitt under the causeways to 43, then west on Everett. My second main error was that I missed two checkpoints on the sweep of downtown; I thought we'd have to come up from the western waterfront the same way we went down, and we could get them then. This turned out to be completely wrong.
Anyway, we visited 22 checkpoints and got 640 points (including a 10-point late penalty): 12 [park sponsorship], 37 [autographs], 32 [causeway sign], 57 [Ebey Island tree farm], 21 [theatre?], 24 [movie theater], 14 [chandelier], 16 [symphony], 11 [award shop], 51 [picnic tables on dock], 54 [vegetation signs], 13 [Providence Hospital], 36 [Rucker Hill mansion], 45 [Rucker Hill reservoir], 42 [Forest Park], 22 [Olympic Physical Therapy], 52 [cemetery], 33 [Lowell Park], 25 [house with white picket fence], 53 [Rotary Park], 43 [Riverside Park], 31 [elevator in garage].
You can view our route on Gmaps Pedometer. I estimate we went around 24 miles.
At the second checkpoint, I sent Omar in to ask who was signing autographs, and Mr. Clint Dodson of the Everett Hawks not only answered, but gave him an autographed (soft) football. People were quite nice on this Scramble: twice people who saw me consulting a map offered to help us with directions. On the other hand, we helped someone in a car find Forest Park.
Just before checkpoint 51 [picnic tables on dock], Omar started asking what a particular noise was. I figured it was either the freight train we just passed, or the squeak of the Trail-A-Bike hitch, but it turned out he was probably talking about my rapidly deflating rear tire. At the dock, I sent him down a floating dock to try to answer the question (not one of my better parenting decisions) while I tried to replace the tube. Numerous foot teams were returning from the end of one dock, while others were just starting. Omar reported that there were no picnic tables (some yacht owners told him so). The foot teams who came afterwards said we were all at the wrong dock, but you could see the picnic tables if you went to the end of the dock. After I replaced the tube and did a feeble job of pumping it up, I checked it out myself, and sure enough, there were 2 picnic tables at the end of a dock sticking out of the next pier to the north. I don't know what was up with this checkpoint.
As we were leaving 51, we learned that I had not reattached the Trail-A-Bike correctly to my bike (you have to take lots of things off to fix a flat back tire). The Trail-A-Bike spontaneously detached and Omar took a tumble. Fortunately, being on the pier and having an underinflated back tire, we were only going around 4mph, so there was no harm done. Still, that was a scary moment.
The path to the next checkpoint (54) was one of the worst bike paths I've ever seen. There were at least 5 railroad tracks intersecting at the bad angles, including one that needs a major repaving job. To top it off, near the intersection with Bond St., there are two guy wires embedded in the pavement in the middle of the path, with barely any room for a bike to pass by. On the way back, we exited from the trail as soon as we could, climbing a hill that coincidentally brought us right to checkpoint 13.
The hill out of 36 to the south was grueling, particularly from 34th to 35th. We had to walk up to 34th, not so much because of the hill, but because my underinflated tire was causing me to slip whenever we would move even slightly side to side. From 34th to 35th we just put our heads down and went up straight, remembering that we'd climbed a similar hill out of the Vashon Ferry dock just a week ago. At the top on the switchback to the reservoir, Omar admired the view of downtown Everett, saying he could see all the way to Seattle. Wrong direction, but it was a nice view.
Out of 45 [reservoir], we cut through the schoolyard, just barely fitting our bikes through the first gate (and holding up some foot teams who were just behind us). Just before Forest Park, we found the overpass marked on the map, one block off. Confused, we went west on a route I was sure would work (this was where I provided directions to a slightly more-confused motorist also looking for Forest Park).
After coming down the hill from Forest Park, we finally found a gas station on Rucker where we could properly inflate my back tire.
After cutting through the Verizon campus back to 41st, I figured we'd find an entrance to the cemetery (checkpoint 52). When we got to the overpass, I noticed that the map only showed one access point, to the south. I didn't want to go there, since we were already running low on time, but as we were crossing the overpass, we saw the NE cemetery entrance. Arggh. So we had to double back. In the cemetery, we gave up bicycling up a grassy hill full of monuments, and just dropped the bikes and ran up the hill until we could answer the question.
Apart from downtown (where I'd previously attended two birthday parties in the Children's Museum with Omar), the only other portion of the route I'd visited was the southern part of Lowell, which I breezed through on a bike ride to Snohomish. This was enough to make finding checkpoint 53 easy.
After 53, we had about 25 minutes left. We reached 43 with about 10 minutes to spare, and Omar suggested we just go to the finish line. I wanted to pick up 31 downtown, so I suggested instead that we see how much time we had left when passing by the finish line, then go as far as we could in half that time. This gave us 4 minutes to get to 31 and back, and we would have made it if we had entered the garage from Hoyt. Instead, we entered from the alley and had to go down a level and out the Hoyt entrance. We ended up 51 seconds late.
Ignoring the problem with 51, there were two checkpoints where the answer was not obvious, despite what the rules say. At 54 [vegetation signs], only 1 sign was easily visible. Luckily I saw the second out of the corner of my eye as we were leaving. At 42 [Forest Park], it appears there are only 7 horseshoe pits from the road. Omar saved us here by insisting there were more, and he was quite right. I guess this answer was obvious if you actually bothered to go to the checkpoint instead of glancing from the road.
We came in first in our division, winning a $25 Lowe's gift card. Heck, we made out like bandits: in addition to the gift card and the aforementioned football, in the raffle we won tickets to a Hawks game next week, and Elizabeth won two symphony tickets.
Since Elizabeth and Emmett finished early, they had time to order a humongous takeout lunch from the yummy Alligator Soul restaurant (on Hewitt just west of Broadway). We highly recommend this place if you have a chance to go to downtown Everett in the future (say, to see an arena football game, or attend the symphony).