Waiting For the Storm to Pass

Taking a break alongside the Suwannee River.

Hurricane Matthew is currently traveling northward along the east coast of Florida as I write this; we expect to go through this storm with winds around 30 mph and rain, but nothing nearly as severe as what is predicted to hit the coast.  The one thing I will guarantee in all this:  we will not be riding the tandem today!

This gives me the opportunity to sit down and type out “h-e-l-l-o” to those who enjoy reading something that’s totally unrelated to the election coming up in a month from now.  Yes, tomorrow the bike stays in the garage.  Why?  Because I’m a “fair-weather biker”!  (That’s why I moved to Florida.)

The riding that we’ve accomplished since we arrived has been exceptional.  We’ve learned several routes within Levy County (in which the town of Williston is located), and we’ve also ventured out into adjoining counties on our daily loops.  Generally speaking we ride almost every single day, and we usually pedal between 35 and 50 miles on each outing.

We bought our current tandem back in 2009.  Up through May of this year we clicked off around 15,000 miles.  Not bad considering we had full-time jobs then.  In the almost five months since we’ve been here, we’ve cycled 3370.3 miles.  At this rate, in one year’s time we will put on almost half of the total miles that this bike had traveled before moving to Florida.  That’s not bad for a couple of almost sixty year olds!

Another interesting side-note is that, while we haven’t fulfilled our dream of pedaling across America, we have ridden more than enough miles to do so since we arrived in the Sunshine State.  The mileage from San Diego, CA to St. Augustine, FL is about 3053.5 miles.  Now we know that given enough time, we can ride the distance; we just need to stop riding in circles at some point and start riding in a straight line!

The beauty of the area we live in is exceptional.  Many miles of horse farms and pastures, forests of pine and hammocks of old-growth oak trees surround us.  The rural flavor of this region is delightful, and yet the “big city” (and all of its services) is twenty miles away.  The little town we live in has a major-name grocery store a little over a mile from where we live, a take-out Chinese restaurant for those “I don’t feel like cooking” evenings as well as a couple of major fast food eateries, and a local restaurant that puts “southern cooking” at a new level.

North-central Florida is notthe picture-postcard image most people conjure up in their minds when they think of “Florida”.  From our perspective it’s much better.  Truly, it’s a year-round cycling paradise!