Rain awakened us at 5 a.m. and that must have been a subconscious signal – we slept right through the alarm. By the time we woke up, it was clearly threatening more rain. Knowing it takes about 2 hours to get out, and that we would be riding in awful heat, and possible thunderstorms, we decided to take a day to write. With only one laptop that takes awhile!
Talk about groggy this morning! We have been getting so much exercise and so much sun, and so little food and so little sleep – I think it all caught up with us. It felt wonderful to just be able to stay in one spot and do things that needed to be done.
However, adventure was unavoidable – we had no food, we hadn’t eaten since the evening before, we only had our bikes, and the nearest place was at least a mile away, with thunderstorms coming. We finally talked to the folks at the office, and one of them graciously dropped us off at Publix downtown. Turns out there was NO place for us to plug in our laptop, and no restaurants! We were going to have to walk at least a mile carrying all our stuff, and we still had to get groceries. We finally opted to get groceries and have a taxi take us to a pizza place we had heard about.
The first part of the plan was great, but then the pizza place was closed. We appealed to the taxi driver (a woman) to give us her thoughts, and she suggested the Village Café.
What an afternoon we’ve had! The food was great and the prices very reasonable, we’ve had our own “private room” for the last 6 hours, and we’ve been sitting quietly working hard with no interruptions. They’ve heard our story and we have gotten freshly baked garlic bread, free refills on the soft drinks and lemonade, and offers to help ourselves to the salad bar. We’ve heard the wonderful stories from the wait staff and the kitchen staff, and we’ve been treated like visiting royalty.
We’ve been in great air conditioning, we’ve not had any mosquitoes, and it’s given the heat rash a chance to chill out.
We have a big storm coming tomorrow, and we can’t outrun it (we need to get 53 miles – which will take us about 6 hours) and the rain is due to start at 10 a.m. So, we’ll be here tomorrow again. We’ll write more tomorrow about Patsy, Jacque, and Therese, from the Village Café, and Laurie from Knights Landing.
One final note – before we got into town, we needed to charge the laptop and the cell phones, and we found a place down near the water at the campground. It’s the fish cleaning area, but it had electricity, large picnic tables, it was right on the water, and it had a great big pavilion cover. One of the outlets was over near the section for actually cutting the fish and cleaning them. I walked over to plug in the laptop, and suddenly there were 2 huge birds that floated in, and several laughing gulls. Chelsea was so excited because one of the birds was a great white heron – seen only in the Florida Keys! The other one was a great egret – and we got some great shots of the two of them almost side by side. We realized that the birds thought we were going to clean the fish, and they wanted handouts! They waited a looong time with no action – hopeful till the end…
We’re headed out now from our safe, cool sanctuary, and we’ll be uploading this to our website from our tent, by flashlight…Patsy from the restaurant is giving us a ride “home”.
Signing off from Marathon Key…