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EVERETT IS a workaday town full of box-like buildings which the city fathers have tried to make look interesting without succeeding. Its report, if it were a schoolboy, would read "Deserves credit for trying." Which is one better than "Good at sports."

We are in now for a succession of ferries from island to island and our riding time and distance are governed by where those ferries are, how often a boat connects them, and how far we then have to ride to a campground. Today we aimed for South Whidbey and its state park and we had the time to spend all morning in the library and going about the tedious things that fill in the time on a bike tour when you're not actually touring.

Google embarrassed itself again by taking us up a 25 per cent climb from our hotel, difficult to walk let alone push a bike. At the top we realised that only the evening before we had taken a parallel road far less steep.

We found our way to the ferry at Clinton, then took a busy road with occasional chances to escape on to lesser roads that went the same way but in a longer time. There isn't a lot to be said about the day except that on that busy road, when we couldn't get across for a photo, we saw a touring cyclist coming the other way. That in itself isn't unusual. What is unusual is that he was on a double-decker bike. He had taken the frame of one bike and welded it, I suppose, on top of the frame of another bike. He sat, in other words, up in the sky.

I don't know where the chain went, how long it was and how the steering worked but he was going at quite a lick and gave us a cheery wave as we relished his eccentricity. I still wonder how he got on it, though, and how he managed at traffic lights. But I shall never know.