Attacked? Tick!
We’ve learnt the hard way that you can’t cycle day in day out without a rest, especially if your bike weighs a quarter of a tonne! You must have days off. Incidentally, learning the hard way involves getting slower and slower and eventually pedalling as hard as you can and falling off as you’re not actually moving! So, for our days off we’d decided to coincide our rest time with a rainy day and visit the Floridian capital Talahassee. There’s a lovely rails to trail path that leads up from the Gulf coast to the state capital which is the oldest in Florida. A...
Read MoreWe’ve got wind!
I know, I know! We’re veggies and Jon loves beans – of course we’ve got wind! But it’s not that type of wind! The wind has changed! At last weve had a couple of days where we’ve not been cycling into the wind and it’s heaven! Our average speed has gone up from 12 to 19 and we’ve been flying through the countryside really enjoying it all. As we are out in the sticks though the local roads are all gravel and unless you want to look like a ghost from Scooby Doo after every truck passes you they’re best avoided so we’ve been stuck on the main...
Read MoreMoving inland
We’d left the tourist trade behind now and were more in Trumpton as evidenced by the gardens that looked like a Junk yard, the shanty town style mobile homes that looked like they had come off badly against multiple hurricanes and of course multiple US flags, Reelect Trump and God Bless America posters, with the occasional Confederate flag thrown in just for good measure. These areas were much much poorer than the south. Despite the poverty the churches were pristine and plentiful – 1 per kilometer at times in a sparsely populated area, but that would prove a Godsend for us later...
Read MoreThe Largest cycle network in the world….
The American Adventure Cycle Association boasts that the US will soon have the largest cycle network in the world. This sounds impressive and is certainly a great goal to set but the reality is that much of this consists of a shoulder at the side of the equivalent of the M25 and it’s little wonder that we rarely see a cyclist and certainly never see one outside small towns. We’ve now covered 600km and we are still to see our first cycle tourers – something we’ve never experienced before – here we’re pioneers and so many people have told us that too, as...
Read MoreBe afraid…be very afraid
We’ve been warned about all sorts of dangers by many different people so far, oddly enough none of which have been to do with being shot. Mainly it’s to do with road rage, bad driving, locking the bike and neighbourhoods. We had been warned not to stop in Belle Glade by a number of people as it was a dangerous city (here it appears a definition of a city can be anything from a couple of hundred people upwards and villages are posh estates in cities!) We didn’t stop but as it was into the wind when we passed through we could have been overtaken by grannies with zimmers doing...
Read MoreAnother world
Leaving our WarmShowers hosts we set off toward Lake Okeechobee to find the first 10km were on the main dual carriageway with tiny a shoulder. We asked the Sheriff for alternatives for a bike which left him baffled. “Where’re ya headin?” “Belle Glade” we replied “That’s 25 miles away!” “Yes” “By bike!!” “Yes” He looked like he’d just met a green eyed alien and all he could offer was pushing the bike through the sugar cane fields. But he was very polite about it! So we lit up the tail flashing rear light...
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