June 16th, 2006
Today was a much tougher day. We started out from the Winn Dixie early, but the heat started in right away. We’ve noticed that the heat/humidity combination is really a killer. We reached Chipley early, and took a great break at the Chamber of Commerce there – we’ve gotten to where we always look for a place with a bench or a good curb – riding and standing only for 6 hours a day gets tiring quickly. It was fun to sit quietly on a bench under an overhang and watch the activity. That being said, there wasn’t a whole lot of activity at 8:30 in the morning. 🙂 It was hard to tear ourselves away from such a comfortable spot, but it was still early, so we hopped back on the bikes. One nice thing about this section of the trip is that there are small towns every 6-11 miles, so it’s much easier to keep ourselves going “just till the next town”.
However, that energy began flagging as we covered hill after hill after hill, with the temperatures getting hotter and hotter, fighting some good-sized head winds most of the day, with heavy traffic. The hills were quite manageable, but the cumulative toll got to us just before Argyle. Stacey and Alex caught up with us about then, and encouraged us onwards to Argyle itself. We went into DeFuniak Springs to find food and sleeping accommodations, and again, had good luck.
We found another reasonable motel and right next door was an amazing lunch place. It was essentially just a burger joint, but I have never seen a place as busy as that! They had over 30 tables, and so help me, they were all jammed for an incredible length of time. And the diversity was amazing – there were a number of entire families there having lunch, and not tourists, either – these were 3 generations of locals at one table, with at least several members at each table having clearly come from work on a lunch hour.
During lunch we were hit with the only rainstorm of our trip so far except Alberto – and it really rained! We ended up following the storm back to Marianna where we wanted to see the Florida Caves. We missed the last tour of the Caves, and the weather was so dark and rainy that I just wanted to curl up in front of a fireplace with a drink and a good book.