Amy and Sunny Pisano were behind schedule.
The sisters from Vancouver were trying to bike from Bellingham to Seattle, but it was after 9 p.m. and getting dark. They rode on back roads through the countryside, and with only dim lights, they didn’t want to keep going once it got too late. They knew they weren’t going to make it their friend’s house, where they had planned to spend the night.
“I thought we were going to have to sleep in a ditch,” said Amy Pisano, 24. “We started looking for a house with lights on.”
They found such a house, one with a carport. They knocked, introduced themselves and asked if they could sleep in the woman’s driveway under the carport. She invited them inside, and they stayed up late talking to her and her three children. She let the Pisano sisters sleep in her camper, and even hooked up the generator for them.
“It was just a beautiful experience,” said Sunny Pisano, 20. “It’s the sort of thing we wanted to happen on this trip.”
The Bellingham-to-almost-Seattle leg was part of a six-day bike trip, where Amy and Sunny traveled from Vancouver, B.C., to Vancouver, riding a little less than 400 miles total. Each night, they stayed with friends, mostly old but at least one new, and ended their journey on July 18 at Fort Vancouver, where they took a picture in the white gazebo before their parents picked them up.
Neither sister had much bike-riding experience prior to the trip. Amy Pisano, who’s in the nursing program at Clark College, rides her bike 9-plus miles to school. Sunny Pisano, who will be a senior at Washington State University Vancouver in the fall, hadn’t been on a bike in years.
While seeing if they could complete the ride was a big reason for the journey, just as important to them was what they left behind. On the bus ride up to Canada, the two discussed why they were going on the ride and what they wanted from it. Sunny Pisano suggested starting the trip with a burning ceremony.
So on the first day, Amy and Sunny wrote down things they wanted to rid their lives of on paper and set the papers on fire. The lists included their fear of the future, fear of the unknown, pain, resentment, insecurity and other more personal items.
“It was about releasing the negativity holding me back,” Sunny Pisano said.
During the drive, both sisters used those burned-away thoughts to find inspiration to keep going, especially during some demanding uphill rides, one of which caused a near-meltdown and some explicit language on the second day of the trip. It was in times like those when the sisters said they held each other up and calmed one another down.
Amy Pisano said she hopes she and her sister can always look back on the trip if they feel themselves slipping into old habits or forgetting what they burned and then pedaled nearly 400 miles away from. If they ever need a quick pick-me-up, they can think back to the beauty of all the small towns they’d never heard of before they cycled through. Or the time they pulled off the road in Rainier, in Thurston County, to jump in a swimming hole with a family who looked like they were having fun. Or the time they went looking for a bicycle shop, but mistakenly ended up going to a motorcycle garage with a bunch of tough-looking, leather-jacket-wearing bikers, who turned out to be quite nice and gave them directions.
The trip also showed the sisters what they can accomplish if they’re determined.
“We didn’t really know what we were getting ourselves into,” Amy Pisano said. “You’re not going to always be prepared or have everything you need for what life throws at you, but that doesn’t have to stop you.”
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