41.5 mi / 12.4 mph / 61 ft. climbing
Home: Fairway Inn

Even though we’d traversed more than 70 miles of the Miami metropolitan area on our way in to Opa-locka (via a combination of bike and train), we still hadn’t reached the city of Miami that forms its core. I’d had an idea to use a brewery visit to route us back to the waterfront and give us a taste of the nation’s 9th-largest metro, but the brewery’s closure meant that we instead remained west of downtown, with an 11-mile straight shot down 22nd Ave. It’s a broad, multi-lane artery, only rarely with bike lanes, but light traffic meant it stayed comfortable the whole way. The check-cashing operations and abandoned jungle-filled lots diminished as we moved south, gradually being replaced with familiar retail chains and well-kept single family homes.

Two prominent bike routes head southwest from Miami towards Florida City (the terminus of the metro area). “M-Path”, the more-inland option, travels under the MetroRail tracks and continues directly to the Miami-Dade Busway trail that we’d eventually take all the way to Florida City. But looked like it was a winding, pain-in-the-ass trail, and its train-tracks location wasn’t great for scenery, so I’d decided to go a bit further out to the Old Cutler Trail. Also a non-ideal “sidewalk”-style bike path, it at least runs through fancy tree-covered old neighborhoods. An attempt to first get a taste of the M-Path for a mile on the way to Trader Joe’s was foiled anyway since it was closed for construction (presumably to solve some of the problems that had me avoiding it), forcing an on-the-fly reroute.

I saw something called “Merrie Christmas Park” on the map in a neighborhood just south of Trader Joe’s where we could stop to eat the lunches we had just picked up, but rather than Christmas trees (or even decorations), it featured monumental banyan trees that competed with the giant living structures we saw in Hawaii! Some of the Google reviews whined about how it’s a “locals park” because there is no parking available, so how lucky that us extremely-non-locals were able to just stumble on it and roll right in under the darkened dome of branches.

Old Cutler Road (and the trail along side it) then continued that shaded canopy in linear form, including more banyans-as-street-trees that we would have stopped to marvel at if we hadn’t just seen ones even larger. The roots of the trees made the trail pretty bumpy, and it got tight in places where it was forced to wind around the trunks, but the luxurious-garden environment certainly made it a better choice for tourism than the M-Path. The whole look-and-feel is certainly nothing that ever came into my head when I thought of “Miami”!

The trail opened up a bit more (and became smoother) as we moved south, and after 12 miles we cut back inland to the South Dade Transitway trail. The Transitway is perhaps the most tragic expenditure of public-transit money I’ve ever seen. It’s a wide, straight road that roughly parallels US-1 for 20 miles, built solely for buses to use (along with a separated bike trail for us). Great concept, and it would be an excellent way to beat traffic on US-1. Except the buses don’t get priority at the intersections!! In the 9 miles we pedaled, we saw maybe 5 buses on this otherwise-completely-empty road (we were often “illegally” riding in the roadway, because it was smoother than the trail, and the trail hopped annoyingly from side to side) And a few that we saw were stopped at a light, waiting a minute or more for a green light, completely negating the whole point of this dedicated road for them. With such low volume, each bus could flip their light to green for 30 seconds, and drivers trying to cross would suffer absolutely zero delay, but it would be a huge benefit to bus riders. The fact that signal-priority isn’t enabled almost feels like a “fuck you” sent by drivers to transit riders: “we’re pissed that you losers get this whole empty road to fly down, so we’re going to make it useless by not allowing you to cross our roads when you’d like to!” Worse, there were frequently times when cars were stopped from crossing the Transitway, even though there wasn’t a bus for miles (at least that stupidity allowed us to cross, though frequently we were crossing against lights, because there were no “walk” buttons for us to push). Some research shows that maybe they’re trying to finally fix this by 2025, but only for three hours a day?!

One nice part of the Transitway trail was that we caught up to a southbound bikepacker and chatted as we rode, making him the first bike tourer we’ve talked to since Massachusetts. Also we had perfect tailwinds blowing us along with no effort. Maybe that’s why we were somehow much faster than this young guy who had come all the way from Nova Scotia via the inland Eastern Divide Trail; our bags make much bigger sails than his bikepacking setup!

Days 2-3

Florida City is where 100-mile-long alligator-shaped gridded development of South Florida ends, and not just in a gradual phaseout to more-rural properties, but in a sudden and complete absence of development. I’d secured campsites at three state parks on the Florida Keys (by checking for cancellations every hour or so over multiple days), the first on the other end of the 25-mile-long “bridge” through the Everglades and bay. But that gave us a couple more days to kill on this side of the “bridge” first. We had thoughts of doing an unloaded ride in-and-out to see a bit of Everglades National Park, but strong winds and Rett coming down with my cold meant that the only excursion from our hotel was a Cracker Barrel visit in honor of Rett’s mom’s birthday.