Make Sure You Get Back In Time For Dinner!

Ever since I arrived in Palm Coast, we've had weather that is more akin to what one might experience in April or October on Long Island or New Jersey:  cloudy and cool, with no real threat of rain. However, torrential rain is forecast for early tomorrow morning, courtesy of a storm system that's moving across the Gulf of Mexico.  Areas to our south and west might have "severe" weather, which could include a tornado.  The weather forecasters say there's a smaller chance that weather could reach this part of Florida.

In addition, my mother planned to make a particularly rich dinner for tonight:  home-made cream of broccoli soup, roast beef au jus; baked potatoes; mushroom gravy made with some of the juice; and broccoli cooked in the oven with olive oil, garlic and Parmesan cheese and baked potatoes. I would need to burn a few calories, to say the least, in advance!

I woke up about an hour later than I'd planned. (OK, when I'm at my parents' house, I don't plan much of anything!) Although days here are about an hour longer than those in New York, there's still a fairly limited amount of time to ride. (The bike I'm riding doesn't have good lights.)  "Are you going to ride to St. Augustine today?", my father asked.  

It was already nearly 10:30.  In one way, my parents have "gone native":  they, like most people of a certain age in Florida, eat dinner at 5pm or thereabouts.  And you simply do not arrive late for dinner with an Italian (or Italian-American) family!

I would certainly have ample time to ride there and back, even on the rusting beach cruiser I ride whenever I'm here.  But I wouldn't have very much time to spend in the city, let alone to shop or stop for anything that looked interesting.

  

Still, I said, "Yes!"  My mother smiled.  The ride there and back is a "metric century".  She knows that if I'm going to do such a ride, all is normal--or, at least, I'm OK.

 

The ride was pleasant, if uneventful.  From the Hammock Dunes Bridge, I rode along the stretch of Route A1A north of the segment I rode yesterday.  Both parts skirt the Atlantic Ocean.  Yesterday's ride--which took me through Painters Hill, Flagler Beach and Ormond Beach to Daytona--rolled alongside sea oats and other flora and fauna that flickered atop sand dunes; today's trek zigged and zagged along inlets and bays.

On the way to St. Augustine, I pedaled into a steady brisk wind.  That meant, of course, the ride back took about half an hour less than the ride up.  Great, both ways.

Dinner was great!

Back In The Sunshine--And Heat

Like everyone else in northeastern US, I've been complaining about The Winter That Won't Go Away.  It hasn't been the snowiest or coldest season, but it's been so gray and dreary, and the snow and ice cover were all but constant from the beginning of the new year until a couple of weeks ago.

Mind you, I don't mind cold or snow.  I like changing seasons.  I don't want endless winter more than I want any other endless season.

So guess where I am now?  You guessed it:  in a place that has a couple fewer seasons than New York.

  

Yes, I'm in Florida again, having come just as the weather was starting to warm up (or, at least,turn more springlike) at home.  

Bicycle tubes at the Trailhead Beach 'n' Bike Gallery, Palm Coast, FL

I'm glad to see Mom and Dad again.  And today I got on the old beach cruiser they keep here for me and kept on pedaling, into the wind, up Route A1A.   I could feel some of the dust flying off and the cobwebs breaking away from my muscles.  And the sun grew warmer--and, I would discover, more intense on my skin.

The result?  I pedaled 51 km (31.5 miles), encountering almost no traffic and, before my destination for the day, my only obstacle--lions .

I had to get past them to enter the historic downtown area of St. Augustine.  Surprisingly, those lions don't chase cyclists.  At least, they didn't chase me.  Maybe they know I love cats.

And they stood aside as I crossed their bridge to leave the city and pedal another 51 km back to Mom and Dad's house.  The 102 km I covered today made it my longest ride of the year, so far.

After fighting the wind on the way up, my feet were practically pedaling automatically on the way back.  That, in spite of tiring about halfway back. 

In June 1964, Andrew Young, then one of Martin Luther King Jr's senior field organizers, led a march through the old part of St. Augustine. He and the other marchers were beaten as they tried to cross to Plaza de la Constitution. One month later, the Civil Rights Act was passed.

I realized why:  I felt that glow I feel on my skin whenever I've just gotten more sun than I've had in weeks and months.  Not only did I spend a few hours in uninterrupted sunlight (except for a couple of brief incursions into St. Augustine landmarks and shops), I was wearing far less--shorts and a tank top--than I've worn in months.  And, as this ride reminded me, the sun is a good deal more intense here than it is in New York.

But I feel my body, my spirit opened again.  That, and something I wrote on the plane on the way down, help me to feel as if I am returning to normal in the good ways.  I'm ready to say "I'm back", though perhaps without the Austrian accent. 

Dawn In The Sunshine State

You haven't heard from me in a couple of days. No, I haven't dropped off the face of the Earth.  I'm visiting my parents, in Florida.

So why did I pick the sultriest time of year to visit the Sunshine State?  Well, for one thing, it's the first time in months I've had enough free days in a row to make the trip one in which I don't get back on the plane after having lunch with Mom.  For another, the fares are cheap now.  And, finally, speaking of Mom:  It's her birthday today!

I've been down here enough times that I know a thing or two about "going native".  Since arriving the other day, I've gone on two rides, both of them in the morning.  In fact, yesterday I started before dawn and so was treated to this:

and this:

and a painterly scene from Painter's Hill:

Fall--to the extent they have it here--doesn't begin for another three months or so.  But the dawn in Palm Coast tinges the trees and mosses with an odd foreshadowing of it:

As the sun rose higher, those leaves and mosses turned green, like everything else hanging from those branches.

I rode down A1A--the road that wends along the Atlantic Coast--through Flagler Beach and Gamble Rogers State Park to Ormond by the Sea, where I espied an interesting bit of landscape design:

Where else but in Florida can someone get away with a color like that on the exterior of a house?  Even in the Easter Egg Victorian areas of San Francisco, I don't think I ever saw a color like that.

Then, after lounging on the sand of Ormond Beach, I started back.  I noticed that A1A Beachside Bicycles had just opened for the day, so I stopped in to say hello to owners Ron and Diane.

There's absolutely nothing made from carbon-fiber in their shop. In fact, there are only a few new bikes.  Mostly, they do repairs, restorations and re-purposing.  As an example of the latter, a '70's Schwinn LeTour was being turned into a kind of Florida cruiser.

One of the repair jobs in the shop was this tandem sold by Sears and Roebuck during the 1960's, I think:

It's like other American bikes of the period from makers like Rollfast, Murray and Columbia that were constructed of spot-welded gaspipe tubing.  But this particular tandem is interesting because it has the twin lateral tubes normally associated with French (and, sometimes, British and Japanese) "mixte" frames:

Also noteworthy are the tires, which I believe are originals:

Those of you who are a decade or more younger than I am might find it difficult to believe that bicycle tires were made in the USA by companies like Firestone and Goodyear. Of course, none of them were lightweights.  But they made those whitewalls--like the one in this photo--you see on baloon-tired bikes of the period.

I stop at Ron's and Diane's shop because they were very friendly to me when I stopped in with a flat a few years ago.  They, like many people here, are a couple of honest folks trying to make a living in a difficult economy.  They--and their dog--remember me whenever I walk in.

Today I woke up a little later and managed not to ride quite as much. But I still enjoyed the calm of the streets and the air, so I plan to take a (possibly pre-) dawn ride tomorrow.  Some would argue it's the only way to ride here at this time of year!

Bridges to Deja Vu

There are at least a couple of different ways in which you can experience deja vu during a bike ride.


The most common way, of course, is to see familiar sights during along a route you've ridden before.  More often than not, that is a pleasant or at least agreeable situation.  After all, you wouldn't be doing the ride again if you don't get some kind of pleasure from it.


Then there is what I will call, for lack of a better term, situational deja vu.  Any number of situations or other experiences can repeat themselves during a ride. Among them are weather, road conditions, fatigue, exhiliaration or some emotion or another that you're dealing with.


Yet another kind of deja vu is, paradoxically, the most ephemeral yet the one that affects us most deeply.  It's the one in which we recall feelings or memories which may have come to us on rides very different from the one we're on at the moment.  Or we have expereinced those emotions during rides we did much earlier in our lives, or in places very different from the one in which we happen to be riding.


There are other ways, I'm sure, in which we can experience deja vu during a bike ride.  I've just mentioned three I could think of at this moment.  They also happen to be the ways in which I experienced deja vu on today's ride.


Although this is my first visit to, and therefore my first bike ride in, Florida in two years, every inch of today's ride was at least somewhat familiar to me.  I had previously ridden every crack and grain of sand my tires tread, though not necessarily in the sequence in which I rode them today.  But it seemed that the flow of sense memories was all but seamless.


It began when I crossed the bridge from Palm Coast Parkway to Route A1A:

Hannibal is said to have shouted "Excelsior!" after conquering the Alps.  Whatever he was feeling, it has nothing on the sensation I experience as I reach the apex of a bridge that connects the mainland to a strip of land along the sea.  At such moments, I feel as if I'm exhaling for the first time, whether the bridge is the one I crossed today, the one that connects Broad Channel to Rockaway Beach, the one I crossed over the estuary of the Dordogne river to the coast near Bordeaux or the one from Highlands to Sandy Hook in New Jersey. 


It was over that last bridge that I took my first long rides during my early teen years.


And that bridge led, like the one I crossed today, led to a spit of land that stands, almost defiantly, between the ocean and another body of water.  When you ride along Route 36 from Sandy Hook to Long Branch, the ocean is never more than two hundred feet to your left and the Shrewsbury River is no further than that to your right.  When you ride A1A from Palm Coast to Flagler Beach, the dunes of Painters Hill (such an apt name!) and Beverly Beach are practically at arm's length on your left, and you're separated by no more than the width of a grove or mobile-home "campground" from the Florida Intercoastal Waterway.


Even though this is Florida, I'll admit that today's ride is more beautiful than the ones in New Jersey or to Rockaway Beach.  But in the end, I enjoy it--and, more important, it matters to me for the same reasons as those rides, and the one in the southwest of France.  They all are bridges to deja vu.