When you live in a big city, you can tell what part of the day it is by the light in which you're seeing whatever's in front of you. In other words, buildings or streets or other structures reflect morning, noon or night by dawn, daylight, dusk, shadows or artificial light.
Here in small-town and rural Florida, flora and fauna show varying sides of themselves through the different facets of the day. So, bush that might bud at one time of the day could bloom a couple of hours later and denude itself by nightfall.
And so it was this morning, when I rode from my parents' house. The street on which they live ends in a wider street that edges a wooded area. That street, in turn, leads to a four-line parkway that cuts through a swamp.
Alongside the parkway I saw these tiny flowers colored like pale lilacs waving in the breeze as I pedaled away. When I returned in the afternoon, they were gone. They were repeating the "hello" and "goodbye" they bade me yesterday and the day before as I began and ended those days' rides.
Tomorrow I will bid them farewell until another day, another season--and more important, another hour, another time of day.
Yesterday I did a shorter ride (about 50 km) than I did the other day (Daytona Beach) or Saturday (St. Augustine). But I planned it that way so I could linger along one of my favorite stretches of Route A1A, in the very aptly named Painters Hill:
Well, all right, the Painters part is apt. The hill, not so much. But it's a feast for the senses. And, oh yeah, I went swimming. You could tell I--and the other swimmers--aren't from around here. Natives wondered how we could "stand" water that's "so cold". I'd guess that the temperature was somewhere around 13 to 15 C (55 to 60F). At Rockaway Beach or Coney Island, it's probably not much higher than 5C (40F) right now.
Perhaps the best part of the ride is that I might have made a new friend and riding partner for future trips down here (or perhaps even for later this week!) I met her at a convenience store-gas station just west of the bridge from Palm Coast Parkway to Route A-1A. The bichon frise in the front basket of her Diamond Back cruiser gave that ever-so-friendly look bichon frises give and, of course, I stroked his head. If dogs are a reflection of their owners, that bichon frise perfectly mirrored her personality.
Before I crossed the bridge into A1A, we rode trails that crossed ponds, cut through swamps and rimmed the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. She apologized--though she had no reason to--for her riding: It was her first time out this year, she said. I didn't feel that she was slowing me down, as she feared. I must say, though, that I astounded her when I said that I rode the borrowed clunker to and from St. Augustine and Daytona Beach. "Just thinking about it gets me tired," she exclaimed.
After about two hours, she had to go back to her house to meet a client. I thanked her: Even if I hadn't continued down to Painters Hill and Flagler Beach, I would have felt I'd had a good ride. After all, encounters like that remind me of some of the reasons I ride.
Yesterday I was off to the races.
No, I wasn't in the peloton or even at the starting line. But I was in the vicinity of a track.
All right, it wasn't a velodrome. But it's probably the one truly important racing venue outside the world of cycling. I'm talking, of course about the Daytona Speedway.
To be more precise, I pedaled to Daytona Beach, which meant that I did two 100k rides in three days, which is two more than I'd done in the three previous months.
I rode up and down the streets, along the boardwalk and, yes, on the beach itself. I was going to do the latter because, I reasoned, if it was OK for cars and jeeps to drive there, why not bikes? Plus, I was riding a beach cruiser, and I thought perhaps it should actually be ridden on a beach at least once!
Believe it or not, the car lane on the beach is actually designated as the Daytona Beach Highway, subject to all of the same rules and regulations as other automobile routes. The difference is, of course, that it's sand instead of asphalt or concrete, and the speed limit is ten miles per hour (16KPH). Hey, you can go faster than that on your bike!
But the best part of going to and from Daytona by bike is the beautiful road--Route A1A--that skirts the coast line. When you're riding north from Daytona, all you have to do is look--real hard--to your right and, on a clear day, you can see Casablanca. After all, it's only 6866.9 kilometers (4246 miles) away.
