It’s 87 degrees in the tent, and I need a towel just to wipe off the sweat – and it’s 8:30 at night -bedtime. We can’t sit outside because the mosquitoes are out. It’s really hot, the daylight will be gone in a few minutes and we still have to pack the trailers, brush our teeth, finish the blog, get the tent organized inside with what we need, and we are slapping at mosquitoes and dripping sweat. Last night we didn’t get to sleep until after midnight, and we were still soaked. My clothing is so wet when I change into pjs that I have to hang it out the following day, or wash it again because I had to put it away wet. And that means I can’t wear it the next day either, so my clothing choices just got cut in half. What an exercise in character building! We comfort ourselves with how soon it will be cooler. Okay, it’s still at least 2 months away, but we have fun thinking about it.
We are also still deep into the organizational phase. We are finding that it takes at least 2 hours to get ready to go in the morning, and despite the fact that the alarm goes off at 5:44 a.m., it’s still 7:50 before we are riding away, and that doesn’t count having breakfast. We are actively working on how to shorten that time.
Last night we had a rain shower and our battery on the laptop died at the same time, so we did our mad run to the bathroom to plug in and log on to send the blog. We ended up getting less than 6 hours sleep, and when the alarm went I couldn’t even find it – I was so sound asleep that my whole arm had gone to sleep, and when I finally found the alarm, I couldn’t hold it to turn it off! It was quite funny – after the shock wore off.
Chelsea’s bike was still acting up, but we finally figured out what the problem was, and did a quick fix. That meant we got started even later, but the bike was working! We had a pretty good day – just chugged along. We saw a Key deer in Big Pine, and got some heat endurance supplement for our water that acts as electrolyte replacement. It really helped us! We wanted to stop just short of the 7 Mile Bridge, but the campground was $68 for basically nothing! We were so annoyed that we kept going to Bahia Honda – just before the 7 Mile Bridge, but they were full, so we kept going again – and crossed the bridge.
It was an awesome experience – all alone out in the middle of miles and miles of water, riding 3 feet away from massive semis and RVs who were screaming by us – doing 80 to our 10 mph. It felt like a real accomplishment somehow, and sure enough, we got a number of appreciative honks – one from an EMT truck, several sedans and SUVs, and one guy was even sitting in a convertible, backwards, taking a video. We’d like to assume that the video was of us, because we were so interesting…
By the way – remember our Hero of the Day yesterday – JR? He passed us early in the afternoon, and honked and waved. It kept us smiling through a very hot section.
We’re in a great campground tonight – very quiet, with great ocean views and lots of trees – we had enough trees in our site to keep in the shade till sunset! The downside is that trees mean birds and now we’ll have to clean off some love offerings from the local bird population.
There are no services here at all, so we had to unhook the trailers and head farther up the road on our bikes to have dinner. We had seafood again – if I have much more fish I think I’ll be growing fins…
We promised ourselves that we’d get to bed at a much better hour, so more tomorrow.
By the way, we decided that today, we are the Heroes of the Day…
Signing off from Marathon Key…