This morning started off
great. We were coming off of a nice
relaxing day off, and there was a good bike path along the road. About 4 miles in though, my dad told me to
stop. I thought he was going to take a
picture of me or something, but instead he told me he had a flat tire.
We pulled over into a shady
area and got to work. Everything was
going pretty well; we took the wheel off, took the tire off, found the sharp pieces
embedded in the tire which had punctured the inner tube, etc. But then, when we
unfolded a new inner tube to replace the flat one, my dad realized that it
wasn’t the right size. We checked the
other spare ones, but they were all either too small or too big. This forced us to use the patch kit on the
inner tube with a hole in it, but it was scary because if that didn’t work
there was really nothing else we could do.
Luckily, the patch worked, and held up through the rest of what turned
out to be a long day. We hope to get the
right size inner tubes tomorrow.
Once we went about 5 more
miles, we stopped at a gas station with a Circle K convenience store. We knew this would be the last place for
about 16 miles so we wanted to fill our water bottles. The Circle K’s advertise their Polar
Pop. It’s basically a soda machine with
lots of options, and any size costs 79 cents.
So I got a large cup (44 fl oz) and filled it with ice and
powerade. Then me and my dad filled up 2
water bottles from that, and still had some left over. 79 cents really went a long way!
After that we had a pretty
long stretch on the intercostal highway, before we started to see signs of
civilization like Cracker Barrel and Krispy Kreme.
We decided we were going to stop for donuts
in 1.5 miles, but then we realized that our maps had us turning a little bit
before the Krispy Kreme’s. So we
followed the map, turned, I guess thinking we’d hit more places, and ended up
in the middle of nowhere. Having just watched The Field of Dreams, it kind of
felt like we were in Iowa.
We were not lost, but we were
definitely off the beaten path. Looking
back on it, it was beautiful. However,
we were not in the right mindset to appreciate it. We were hot, there was no shade on this path,
the only thing we could see were palm tree nurseries, and we were like 10 miles
away from civilization.
Those 10 miles were
painful. Luckily towards the end some
nice bikers told us about a restaurant in the area (still totally the middle of
nowhere) so we had somewhere to sit and relax for a while. The bad news was that even though we had
already gone 45 miles (already pushing it) there wasn’t a hotel for 5 more
miles. So, while I thought maybe one of
these days we would try and do 40 miles instead of 30, today we ended up doing over
50.
I really appreciated the pool
today, and my bed at the La Quinta Inn feels like heaven. If I am able to move in the morning, we hope
to make it to the Holy Land – Miami Beach, because we aren’t too far (only like
25 miles- I guess that’s nothing compared to today).
Thanks for coming along for
the ride!
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