Key West

In the kitchen at our lovely hotel, Azul Key West, I see a woman in what I first think are bike shorts. She’s stretching a lot as she walks. Warming up to ask her about roads and routes and such, I ask if she’s been biking around here. She says no, they aren’t biking. She says they RAN here … from Miami. 198 miles, she says. How many days did you do that in? I ask. We did it overnight, she says. Okie dokie, then.

Key West is a fun place to wander around and “people watch:”

We’ll be here for two days before starting the real biking. First up, we head over to Island Bicycles, where we’d arranged to have our bikes shipped after Gene Bell packed them up. Here’s a photo of the owner (Aaron’s his name, I think), finishing up with our boxes:

Aaron told us a great story about a guy for whom he did some work, who had some kind of long metal piece attached to the back of his bike which arced up and over, with a heavy weight hanging off of it, to help him “move faster, especially down the hills.” We all laughed about the image of this man on his bike, with the weight hanging in front of his face, essentially pulling him along. (The man swore by it!) Later, the story got me thinking. On the bike, I’m often wanting to be faster, and for the effort to be easier. When the season starts and I’m out of shape (which is the case now, sadly), I’m sometimes thinking about the end of a ride just as I start out. 

But this is ridiculous! The ride is the point; we’re here to bike. I joked in the first blog post about this all having been Jerry’s idea. But that was truly a joke; I’m psyched. I’m looking forward to this. (Mostly.)