57 miles today to complete our journey.
For some reason unknown to me, we rode more together as a group today than pretty much any other day of the trip. We mostly all left the hotel around the same time & a good sized group went at the same pace for quite a while. One of the more interesting road situations was on our schedule. There is a 7 mile long bridge that kind of becomes the entrance to Key West. It is mostly flat, but does have a hump part way through to create a channel for big boats. This is easily the longest bridge I have ever crossed on my bike. What makes it more interesting is the wind conditions that tend to want to destabilize the bike. I never felt unsafe, but I could sure feel the wind pushing me back and forth. As we came off the bridge, our support driver Carol got a picture of 6 of us together. I am second last.
As I mentioned before, roosters seem to be a big deal around Key West. I probably heard 10 of them announcing their presence, only actually saw 4, and managed to get a picture of just this one.
The thing that most surprised me today was how much undeveloped land there is in this area. For everything I’ve heard about Key West, I was expecting more of an urban area. The city itself is developed and densely populated, but there aren’t any suburbs. There are a lot of bridges. In addition to the 7 mile bridge, there are probably 50 other much shorter that we crossed today.
Another interesting factoid about the Keys is how stable the daily temperatures are. Today the forecast was a low of 79 and a high of 81. On the subject of weather, we managed to do this 3 week journey without ever really riding in the rain. We did delay our start one day by a couple of hours to miss a storm & we did have a few sprinkles here or there, but we never really got wet. Amazing! We have heard that some of the towns we went through have now been hit by heavy rain storms. We were just enough ahead of that to miss them.
There are a couple of iconic landmarks that are picture opportunities down here. One is the southernmost point in the continental USA. When we arrived there, we found a line about 30 minutes long waiting to get their picture taken. Here I am waiting.
And here is most of our group with a picture at the landmark.
The other place to get a picture is at mile 0 on Hy 1. We have been watching the mile markers going down every day & here is proof that we reached the very beginning of Hy 1.
Another tradition is a full group photo at dinner. This picture is actually from last night, but does include most everyone in our group. It was a great group to journey with. I made a bunch of new friends & heard people’s stories from all around the US & even some Canadians.
This pretty much completes my version of this New Orleans to Key West bicycle adventure. Thanks for following along. I hope you enjoyed.
Tomorrow we have an off day to do a little sightseeing & a lot of rearranging the van in preparation for our return drive home beginning early Tuesday morning. Depending on how we feel, we are expecting either 2 or 3 days travel to get back to Wisconsin