On a rainy Wednesday morning at a Port Gamble Park & Ride, Orysia Earhart has her mind set on adventure.

Actually, she has her mind set on two.

“I’m a writer,” she explains.

Earhart, of Bainbridge, has a litany of stops before her: She traveled to Port Gamble to catch an 8 a.m. bus to Lofall, where she’ll hop on a ferry to South Point, from where she intends to catch another bus to Sequim, where her writers’ critique group meets once a week.

Normally Earhart wouldn’t need to leave the Kitsap Peninsula until the afternoon, but the Hood Canal Bridge closure has changed those plans.

“I’m looking at this as an adventure right now, and seeing whether I will be doing this again,” she says. “I think e-mail might be cheaper.”

Earhart joins hundreds of commuters traveling to and from the Olympic Peninsula via the Washington State Department of Transportation’s free alternative options, meant to make canal crossing possible while the bridge is closed for six weeks of construction. More than $12 million of the project’s nearly $500 million cost has been devoted to mitigating the roadblock for the 15,000-20,000 motorists who use the bridge.

Jeff Kempf, an Edmonds-based commuter who runs a snowboard factory in Sequim, is planning to make the commute once or twice a week, sleeping on the couches of generous friends during the nights he stays on the Olympic Peninsula. Wednesday morning marked his second trip across the canal, and he said the two-hour journey has so far worked well.

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s going to be inconvenient, but we’ll find a way to get over there,'” he said, recalling when he first heard of the bridge closure.

Like many, Kempf tapped at the screen of his cell phone while riding the bus. Even with more than a dozen passengers, it remained a quiet transport; the roadway similarly lacked its usual bustle of cars. In a row of seats near Kempf’s, a young girl in a green knit hat and rain boots, too short to see over the seat in front of her, read a book beneath soft commuter lights.

A flux of Kitsap-bound passengers, headed in the opposite direction, prepared to board the Starline luxury vehicle as it pulled into Lofall. Some wore street clothes, carrying backpacks, while others looked more professional, toting Bluetooths and manillas.

Down at the ferry dock, awaiting a ride toward the Olympics, Bill Norman says he’s a guy who goes with the flow.

“I’m mellow,” he explains. He wears a bright orange sweatshirt and carries a purple lunch cooler stickered with a CraneCam logo; grisly gray curls appear from beneath the brim of his cap.

Norman, a crane operator, works a graveyard shift in Bellevue. Because of the ferry cancellations due to Tuesday windstorms, he’s heading home for the first time since Monday. (Read more about the cancellations in “Winds throw monkey wrench at Hood Canal Bridge project.”) He passed the 16 hours between shifts in a Geo, which, at six-feet tall, is a long time to spend, he contended.

“You just deal with it,” said Norman. He’s taken the ferry across the canal since the closure began May 1, and said bus drivers and boat workers have made the trip a pleasant one, despite ticking his Hadlock-Bellevue commute time from three hours to four.

“It’ll all work out in the long run,” he says.

The bridge, its draw span open, stretches in full view from the crossing. A hole marks where the east truss once was, and a fleet of tall cranes jut skyward like the long necks of dinosaurs, lending the concrete horizon a jurassic feel.

A few contented passengers wax positive on the swift magnitude and efficiency of the short-term system. Two vessels clip across the canal, each taking 20 minutes and leaving in half-hour intervals from 4 a.m. to 11 p.m.

“Government at its finest,” quipped one ferry boarder.

But at the Lofall dock, adventurer Earhart meets an impassible foe: the last bus to Sequim has already gone. At 9 a.m., she arrived a half-hour too late.

A short woman in a long tan coat, peering from behind rounded glasses, Earhart makes a hurried phone call explaining her ordeal.

“I am so ticked, there should be more than three buses,” she says later, contending the gap in service won’t just be a problem for her, but for tourists as well. Making transit connections had been her main worry before leaving Port Gamble.

Soon Earhart happily tells a bit about her novel, a story of mystery set on the 1918 Eastern Front, where heroine Sophia must reassemble a stolen triptych. She says she’ll try the DOT’s system again next week, just “one more time.” For today, she’ll converse with her group via e-mail and conference call.

Earhart describes Sophia and her race against time to piece together ancient panels of art, an enterprise unfinished, just like her own.

“Does she or does she not do it?” she asks.