The Cardinals scramble in Gig Harbor

Despite having lived in the Seattle area for the past twenty plus years, this was our first visit to Gig Harbor. It’s always fun to do a Street Scramble in a new area and experience how the city and the land are laid out. At this Street Scramble, we had both kids, both on pedal trailers for the first time. The kids really enjoyed jumping off the pedal trailers to find the answers to the questions at each checkpoint.

We were a little schizophrenic in our route planning. It was clear that we should visit all the close-in checkpoints. We couldn’t decide whether to go north or south or how far to go in either direction. We initially mapped out a route to sweep a little way north. At the last minute, we (I) changed our strategy to ride out to the farthest point we wanted to visit and collect the checkpoints on the way back, a strategy we had not tried before. It worked fairly well for us, but caused us to waste a little time at a couple checkpoints along the way.

We started out by riding out to checkpoint 52 and then collecting checkpoints on the way back toward town. On the ride out we passed and then were passed by a team on Bike Friday bikes. We actually missed the first turn to go directly to 52 (boat ramp), so we got 25 (Slippery Hill road) first and then 52. After getting 35 (steam in park), we skipped 39 (the hill was just too steep for us). We missed 22 (top of stairs) because we misinterpreted the map as showing a street where the stairs were. We got 28 (viewing platform), saw Teriyaki Donut, and then went up and got 22. We skipped 11 (school) because the hill was too steep on bikes for just 10 points. We went to 43 (pot behind museum) and 33 (plaque on bench). Checkpoint 27 (display window) was one checkpoint we should have got on the way out. We were now on the wrong side of the street and the traffic was heavy, so it took precious minutes to get across and then back across to continue riding south. We couldn’t resist going for the two forty point checkpoints, 46 (fire hydrant at school) and 44 (Andrew’s troop), so we rode up the hill (long) to 46, planning to get 44 on the way back down (it was on the other side of the street). Doing this, though, prevented us from adding 42 on the fly. We got 44 (which took us a few minutes because we hadn’t read the description closely) and then went on to 45 (white church) and 26 (church). We rode down the hill to 34 (public dock). We had trouble finding 31 (bench with graffiti)—we didn’t realize it was so far out on the dock. We then wanted to get 53 (sign at end of street) and got 12 (“green” building) on the way. After 53, we rode up the hill to 24 (white house) and passed Teriyaki Donut on the way up the hill. We had about fifteen minutes left at this point. We knew we wanted to get 36 and 21, but didn’t think we could add another checkpoint, which is another problem with riding out to the farthest checkpoint and collecting them on the way back—we were out of checkpoints, but we had time left. In the end, it worked out okay because I told Gwen to go right to 36 (post office) instead of left and so we had to wait a few minutes for her to figure out she went the wrong way and come back and find us. On the way back to the finish, we got checkpoint 21 (church).

In general, the area was hillier than we anticipated which slowed us down. Our favorite checkpoint was probably the giant pot behind the museum: checkpoint 43.

Our route was 25-52-35-28-22-43-33-27-46-44-45-26-34-31-12-53-24-36-21. We got 560 points and rode about 10.5 miles.