41.3 mi / 14.3 mph / 173 ft. climbing
Home: Looe Key Reef Resort

While it never got “cool” overnight (our sleeping bag remained packed), the temperature eventually eased enough for us to get some sleep, and thankfully our bikes suffered no further animal attacks. Though our neighbors a couple sites over (the only other people camping in the park) had a bag of their rolls stolen by rats. Upon opening our eyes, we could see hundreds of no-see-ums coating the mesh ceiling of our tent. They appeared to be mostly-dead, but exiting the tent revealed that plenty of live ones were still massed for attack.

The bugs meant we had a challenging decision to make for breakfast. The “smartest” option was to skip breakfast in camp and head straight to a cafe, but with the nearest one 9 miles away, that made it sound significantly less-smart. Our normal bug-solution where I do all the breakfast-prep and bring it to Rett in the tent also wasn’t great, partly because the morning sun was already heating up the tent, and partly because the no-see-ums were aggressive enough to drive even me crazy. So we “compromised” by heading the 200 yards back near the the shower building, where we hadn’t noticed any bugs yesterday.

The spot that worked was essentially in the middle of the parking area, where we could set up our chairs and stove in the shade of the bathhouse building, and catch the cooling effect of the steady wind channeled down the cleared asphalt lot. Luckily the park doesn’t see much traffic, so the few visitors could easily drive around us. No-see-ums were definitely still present, and even biting through our repellent, but less than 1/10th as bad as they were at our site. After breakfast I biked back over to our site to pack up all of our stuff that we had just abandoned, and by that point the hot sun had taken the lead from the bugs as the prime annoyance.

The Overseas Heritage Trail covers most of the length of the Keys, but in many places it is incomplete and discontinuous, and in others it crosses from one side of the highway to the other for no particular reason. Meanwhile, the highway almost always has a reasonable shoulder/bike-lane. So we found ourselves constantly debating whether it was worth the time and effort to get off the road and onto the trail for just a bit more peace. Making that choice is easy when the trail is on the right side of the road, but we guessed wrong multiple times when crossing over to the trail on the “wrong” side of the road. Sometimes because the secondary bridge that the trail led to was unceremoniously fenced-off, and sometimes because the trail just switched back to the right side of the road in short order, both of which required waiting for another break in the near-constant traffic to cross back. If we used the trail every day and got to memorize all the closed/crossover points, I’m sure we’d find it valuable, but as tourists it feels like kind of a bait-and-switch.

Then on one of the bridges, Rett hit a piece of debris in the shoulder, and despite stopping almost immediately, a length of heavy coat-hanger wire had somehow coiled itself tightly around her front hub and jammed under her fender. I was able to carefully bend it free with the traffic roaring by, and luckily it didn’t cut the electrical wire running from her generator hub into her fork, though it came within a couple millimeters on both entry and exit. And generally we were quite lucky that Rett had the skills and reaction time to stop safely, because it could have ended much worse than it did.

All these frustrating challenges at least confirmed for us that riding these 9 miles before we’d eaten any breakfast would have definitely been the wrong choice!

Since yesterday’s Denny’s had been so well air-conditioned, we repeated that as our fast-food lunch cooldown for today. Unfortunately the dining room temperature must not be a corporate standard, as this place wasn’t as cold, though it was still significantly cooler than outside, where the 83F temperature combined with the humidity to create a heat index of about 94F!

And that’s where I finally convinced Rett that spending two more nights camping under these conditions would not be good for our sanity. To her credit, she was willing, despite her suffering, to try out one of the two nights that we had booked at Bahia Honda State Park, but when I found that there were no grocery stores or restaurants on the island to supply us, I decided that it made the most sense to just bag the whole thing and get a motel (finding a less-than-$250/night Florida Keys motel with vacancy was another factor that influence my decision!)

Refreshed and with our bottles filled with ice from the drink machine, we soon hit 7 Mile Bridge, named for exactly the reason you’d expect. Even though I knew it had good shoulders for the whole length, we’d taken the several warnings we’d heard about it to heart, regarding debris in the shoulder, speeding drivers, or crazy winds.

But here the Keys gave us a break, and we had an absolutely ideal crossing. The shoulder must have just been swept, because it was almost perfectly clear. At the elevated section where we needed to climb, construction made our shoulder disappear, which was far from ideal, especially since the modified lane layout left just enough room for drivers to try to squeeze past us. But we lucked into an absolute king of a driver behind us, who was happy to wait the whole way up and down the hill, holding off all the more-impatient drivers behind him. Because if one of those drivers had tried the squeeze-past move, then all the following ones would have, with the risk increasing as the passes became more mindless. And finally, we had no headwind or buffeting crosswinds on the open sea, just a perfect strong tailwind, making it easy to cruise at 18-20mph and cross the 7 miles in a minimum amount of time (prayers for anyone riding the other way though!)

We both felt almost guilty for cancelling our 2-night reservation at Bahia Honda State Park, as it’s the first time in our memory where we’ve done such a thing. Was it truly necessary? Maybe Google reviews were correct and the bugs (and rats!) wouldn’t be as bad at this park as they were at Long Key? Maybe it would feel cooler overnight? Maybe the overnight rainy pattern wouldn’t continue? Well, the decision was made, but stupidly, I couldn’t cancel on their website or even by calling the central State Parks number. While any refund would be nice, mostly I just wanted to free up the high-demand campsite for someone else. Since there is only one road through the Keys, and our motel was 7 miles further, it was easy to stop in the registration station as we passed by and talk in person. And an anecdote from the ranger that validated our decision was worth even more than the $33 we got back. He said that he went out for his standard relaxing early-morning walk around the park today, but after being out for a few minutes he had to go back to his RV to soak his long sleeves in repellent to protect himself from the ravaging no-see-ums. And even then it was not the relaxing walk it was supposed to be! He attributed their activity to the pre-dawn rains, but whatever the reason, we now felt less shame about “wussing out”.

Day 2

Our hotel had the cinder-block spaciousness of Mexican hotel rooms, and was cleaned with a particular product that immediately takes Rett and I straight back to Baja ever since we started smelling it again in St. Augustine. It also runs snorkeling tours, so I had thought that another reason to switch from the campground to this motel for two nights was that it might enable Rett to finally get in the snorkeling that we weren’t able to do at Pennekamp, and help prevent this Keys excursion from being a total bust. But her cold was still nagging away, so we decided the wisest decision would be to just continue to relax in the bug-free air-conditioning.