Blog

Life continues apace with our non-stop selling of furniture and household goods and with our multiple projects of digitizing everything possible in our lives. Last November I wrote about how our house was beginning to echo, but that was small peanuts compared to now. The house is now so empty that we can’t speak in regular voices inside the house; we have to deliberately lower the volume. Chelsea calls the new voice levels our “empty” inside voices, as in “use your empty inside voice, Mom!”

Selling all our furniture and household goods

In recent months we’ve decimated our personal goods – we’ve sold wardrobes, lamps, a bed, side tables, power tools, weight benches and weights, two generators (for hurricanes), hefty generator cords, a powered USB hub, life jackets, clothing, laundry hampers, yard and garden tools, dishes, all our bookshelves, and more, more, more.

We’ve gotten so good at FreeCycle and Craigslist and garage sales (with a bit of eBay thrown in) that we could write our own “Downsizing for Dummies” series.
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Riding in the rain

Chelsea and I have been very lucky with almost never getting caught in the rain. Well, it’s been both luck and careful planning. We have, however, wanted to be better prepared for riding in the rain.

I left before dark again one Saturday while Chelsea was in California, and hadn’t paid much attention to the weather forecast. It was definitely very chilly, enough to wear cold-weather clothes and my windproof jacket.

By the time I got to A1A I realized how dark the skies were, and soon began feeling the first drops of rain. I very much wanted to keep going on my ride, despite the increasing rain. By the time I got to the Inlet I was quite wet, so I pulled off and sought cover under the pavilions, hoping it would let up.

As I sat quietly in the dark, listening to the rain on the pavilion roof, who should wander over from the ocean side of the lot but our buddy Jungle Jim, dressed for cold, wet weather, carrying fishing poles and a lawn chair. He was amazed to see me under such inhospitable conditions, almost as much as I was amazed to see him in that weather with fishing poles and a lawn chair. We chatted for a while as I tried to decide what to do. Jim invited me to breakfast with him and one of his “sponsors”, strongly urging me to go.
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Daily surprises

Each day something different happens on our rides, keeping life interesting.

There’s a house on our route on A1A, off to the left at the north end of Delray Beach, with a tall two-story window in the front. It’s normally covered in gauzy drapes and the lights are out when we come by so early. One pitch black morning (Chelsea was in California) I could see light through the trees. Getting closer, I was rewarded with a spectacular view of an absolutely stunning chandelier, fully lit in the pre-dawn dark with each of its hundreds of crystal prisms shimmering and reflecting the light.

We look for it every day now, and we’ve seen it lighted since, but it’s always been covered by the gauzy drapes, unlike that first incredible day.

One early morning while Chelsea was in California I caught up with and passed another rider. He sped up to ride with me a ways. While talking, he made a bit of a sarcastic comment about my heavy bike and wide tires. I told him I knew I could get thinner tires, but why bother since I’m gaining strength and I’ll need it for our upcoming tour.

That got him asking questions about our tour. He was fascinated, and for the next few minutes he kept his iPhone up over his head, talking away and taking photos of me as we rode, telling me he can’t wait to post them on his Facebook page. That was a bit unnerving. I never did get his name and Facebook page. Hopefully I looked stunning in the photos.
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Chasing sunrise again

Perhaps what we love the most about riding here is the spectacular scenery. Sometimes we want to pinch ourselves to see if we are dreaming – we feel so lucky to live here! (And often we can’t believe we are giving it up to live on the road for eight years…)

Before we started chasing sunrise again, we’d reach the golf course on A1A above Delray Beach just after the sun rose. Huge pine trees line the road on both sides of the golf course, more of them on the ocean side, giving frequent glimpses through the trees of the ever-changing water. As the sun rises, the red-gold light comes in horizontally through the pine trees, lighting up everything in its path; it highlights the oncoming cyclists against a brilliant background of red bougainvillea, giving them a luminous glow. Seeing it takes my breath away.

We started chasing sunrise again in early January. At 5:30, in the pitch black, the world is nearly deserted. Mists rise from the great expanse of lawn in the cemetery on cold days. The full moon highlights the roadways, ducking in and out of tree shadows, dusting the white above-ground-graves in the cemetery with an eerie glow.
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Our riding territory

We wind through several neighborhoods on our rides each morning – some with wide ethnic diversity, some all white, some all black with a few Hispanics, then the multi-million dollar neighborhoods on A1A. Each one is unique.

Our two favorites are the sections on A1A for the views and scenery, and the all-black neighborhood in southwest Delray for the people. Besides having hands-down the most courteous and thoughtful drivers on our thirty-five mile rides, we’ve come to know a number of regulars in the southwest area.

There’s the thirty-something guy, deep ebony skin, at least 6’4” and 250 lbs, who’s often outside chatting with neighbors and friends on the weekend mornings. He always has a big smile for us and a booming “Hey, girls!” His voice is so resonant that Chelsea calls him “the pastor”. Like all our regulars, he was so used to seeing both of us that when I rode without Chelsea for several months, he regularly hollered, “Hey, your friend is missing!” “Hey, your friend is still missing!”
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Cold, cold, cold

Our glorious riding weather of November came to a screeching halt with the onset of severe cold spells in December. This is southeast Florida, land of the warm, warm, warm weather, yet in mid-December we had a few spells of below freezing cold. On a few memorable days the temperatures hit twenty-eight degrees.

Chelsea and I rode in south Louisiana in very cold weather throughout the winter of 2008-2009, so it wasn’t too much of a shock, but wow…twenty-eight degrees is really cold! We saw only one other cyclist (one!) on our entire twenty-five mile ride. We gave ourselves pats on the back for being so tough.

The air temps were so cold that the ocean looked like a huge snow bank, a result of the steam from the warmer water hitting the cold air. Check out our photo albums…it’s pretty amazing to see the fuzz on the water. The clouds in the background looked like snowcapped mountains. We were bundled to the teeth, literally.
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We’ve had a tremendously good time with our early morning rides. Every day something fun happens, it seems. Whether it’s someone we meet or something we see, it’s never dull.

Back in mid-November, just a day or so after I had last written, we were still doing our “later” rides, leaving at seven a.m. or so. Back then we were only riding twenty-five miles a day, so our stopping point was the Boynton Inlet. You’d think after seven years of stopping there we’d be tired of it, but oh no… It never fails to delight us.

Fish and fishing stories

That first week after I posted was so spectacular, it was breathtaking. Three separate rides were absolute treasures of fish and fishing related fun. In one day alone (only an hour or two) we saw sergeant majors, file fish, pilchards, parrot fish, southern sea robins, puffer fish, drum, porkfish, Atlantic needlefish, ballyhoo, red snapper, skip jack, and a lizard fish aka slippery dick.

Mind you, we go days and weeks seeing nothing, then all this abundance was in only several hours on one day, standing in one spot at the seawall.
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We finished our twelve-week Body for Life program on Christmas Eve, with wonderful results. I was definitely “the biggest loser” – I needed the biggest results and I got them. My loss was thirty pounds, twenty five inches, and over ten percent body fat. Chelsea did well, too. She lost four pounds, sixteen inches, and three percent body fat. (She lost more initially, but regained some in her California sojourn.)

It was absolutely a commitment to get through the program. Most days we forced ourselves over to the weight bench by sheer determination, but once we got into the workout each day, it got easier. We tried a variety of tactics to keep things interesting – we’d switch the time of day (morning was best); we had a lively playlist of songs on the computer – the kind that get your feet tapping; we’d make non-stop jokes; and we changed our routines regularly.

During the darkest days of December we even lit candles and used an aromatherapy diffuser during our 6:30 a.m. workouts, or we plugged in our jalapeno pepper lights and rocked away to the music. For a few weeks, one of our cats entertained us no end by curling up for a nap on the weight bench as we’d be doing our arm exercises, and she dearly loved having us get on the floor to do our abs. She’d spend the whole ab workout winding her way around our legs and nuzzling our faces. It was pretty hard to not laugh and to keep the count straight with a purring kitty collapsed on our heads.
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Eight months. Eight incredible months it’s been since we last wrote. How is it possible for time to disappear so easily?

I have such good intentions about writing. I list my projects for the day, and somehow, in my deep desire to get the other projects done, writing the journals drops to the bottom of the list. Then a week is gone, a month is gone. Then it’s a big job to catch up, as so many things have happened since we last wrote.

And “so-many-things-have-happened” is the good news – our steady list of accomplishments and adventures is ever-growing, despite our frequent feelings that we may never finish.

One early morning last week, Chelsea and I sat down with our protein shakes and toasted bagels, listing words that came to mind describing how we often feel. Slogging through, overwhelmed, slugging through, buried, churning through, swamped, plowing through, exhausted, bone-weary, isolated, plugging away, marching along… all these floated up.
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Chelsea and I both love sunrise. The world is so calm and quiet, the air is fresher and cooler, the winds are calmer, there’s the promise a new day brings. We love being up before the birds and watching them awaken; we love the gorgeous pink and gold and orange colors of the sunrise as it slowly spreads across the sky, reflecting in brilliant hues off the Florida coastal clouds.

A few months ago, as the days were getting shorter, the sun would rise as we were still heading east toward the ocean. We began thinking about how much we’d like to see the sun rise over the ocean, but that meant we’d have to leave the house before six. It didn’t seem too likely…it was hard enough just getting up before six.

But as the days got even shorter, and the sunrise got later, I realized that if we left by 6:20 and rode fast, there was a strong chance we could be at the Inlet bridge in time to photograph sunrise. It meant getting up even earlier, but the fun of accomplishing it, and the lure of photographing some potentially beautiful sunrises, made the extra effort worthwhile.
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