Month: September 2017

August 17.

The trip from Ft. Lauderdale to Homestead was 78.9 miles of mostly city.  Some of the city biking was not to bad–about the first twenty miles or so.  We were traveling then on multi-lane roads with bike lanes.  But soon the bike lanes petered out and we were just a part of the city traffic.  There were several times when someone turning right would cut off the lead cyclist.  A couple of times I had to put the brakes on quickly to avoid a collision.  Other times a car came close enough that I could have knocked on the window without any trouble.  It was too close for my comfort.  The other bad part of this city cycling was that it was hard to go much further than a couple of blocks before stopping at another light.  Stopped at a stop light, the heat surrounds you with no escape.

I got to a round-about that had about six exits, and I knew that I had taken the wrong one.  I was stopping to reconnoiter and try to figure out which way to go when the sweeps, Larry and Scott, rode up.  I had not gone far enough around the round-about–it was the next exit.  By that point, I was fed up with the traffic, but I figured I could make it another five miles or so to the next rest stop.  It would be difficult for anyone to pick me up where I was.  With all three of us together we were easier to see though the traffic was still bad.

I got off my bike at the rest stop and said, “I’m done with this!”  Apparently I was quite adamant.  It became part of the story-telling for the group.  A couple of the people that I had been riding with throughout the week, but had taken the day off after their hundred mile day, laughed at my exclamation.  I got a ride to the next rest stop.  After that, we had been told, was more country roads.

So I got a ride to the next rest stop, at a marina.  The marina had warning signs on how to avoid manatees (sea cows).  In certain areas, the boats were not allowed to run their motors, or maybe just small motors, to avoid harming the manatees.  I never did get to see a manatee.

I think this was the day that Ky had an encounter with an iguana.  An iguana got caught up in the spokes of his front wheel.  From there, it managed to somehow get to his left leg, climb up, across his waist, and then jump off.  How he managed to keep riding through that encounter, I don’t know, but he did it.

I saw mostly little lizards by the road.  The longest was probably about a foot in length and very bright green.

After I got in the car at rest stop two, I was glad that I did.  There were even more narrow roads and lots of traffic.  We did get to a section that I wished I could ride, though.  There was a bike path and lots of pretty banyan trees on both sides of the road.  And then we learned about banyan trees by looking it up on Google!  They start when a seed lands in the crotch of a tree and starts growing.  As the plant grows, it sends its roots down to the ground.  Eventually, the host tree can be totally enveloped by the banyan (a type of fig) and then the host tree will die and rot.  That is why banyan trees have such interesting configurations.

Homestead was cool and the people there were very kind.  There is a place to go called the Coral Castle that I would like to see someday.  It was built by a man who was rejected in love.

I did not take any photos in all the traffic.

August 15.

This was a 100 mile day, mostly along the beach roads again.  Check out the places where we had our rest stops:

A lot of people went swimming when they got to the rest stops.  It helps to cool you down in the heat–that’s for sure.  It also gets you covered with salt water!

This was the day that I took a fall.  I pulled over into the shade, and I was pretty much stopped and just lost my balance.  I somehow landed with my gluteus maximus on top of my saddle–which gave me a very deep bruise.  I never looked at it until about five days later–that was one ugly bruise!  Right after I fell, a police officer pulled up to see if I was ok.  Which I was, though I knew that bruise was going to be a bad one.

I sat in the shade for a while and then rode on to the Ice Cream Club about three or four miles further on.  Seriously good ice cream there, and it was a good place to wait.  I thought that I had somehow damaged my bike in the fall, and called for a ride.  Turned out I had only bent the fender in where it was rubbing the tire!  Maybe I could have made it for the entire 99 miles, but I’m not totally sure I would have made it anyway.

In the evening we stayed at a huge United Methodist Church.  My main goal was to get my bicycle fixed so that I could ride the next day.  I was trying to adjust the brakes because I thought that was the problem (as did one or two others) but it was only the fender.  Our trip leader, Connor, found the problem right away and fixed it just as quickly.

 

I completed the trip to Key West on August 19 and several people asked me if I planned to document the rest of the trip.  I told them all ‘yes,’ but it sure has taken me a long time to get this far!  Since the trip ended, I spent a week with my daughter in Alexandria, VA and then came to Kansas to live with my mom while I look for work.  Looking for work, at least as a minister, is not progressing as well as I had hoped.  I am, though, truly enjoying the time I get to spend with my mom.   I am lucky to get the chance to do that, and lucky she is willing to have me!

The first day was from Orlando to Melbourne on August 14.  The GPS route we are sent each day tells us how many feet we ascend and how many we descend along our route.  We went up 384 ft and down 475 ft–basically flat, but back down to the sea. Most of the hills are usually overpasses when the numbers are that low.   The church we stayed in on Monday evening was called St. Sebastian by the Sea.  It was only about two blocks to the ocean.  Our total trip that day was 76 miles.

At St. Sebastian’s we learned that this is a prime spot for sea turtle nests and that we had arrived during the right season.  If you wanted to see a sea turtle, you needed to go down to the beach at night–no flashlights allowed, and just look around.  I was too tired to stay up, though I did consider it.  Two people from our group, though, did go out.  They saw a couple of mothers coming out of the ocean to lay their eggs, and they also saw some sea turtles hatching and making their way to the ocean.  The reason you can’t use flashlights is because the turtles use the light of the moon to guide them to the ocean.  Any other light throws them off and they can’t find their way.  Somewhere along the line, someone had enough foresight to regulate building along the beach so that even the houses there do not have lights that show up on the beach.

One of the people at the church has a daughter who works at a state park near there.  They knew of a couple of sea turtle nests that they were able to rope off and protect.  Another one, though, they didn’t find on time.  It was very near a campground restroom and the little newly hatched sea turtles were all over the lit restroom.  I think they managed to save some of them and herd them out to sea somehow.  You can’t pick them up and carry them to the sea–I think it is like trying to help a butterfly out of its chrysalis.

Tuesday of the final week we traveled very close to the beach for the first 40 to 45 miles and then turned inland toward Port St. Lucie.  As you can see, it was another beautiful day.

Just about every morning, I started out the day with a smile on my face and in my heart.  It is a wonderful thing to be on a bicycle trip–especially when we are able to get help if we need it.  I know it’s not for everyone, but it is one of the most fun things I can imagine doing.  If I were to do anything different, it would be to have a few extra hours in some of the places that looked interesting, but that I had to pass up to keep up with the group.  On days when we didn’t ride, I often had trouble sleeping–not enough exercise that day!

August 11, 12 & 13.

From Ormond Beach we turned back inland to head to Orlando.  In Orlando, we have the Central Florida Fuller Center and we will be working with them.  We stayed in the First United Methodist Church in Orlando.  On the way there, we rode a long stretch of highway called Tomahoka Farms road and I saw signs saying “keep Tomahoka rural”.  But after crossing the country and seeing so much of rural America emptied of businesses, I wonder about this dream and ideal.  I have spent much of my life in rural areas; rural America instills a strength, devotion to family, and commitment to neighbor that is hard to beat.  But agricultural jobs are fewer and fewer, and there aren’t a lot of other local job opportunities in those rural areas to choose from.  It’s appalling to visit a town and see one business open along a street full of shuttered businesses.

In Craig, CO we learned, from a local real estate agent, that her business really picked up after Donald Trump was elected as president because they are in an area which still has abundant coal resources—enough to supply the local coal-fired power plants for another fifty years.  The local plants have just been upgraded with emission controls to meet EPA standards.  Coal may still be viable there, but employment in the coal industry nationwide has declined for decades.  The perception that Trump was pro-coal and Clinton was anti-coal was the deciding factor for them.  Most solutions to problems will have to be local, but we also need to learn compassion for people whose situations are different from our own.  It is too easy, in our modern age, to almost totally insulate ourselves from people whose lives are different from our own.

In Savannah, we happened to be at church when the church was saying goodbye to a family that was going to travel through the US in an RV for the year.  He had a job in which he could work from home, and she is a teacher who is going to home-school their three girls.  Since I have felt called by God to go on this bike ride, it truly made me wonder what God is up to.  This couple wanted to show their girls the beauty of the natural world, and also meet people around the country.

Back to Florida—this was the one day when I had problems with sore knees.  It surprised me.  I’ve been through the mountains without any knee problems!  But my knees were bothering me enough that it was totally throwing me off my game, so I did not ride the entire distance to Orlando.

In Orlando, we were able to have dinner with the local Fuller Center board and people from the First United Methodist Church.  The next day was a work day, painting a house that belonged to Helen.  Helen was an interesting person—full of joy!  She was a widow, and in a wheelchair.  When she got the wheel chair, her house wasn’t accessible but she lived there anyway.  She was active in her church and she helped her neighbors, even taking in a couple of extra residents into her house.  Her bathroom was inaccessible to her, so she used a bedside commode and then, to bathe, she rigged up an outdoor shower area for herself.  She would put the hose in the sun to warm up the water and bathe behind a tarp in the carport.  One tough lady!  So the Fuller Center of Central Florida made her bathroom accessible and made a couple of wheel chair ramps so she could use both doors of her home.  We were merely painting the outside.  Her church came out and fed us lunch.

Sunday was a day off.  Quite a few went to one of the Disney parks, but I decided to visit my nephew, Kris.  We had a great time and it was also relaxing—much more relaxing than spending the day at Disney World.

Across the street from the Methodist church was a statue of Homeless Jesus which I found moving.

August 10.

This has to be one of the prettiest rides ever–most of the day the ocean was just behind either the dunes or the mansions along the road, and every once in a while we would catch a glimpse of it.  And then–there it would be–in clear view for long stretches at a time.  We were on Florida A1A.  It was an 81 mile day and I think I made it all the way to the destination by bicycle, but I may not have.  There was one day in here when I got over-heated and had to stop early and it may have been this day.  Still, it was beautiful.  I think we also had a tail wind for a good part of the day.

One thing that has come home to me as I traveled, and also as I compile my photos to post, is how much things change as we travel along through the day. I think about the times when I have driven 400 or 500 miles in a day along the interstate and thought that the landscape was “boring.”  Such an idea seems ridiculous after this trip.