Author: amy

We’ve spent the last week completing a loop around central Florida. Florida has been distinctly different from the rest of the south – to paraphrase Jared, the more south you go, the more north you get.

The first difference we noticed was the roads. Even the backroads in central Florida are apparently highways, but oddly, they all have bike lanes. The last time we were here – driving a car between Sarasota and Melbourne – I distinctly recall making fun of them. “Why did they bother to paint a bike lane here? What idiot bikes next to a highway?” Now, of course, that idiot is me, and I’m appreciative, albeit sick of highway smog and noise.

Then we kept running into other folks from the north. Yesterday we stopped at a bar, Walden’s Filling Station. It was a picture-perfect little dive bar. Country music was blasting out on the porch while a group of regulars played cornhole. We ordered some beers – two for drafts $3, served in plastic cups. But when we struck up a conversation with the bartender she was from… upstate New York!

In the deep south, people looked a little disappointed when we unleashed our Yankee accents and said we came here from Brooklyn. In Florida, we’re just as liable to meet another member of the New York diaspora.

Once we escaped the gravitational pull of Orlando, most of our riding has been on rural roads and Route 1. I’ve enjoyed seeing the small businesses dotting the highway, many of which look completely untouched by time, straight out of the ’50s and ’60s. We’ve passed retro motels of all sorts; an ice cream shop shaped like an ice cream cone; and an honest-to-goodness drive-in diner. The highlight was Reptile World: Serpentorium.

We took a break there to admire the reptile collection. The snakes inside were organized by country. I found the number of venomous snakes represented by the USA mildly alarming: they all seem to be native to the areas we’re plan on biking through.

The highlight of the last week has been visiting our college friends, Jared and Bryce, on the coast. We last saw Jared at our wedding (well, technically at the after party), so it felt nicely circular – like we had biked straight out of the wedding and then directly to Florida. We spent two days catching up, having long philosophical conversations, and eating our way through West Melbourne. We started with trivia night and beers at The Broken Barrel Tavern – I contributed nothing but wrong answers, but the team still squeaked into 2nd place. The next day, Jared introduced us to the joy of mofongos at Mi Balconitos, and that night we cooked dinner for all four us us. Cooking was a real treat; it was the first time we’ve actually cooked in a kitchen in months. We ended the evening by playing a few intense rounds of Escape and Magic Maze.

We both felt a bit melancholy after leaving. It really did feel like this part of the trip has come to a close. Today we’ve rejoined the Southern Tier route and we’re feeling more back in our groove. I’ve started to ponder the enormity of crossing the country, but our next real goal is Pensacola: where we have a flight booked home for Thanksgiving!

Edit: I previously stated that we got 3rd place in trivia. Jared actually won our team 2nd place in an epic tiebreaker.

We made it to West Melbourne! This marks the southernmost point of our Atlantic Coast tour. Next we rejoin our route and turn west!

We spent the last few days riding down the coast of Georgia, before crossing into Florida yesterday.

Georgia surprised me by being my favorite state for cycling in the south (so far). As other cyclists warned us, bike infrastructure gets progressively worse as you head south from Virginia. We’ve noted deteriorating conditions for bikes – smaller and smaller shoulders, then rumble strips. But when we hit Georgia, suddenly it looped around and became so rural that the riding was great again. Slightly curvy and undulating roads; good asphalt; relaxed traffic measurable in minutes-per-car; beautiful farms with an occasional tiny town hosting a stick-to-your-ribs buffet.

We expected thunderstorms so we crammed three days of riding into two to reach the one nearby hotel on our route – in Nahunta, GA, population 1,000. We took off our first full rest day in a long time. Usually when we’re “resting,” we’re actually exhausting ourselves being tourists in a city somewhere. But Nahunta was a small place, so we planned to do absolutely nothing, which we enjoyed very much. I spent most of the day working on a painting in the library. We also watched a lot of bad movies in the hotel and made several raids to the local Piggly Wiggly for fresh food.

We left Nahunta feeling refreshed, and it was a short ride before we crossed over into Florida.

Very quickly the rural countryside disappeared and we were back in tourist country. Our first Very Florida Experience™ was to stop at one of the Citrus Center gas station tourist traps. It was actually a real delight on a bicycle – all the chilled orange slices and juice we could sample. The employees seemed pretty bored so I guess they were happy to accommodate our enthusiasm for fresh citrus.

Today we continued along the barrier islands on the eastern edge of the Florida coast, passing through Big and Little Talbot State Parks, and then the beach towns along route A1A. The damage from recent hurricanes (notably Irma) was still evident here, with lots of ongoing construction and special debris collection stations.

At the end of the day, we reached St. Augustine, which is our final destination on the Atlantic Coast Cycling route. I feel like I should be reflecting on the enormity of the accomplishment, or at least have something deep to say – but I have a very large dinner to sleep off!

Another state is in the bag – we bid farewell to the rumble strips of South Carolina and spent a rest day eating and sight-seeing in Savannah, Georgia.

We’ve had a few relatively uneventful days – after we left the outer banks, we’ve been riding through the ‘burbs around the southeast of North Carolina. A lot of it has been suburban hellscape – dull and busy roads filled with auto dealerships and storage units and strip malls.

But civilization also isn’t without its comforts! We did a lot of shopping and resupply – new shoes for me, and a full pannier of food for both of us. We also ate a bunch of good food. In 24 hours we hit a vegetarian restaurant for dinner and a BBQ restaurant for lunch. It’s a weird contradiction – after a month and change traveling, we really crave vegetables and fresh things, which we can’t carry very easily. But our appetites are still enormous, which makes it easy to put down a whole lot of pulled pork. Notably, both restaurants also sold us hush puppies (yum).

The most exciting part of the resupply mission was stopping in Surf City to pick up our very first package! Apparently you can ship things to any post office as “General Delivery”. We were anticipating this box for a couple days. Among other comforts of home, we got prescription sunglasses, an eBook reader, and an economy-sized tube of chamois cream.

Finally, we also enjoyed another great Warmshowers stay in Wilmington, a city that surprised us with a Whole Foods and a Trader Joe’s, a great beer shop, a long river-side bike path and good food. We left late after a lazy morning, refreshed and ready for the sparse services between here and Charleston.

We spent this week leisurely working our way down the Outer Banks. A thin strip of sandbar off the coast of North Carolina, the Outer Banks are part of the Atlantic Coastal Plain. That’s the same geological formation as Cape Cod, so it’s been fun to compare and contrast the two. Unlike the Cape, the Outer Banks are almost perfectly flat and only a few feet above sea level. The houses here look like Cape houses, but they’re built on stilts to reduce flood damage.

That flatness also means that there’s very little to break the wind. The riding has been decent, but plagued by a persistent headwind.

We crossed into the Outer Banks using the 518 bridge at Point Harbor. Our first stop was with Tom in Kitty Hawk, who was the best Warmshowers we could ask for – both an excellent conversationalist and an amazing cook. Since we were having such a great time, and my birthday was coming up, we decided to spend an extra night there. We spent our rest day in Duck, NC, lying on the beach and shopping.

At the end of the day, we also picked up a birthday cake from Tullio’s Bakery so I could have a proper birthday celebration with Jim and Tom. We sang Happy Birthday together, which was a really memorable and special experience – it made me feel really welcome here, which means a lot when traveling.

The next two days we rode south. The Outer Banks became increasingly depopulated as we went away from Kitty Hawk. First we were riding through beach towns, filled with empty rentals and t-shirt shops, but once we crossed the Oregon Inlet bridge, we were suddenly on a road in the middle of nowhere through a nature preserve. The road was incredible – the ocean on your left and the sound on your right, with only a few feet of dunes separating you on either side.

Every subsequent town was a long stretch away from the next. As we went south, it felt a little like going back in time, with hand-painted store signs, and a kind of beachy, sand-blasted, down-on-its-luck appeal. We met up with another cyclist, Frank, and got more practice drafting off of one another on those long highway roads.

At the end of the second day, we took the ferry from Hatteras Island to Ocracoke Island. We pulled into a beach-side state campground, which had looked really nice on the map, but unfortunately was teeming with mosquitoes. We took shelter in our tent. While we debated what to do, like a mirage, a woman and her husband came by to offer us cold beer and hot dinner! Once the sun set and the mosquitoes calmed down, we visited them at their camper, and were properly introduced to them as Mark and Anne. Besides feeding us, they regaled us with tales of Mark’s adventure biking to Oregon in the ’70s. We enjoyed beers and a perfect view of the Milky Way.

Originally we had planned to get up early and take the morning ferry back to the mainland, but Mark and Anne told us we shouldn’t skip Ocracoke Village. It turns out they were right – Ocracoke Village is everything we had hoped for in the Outer Banks. It’s very tight-knit, with a year round population of about 1,000, and full of cute shops. There’s a lighthouse. Plus, they even have a local dessert: fig cake, due to all the figs that grow on the island. We spent the day wandering (and eating) our way around town. One particularly great part of Ocracoke was how everyone seems to know everyone – the coffee shop owner, Katy, told us to buy fig cake at the seafood market; the seafood market owner Patty told us to chat bikes with Katy!

When it came time for the evening ferry, we realized our mainland camping plans weren’t going to work, so, oh, darn, too bad, we just had to spend the night in Ocracoke. We were both still itchy from our last campground, and I had a head cold, so we splurged on an actual motel, complete with balcony and hammock.

Today we’re actually going to take the ferry and return to the mainland. I’m really glad we decided to take the Outer Banks route; it was unlike anything I had expected to see on this trip.

For the last three days we’ve been booking it down the coast. We realized there wasn’t much else we wanted to do on our route in Virginia, so we decided to increase our mileage and ride for the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The weather has been cool, the terrain is pancake flat, and we felt ready to ride longer, so we did two 50+ miles days and our longest day yet, a 73.

We left Richmond and spent a day and a half on the Capital Bike Trail, which ends in historical Jamestown (apparently now some kind of colonial theme park.) We took the car ferry across the James River and continued through cotton and peanut fields towards the coast.

We ended our second day at a grocery store in Suffolk, VA. After restocking our supplies (mostly beans, oatmeal, and peanut butter), we discovered both our plan A and plan B for lodging had totally fallen through. While we debated whether to camp in the Great Dismal Swamp or to try our luck at the local one-star motel, who should come over but two bike tourists, also shopping for groceries!

We struck up a conversation and it turns out they were part of a group called Canada to the Keys, riding to raise money for the American Society for Suicide Prevention. They graciously welcomed us to join them where they were staying in a local church building. We were thrilled not only by the serendipity of it, but also because we had such a good time meeting everyone. Their group included people who had completed more than one long tour; a world record holder; a recumbent rider and a couple on a tandem! Besides comparing bicycles and notes, we enjoyed the chance to meet people who were such perfect bike-touring role models for us, and I went to sleep with a big smile on my face.

We waved farewell to our new friends at dawn, (and again half an hour later at McDonalds), and before lunch we crossed the border into North Carolina. The ride quickly became even more rural, with long stretches of perfectly flat, straight farm roads. The only challenge was a persistent headwind, which gave us practice drafting off on one another, as well as practice fighting boredom. At the end of a long day, we finally reached the coast, and we were treated to spectacular salt marshes during sunset – like Cape Cod, only flat.

Tomorrow we head towards the Outer Banks – we’re looking forward to enjoying a few lazier days by the beach.

The last few days have been fairly easy riding through Virginia. The weather is cooler and the terrain is relatively flat, so we’ve been adding on some extra miles.

Between DC and Richmond it’s fairly populated and suburban. I miss the more abandoned farm roads. The upside is that instead of roughing it in the wilderness, we’ve gotten to stay in RV campgrounds. They feel more like staying in a hotel than camping: complete with private showers, camp stores and cheap firewood. This morning our RV resort actually fed us free waffles.

We planned a short ride today so we could spent a little time in Richmond. Originally we intended to see the Civil War museum, but we decided we were a little sick of Civil War history. Our route has gone past battlegrounds and memorials, and we spent a day in Fredericksburg, where the antique shops were filled with Civil War artifacts and the souvenirs were Civil War-themed.

As an interesting aside: I’ve seen two confederate flags outside: the first one in southern New Jersey (yeah, really), and then one yesterday in Virginia. But inside, it seems like souvenir shops have a wide array of confederate-flag themed tat. I’m sure there’s a deeper cultural message here; I’ve been thinking a lot about Rahawa Haile’s article “Going it Alone” in Outside.

Regardless, we ended up spending the day wandering around Richmond a bit. We went out for some soul food and have enjoyed relaxing in our peaceful downtown hotel.