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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.
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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.
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So, here we are again, still in Sugarloaf Key, at the KOA campground. How did that happen? The great pub and views notwithstanding, we battled awful mosquitoes and no-see-ums last night, to the point where we nearly flung ourselves into the tent to escape. We knew there would be dew, as we were so close to the water, but we didn’t have the time or patience to cover everything, and we trusted for the best. Bad idea. We awoke this morning to the same mosquitoes and no-see-ums, really high heat and humidity, a soaked tent and rain fly, and everything we owned was somewhere between damp and really wet. We braved it out, got the very wet tent packed, packed up our very wet belongings, and headed for a gravel area in the shade to put on sunscreen.

That was when we found out that Chelsea’s brakes were completely, totally locked up. Even though we are very clever, and good with tools, those puppies weren’t moving. The heat was rising; the shade was disappearing; we hadn’t eaten since pizza the afternoon before; time was slipping away fast; and the nearest bike shop was 10 miles away. We knew it was time for Plan B.
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Hi Everyone!

Our virtual office this afternoon is the “pub” at a KOA campground in Sugarloaf Key. We have instrumental music playing the background – it started with primarily steel drums, switched over to really old country music, and as the liquor flows, the locals are doing some serious sing-a-longs to old country songs. The fans are circling overhead, giving a much-needed breeze. We’re under a huge blue tent, and there’s a bar serving margaritas, beer, sodas, and pretty much anything one could want.

We’ve gotten ourselves settled in at a table near the bar, in a quiet corner. Chelsea has a view of the V Harris Channel, while I can see the pool and the RVs. We are plugged into an outlet and the bartender offered to plug in our powered USB hub for us, over the counter behind the bar. So we’re ready to go! Our laundry is done (we need to go get it and put it in the dryer), and we’ve got our showers done.
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Hi Everyone,

It’s after midnight and we are still working. We leave 9 days from now on our great big adventure, and we are beginning to feel the excitement and inevitability of leaving. We have an incredible amount of work to do – we are packing all our personal and family items for storage; we are giving away or selling everything we can (we just did our first eBay auction very successfully – we sold our two kayaks); we are ordering what we need for the first stage of the trip; we are in communication with a number of people about our trip; and we are having to think 3 years out on anything that may come up while we are gone. We also have to make sure that Alex is completely set to run the house while we are gone, and make sure he is on all accounts and so on. It’s a good thing that we are no strangers to major projects, because our project management skills are getting a great workout.

We have a couple of fun things that have happened just in the last few days. Just for kicks, I wrote our story to one of the companies whose catalogue I receive – a catalogue for active wear for women – and we got a reply that they liked our story, that they are including us in the upcoming July update on their website in their Women In Motion “gallery”, and that they may use us in an upcoming catalogue. We will be sure to see them when we go through San Diego, and I’m sure they’ll be delighted in our progress – we will have covered 4300 miles by then and will be on the verge of heading into Mexico.
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Hi Everyone,

You’d think that cycling 4280 miles in 3 & 1/2 months would be enough cycling to last for a while, but all it did was to stoke the fires of adventure in us. Deep into our cross-country trip of last summer, one of the notes I had made to myself was noticing when a trip was “just” a trip and when it became a lifestyle. And Chelsea and I realized that we loved the lifestyle.

We loved the freedom and independence, and we loved the constant new input. We found out that no matter how awful today might have been; tomorrow could very well be our best day ever. We felt better than ever, we looked better than ever, and we liked that. We loved meeting new people and seeing new places, and we loved the intimacy of getting to know a place by bicycle.

We discovered that we want a lifestyle where adventure is the lifestyle, and where we create our financial opportunities around that.

One day a couple of months ago, on one of our usual bikes rides up to Lake Worth Pier (check out Google Maps to see the area), Florida, east coast, south – as you get in closer you’ll see Lake Worth – we stop at Barton Park where 802 dead ends into A1A), we got to talking about how much we love the bicycling, and how much we love the beaches, and how incredibly lucky we feel every day to be able to ride through the gorgeous scenery that we have here. I just casually (okay, actually it was somewhat longingly) threw out the thought “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to just keep riding and ride all around the coasts of the US and see all the coasts, and see how different they are from each other?” We know, for instance, how radically different Ft. Pierce FL is from South Beach, and how different Naples and Ft. Myers are from the southeast coast of FL. And never mind how different South Beach is from the Oregon coastline!

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