32.5 mi / 11.5 mph / 848 ft. climbing
Home: Yelena’s AirBNB Room

Our inland excursion is complete, and it’s time to head back to the Gulf Coast to continue tracing the coastline of Florida. Our immediate target is the manatees in Crystal River, and conveniently their waters spring right on the WNW line that one might take to return to the coast from Orlando even if they didn’t know about the manatees.

Waiting out the cold weather worked, and while the morning was definitely chilly, it was a reasonably-comfortable day for our first proper ride in nearly three weeks. As we rounded the topside of Universal, we could see the spires of Hogwarts in the distance, across parking lots and behind hotels. Not sure why the Muggles in the UK don’t know about it, it’s pretty damn visible!

At the post office, Rett jettisoned her many theme-park acquisitions to places far and wide. But as we were getting ready to ride on, her watchband decided to fail, sending her Garmin to smash face-first on the concrete. Somehow I ended up being the one scolded (for not sufficiently rending my flesh in empathized anguish, I guess). Sure, especially after spending a boatload of money at the parks over the last weeks, immediately adding another $300 expense on top of that is definitely not my idea of a good time, but rending flesh won’t do anything to change that shitty reality. Instead, I just put my energy into searching, and found that we could get a new one at Target just slightly off-course and only a few miles up the road. Really we’re lucky that we were still in the heavily-populated Orlando region; where were headed, there aren’t going to be any stores selling Garmin watches!

We were shocked by the hills we encountered on our way into Orlando, but they were nothing compared to what we had to climb on our way back out. These were legitimate up-100-feet, down-100-feet hills, bigger than anything in Illinois! Leaving Target, we had to climb up a 9% grade(!!), and it would have been even higher if the driveway wasn’t strategically angling up the ciff face. And due to the overall flatness of the state, from the top of the hills you could see for miles! It was all very strange, not just for what we knew about Florida, but for people who haven’t seen land blocking the horizon for more than three months! Our 848 feet of climbing ended up as the most we’d done since Long Island.

After Target we were able to do the last 10 miles on a series of trails. They didn’t completely eliminate the hills, but they were really wide, mostly empty, and a much more pleasant way to move through the region than the huge suburban arterial highways we’d used until that point. The longest section brought us around the bottom half of round Lake Minneola, just one of the many lakes dotting this region, like it’s Minnesota or something.

Finding a spot to stay midway between Orlando and tomorrow night’s campground was a challenge, so we’re in an “AirBNB Room”, a room in our host’s nice suburban house (we did the same on the way into Orlando). She said that she wouldn’t be there when we arrived, and her parents didn’t speak English. But as I was unloading the bikes and preparing to park them in the back yard, her mom came out from a room, said a bunch of words I couldn’t understand, but it was clear from her motions that she wanted me to park the bikes in their foyer. Awesome, thank you! (I think she knew enough English words to get the gist of that). We never saw our actual host (that’s no problem for us), but around 10pm she messaged us and asked if we could turn the volume down because her kid in the room next door couldn’t sleep. I think it probably had less to do with the TV, and more to do with us excitedly having a video chat with my parents a bit earlier (because we do get loud when we’re excited!), but that’s certainly the sort of uncomfortable-for-both-sides thing that Vrbo uses in their ads to differentiate themselves from AirBNB!