Chasing sunrise again
Perhaps what we love the most about riding here is the spectacular scenery. Sometimes we want to pinch ourselves to see if we are dreaming – we feel so lucky to live here! (And often we can’t believe we are giving it up to live on the road for eight years…)
Before we started chasing sunrise again, we’d reach the golf course on A1A above Delray Beach just after the sun rose. Huge pine trees line the road on both sides of the golf course, more of them on the ocean side, giving frequent glimpses through the trees of the ever-changing water. As the sun rises, the red-gold light comes in horizontally through the pine trees, lighting up everything in its path; it highlights the oncoming cyclists against a brilliant background of red bougainvillea, giving them a luminous glow. Seeing it takes my breath away.
We started chasing sunrise again in early January. At 5:30, in the pitch black, the world is nearly deserted. Mists rise from the great expanse of lawn in the cemetery on cold days. The full moon highlights the roadways, ducking in and out of tree shadows, dusting the white above-ground-graves in the cemetery with an eerie glow.
As the lunar cycle changes, we have several days a month when we look to our left as the ghostly pale-gold moon sets over the Intracoastal in a faded blue sky, leaving a long trail of its pale-gold light reflected on the water. Then we look to our right to see the vivid red sun rising over the ocean, in a mass of pink and orange and gold clouds.
The Intracoastal and the ocean are especially beautiful when the winds are calm – both bodies of water are completely flat as far as the eye can see and everything is reflected in a perfect mirror image off the water. That’s when I wish we had a video camera.
The calm days are most often when we’ll see huge fish jumping, manatees in the Intracoastal, and dolphins in the ocean.
When the winds are from the east, we get the briny smell of the ocean and we hear the waves slapping on the beach. Passing the sailboats stored on Delray Beach, we hear the sailboat riggings clanking and creaking in the breeze. The east breeze also brings us the smells of bacon, fresh coffee, pastries, and hash browns floating out of the Caffe Luna Rosa and the Marriot Hotel kitchens on A1A and Atlantic Ave as the restaurant crews get an early start on the day.
One black pre-dawn morning Chelsea and rode the entire length of Delray Beach with huge dark clouds building up over the ocean on our right. Spectacular flashes of lightning lit up the clouds non-stop. We had a front row seat to a quiet, incredible fireworks display.
When we reach Ocean Ave, a few miles further up north, we run into a group of hard-core cyclists with a regular weekly schedule of training rides (I’d bet my cycling socks that they race). Never fewer than five, and often as many as ten in the group, these guys are committed to riding hard and fast. Each of them rides with two rear red flashing lights on their bikes, jerseys, or helmets, and one white light on their handlebars or helmets.
It’s eerie seeing them in the pitch black. They come out of nowhere; the first we know they’re near is a shouted call “Riders up!”, followed instantly by the click and whir of chains and gears as they fly by us. The riders are hunched in silence over their bikes, with red rear lights flashing, riding in an amorphous pool of white light on the ground, looking like an alien space ship that just dropped from the sky and is winding its way steadily along the roadway.