38.3 mi / 11.9 mph / 30 ft. climbing
Home: Stephen and Mary’s WarmShowers House

After 35 hours enclosed in our air-conditioned room, Rett was dreading a return to the heat and humidity, but opening the door revealed a different world than the one we had escaped. It was certainly still warm, but a layer of fog had enveloped the Keys, an unexpected development that we didn’t even know was possible. While we were still sweating, it kept the sun off our backs and made the riding more-comfortable than the three previous days. Another change was the wind was no longer flowing in-line with our route, and while that meant we didn’t move quite as swiftly, it also meant that the relative velocity between us and the wind was greater, so we felt its cooling effects more-frequently.

Arriving into Key West felt a bit like arriving to Cabo San Lucas after riding the length of the Baja peninsula: we were suddenly surrounded by busloads of tourists who all felt newly-teleported to this place directly from Miami (or other mainland cities) without experiencing any of route that actually connects this endpoint to the mainland. So as miserable as some of those miles were, I was glad that the landscape and environment were at least communicating reams of information into our bodies and minds, information that connects us to this place much more-intimately than these teleporters. I imagine most of them drove over the same highway we did (ensconced in their bubbles for a few hours), though I also felt a significant “just got off the plane” feeling. Oh, or maybe it was cruise ships doing shore excursions!

We cut from the north side of the island to the south to get some lunch, first getting a bit cleaned up at the public bathrooms at Higgs Beach. So when we sat down at our umbrella-covered table inches from the ocean, on the back patio of a grand Victorian mansion, with craft beers and wood-fired pizzas, it suddenly felt a million miles away from our no-see-um-dodging parking-lot breakfast at Long Key State Park a couple mornings ago. Maybe all these people skipping everything else and just heading straight to Key West have it right? Though the still-overcast skies were a big contributor to the relaxing island vibe.

Key West touts itself as the southernmost point of the continental United States. Since I was recently at the southernmost point of the actual United States in Hawaii, this qualified extreme wasn’t particularly exciting, except that I was fascinated by the pointless trickery that they play here. There is a giant buoy planted on the waterfront, painted with “Southernmost Point / Continental U.S.A.” where everyone goes to get their picture taken, even though the house right next to it obviously extends further south! The spot a block away where our chairs sat during lunch is further south than the buoy! Next to the cafe was a pier extending further south into the water and a bunch of people were lined up for pictures at the end, for which I give them some credit, since at least they’ve found the visual extreme within the local area. But it’s still far from the southernmost point on the island, which admittedly is on a Navy base, though Zachary Taylor State Park at the island’s western tip actually contains the southernmost publicly accessible land.

Anyway! We walked out to the pier after lunch, just because I wanted the view into the water. But the real benefit turned out to be running into Julien, a French-Canadian who was (reasonably!) claiming the pier as the end of his four-month-long bike tour from Calgary! Once we indiscreetly budged his standard question-asking tourists out of the way, we spent nearly an hour chatting out on that pier, us learning about his routes and amazing experiences, and him being inspired by our early-retirement and doing this as a couple.

And it was a good way to remind us that even though our bicycle travel continues tomorrow and for the foreseeable future, we should still commemorate the end of this geographic phase, this journey south from New York summer into Florida winter. Overall my plan worked out far better than I expected. Rambling east and west through New England in August and September, waiting for the days to cool before heading south worked almost perfectly; the bubble of comfortability moved south at almost exactly the same pace as we did, leaving us rarely too cold, and almost never too hot. So the worst and most-surprising mismatch of the 2500-mile journey was these last weeks in South Florida, where we outran the suddenly-stalled bubble and nearly got baked (my guess had been that our biggest challenge living through winter in the Continental US would come from cold, not heat, so the temperature gradient of the Florida peninsula taught us quite a lesson!) The East Coast experiencing one of the driest autumns on record was just dumb luck for us (and surely less-appreciated by its residents). And arriving to the southernmost point and swinging back north just two days before the sun begins doing the same was more coincidence than plan, but with the temperatures essentially guiding our pace, maybe that was inevitable?

We cut back to our ferry on the north side of the island through Old Town, and I was surprised to see that a significant part of Key West (including our lunch spot) feels closer to Savannah or Charleston than anywhere else on the Atlantic Coast of Florida outside of St. Augustine. Big old trees, 19th-century houses, and narrow lanes gave it a feel unlike anything else in the Keys.

I thought our 4:50pm arrival to the Key West Express ferry terminal meant that we were reasonably early for the 5-5:30pm boarding window and 6pm departure, so when I took our bikes up the elevator into the waiting room, I was surprised by the hundreds of people who apparently don’t wait until the last minute to hop on the ferry to Fort Myers Beach! The ferry’s website is quite explicit about “no attachments” being allowed on bicycles, and they sounded fairly strict about luggage limitations too (as a passenger-only ferry, filling as much of the limited space with paying customers makes sense). But plenty of bike tourers have taken this ferry, and of those who even said anything about it in their journals, all wrote that in practice no one had any problems with the panniers on their bikes.

So I was shocked when we rolled the bikes up and a worker said we’d need to remove the bags. Rett barely had time to protest (reasonably reminding me that carrying all five of her bags on the boat is not something she’s capable of doing in one trip) before the guys who actually load the bikes turned up, and took them away as-is. Their only comment was that the bags would probably be soaked by the sea spray, so we quickly covered our panniers. And they were in such a hurry to get them on-board that we didn’t get a chance to unlock Rett’s steering lock, and they unwittingly bent the metal to “unlock” it. This is the third ferry of the last few months (following zero before that) where the crew takes our bikes and loads them. I don’t know if they consider it a “service” (they’ve all been expensive ferries, this one extremely so at $350 for the two of us and the bikes), but I much prefer wrangling our bikes ourselves!

Despite being some of the last people to board, we had no problem finding seats, ordered some cheap hot dogs and chicken tenders for dinner, and settled in for the 4-hour transit back to the mainland, now on the Gulf coast of Florida. With everyone raring to go, the boat pulled away from the dock at 5:27pm, more than 30 minutes early. We still didn’t dock until nearly 10pm though. The bikes (which were our responsibility to roll off) were definitely damp, but not soaking, and not obviously salt-crusted.

One additional benefit of cancelling the campground in favor of the motel for the previous two nights is that it shortened today by nearly 10 miles. Night riding in the dark is such a novel experience for us that the 8+ miles to our WarmShowers house would have felt quick no matter what, but it definitely would have dragged a bit more if we’d had 10 more miles in our legs. My generator wire had broken a couple weeks ago, so I had no headlight, but with Rett riding in front and our host’s excellent directions, I didn’t even really need the headlamp I had strapped to my head as insurance.

Despite it being 10:30pm, Stephen and Mary welcomed us warmly into their beautiful Christmas-decorated house when we rang the bell (luckily we aren’t the first people seeking nighttime refuge with them after getting off the ferry, so they know the drill). We got our warm showers, got to know them a bit, and settled into their comfortable guest room bed now facing a new direction for the first time in months. North!