The wheels of adventure are rolling again! The alarm went off at 5 a.m. and it only took us 10 minutes to get out of bed. We had an extremely efficient process for getting out the door. We had no tent to take down, and we had packed up everything possible last night. We were on the road by 6:30 a.m. and we made nearly 25 miles before taking our first real break!
We knew by checking our map that if we were going to stay in an air-conditioned hotel for $39 (the rate Jesse got for us), we were going to have to alter our route. As we sat at our break trying to decide what to do, our incredible good luck held up. We had stopped at Seabranch, a few miles shy of Port Salerno. It’s a starting point for some hikes near the water, and it turns out to be a place where cyclists park and then set out for their longer rides. A group showed up just after we got there, having finished their ride for the day, so I headed over to ask their advice.
We ended up in a totally delightful conversation with them. They were amazed by what we are doing and wanted to know more details. We are so delighted about what we are doing that we love to talk about it, and it’s completely utterly fun to talk to people who understand and appreciate what we are doing. We met Kirk Wilsterman, Mike Barrett, Steve Kurth, and his daughter Jackie. We felt very honored to meet Jackie – it turns out that she won the Nationals in her age group last year in road cycling, and is only missing this year because her jaw is wired shut from breaking it 4 weeks ago. She’s only 16 years old now, and is considered an elite rider, so she rides with the best of the best. She just signed with a new team, and it looks like she has an awesome future ahead of her! Her goal is the Olympics, and we’ll be cheering her on fervently when she gets there!
The rest of the day was great, but way too hot. We managed to do 42 miles, which is the best we’ve done to date (go, us!), and we saw lots of marinas, boats, and climbed over lots of bridges. South Florida doesn’t have real hills, but we DO have bridges, lots of them, and most of them definitely qualify as hills! Chelsea calls them boat hills – as they are designed either very high to let boats go under, or they are quite high and are drawbridges. I must say, the grating on the top of the drawbridges is spooky to ride over.
We had a great tailwind that picked up steadily throughout the day, and we loved the route along the Indian River. We had to head about 5 miles inland to get to our hotel, and then backtrack about 2 miles into a headwind. That part was tough – we were so hot and so hungry and the head wind wasn’t appreciated.
We reached the hotel by 2 or so, and it is swamped today with a wedding party and with the New York Mets training camp attendees, plus a football group. It’s pretty hard to be invisible hauling our bikes and our Burley trailers through a nice hotel lobby, and we were “waylaid” every couple of feet with people interested in what we are doing. One of the people was Bruce Yarock who is a professional videographer (www.yarock.com). He does events, commercials and documentaries, and he decided to take a few photos of us, and then run some video footage. He was hilarious! Bruce started shooting the footage and photos while we were waiting for the elevator, and then we ended up with several other people in the background taking photos of us as well. The lobby was just jammed, and there we were at the center of attention. We must have handed out 6 cards just in that 15 minutes.
Bruce is here today to shoot the wedding, and he had us do a bit of footage congratulating the bride and groom. Sean (sp?) and Anastasia, if you are reading this, we hope you have a wonderful wedding and an awesome life!
We are finally in our room with showers done and laundry in, and we’re catching up on the blogs from the last few weeks. We’ll also be posting our photos from the last few days, so be sure to check out the photo gallery. BTW, Bruce is going to try to email the video footage to us, and I hope he does. What fun that will be!
We are getting up at 5 again, and we’ll be heading out for Long Point State Park. It’s another 40-45 miles, so we’d better get started early and avoid the heat as much as possible.
Signing off from Port St Lucie, FL…
Rosemary & Chelsea