So I rode the bike up to a buddy's place in Mount Vernon yesterday. Pretty ride, nice weather, been wanting to do it for a while. I went straight up Hwy 9 to Arlington - it's got a nice 4-6ft shoulder the whole way - then cut over to the Old 99 which mostly parallels the I-5 for the last 20 miles, which was also nice and absolutely free of traffic. 
Which was nice because I was a hurting dude by then, so I needed my space, and wanted to keep my streak of 50-miles-without-a-redneck-in-a-Chevy-honking-yelling-or-scaring-me-half-to-death alive. See, I got 4 miles from my house down into the Sammamish Valley and realized I was in deep shit there was a solid 10-15mph headwind blowing. Directly from the North. Yes, Mount Vernon is directly north of Kirkland. So my happy-ass got to enjoy about 70 miles of driving into a headwind at 18 miles per hour, all by my lonesome. And that's about 20x harder than doing it safely tucked inside a pack of other dudes sharing the work.
Add to that the fact that I flatted just after Arlington (those nice shoulders had all kinds of crap on them, so I knew it was a matter of time), and the portable pumps aren't really made for normal use, so I spent the last 30+ miles on a half-inflated rear tire which didn't make me go any faster. So I'd budgeted 4 hours for the ride and it ended up being 3:45 moving time and almost exactly 4 hours total, but my ass was thoroughly kicked by the time I got up there. My Garmin figured a ballpark calorie spend of - get this - 5,600 kcals. That's a lot of Gatorade and Power Bars, and at the end of the day the wind couldn't get the best of me as I came flying through the last few miles through downtown Mount Vernon like my ass was on fire. Which it kind of was - I wanted off that bike bad, and that's a powerful motivator.