38.1 mi / 13.4 mph / 374 ft. climbing
Home: St. Andrews State Park

Rett woke up in the middle of the night with stomach pain so sharp that she couldn’t even roll over onto her back. I brought her some Gas-X, and along with time, the shackles released themselves and luckily there were no significant lasting effects by morning. Except that I let her sleep in as long as she wanted, which meant that we didn’t hit the road until 9:30am. By the clock, that’s a fairly normal start time for us on this stretch, but now that we’ve crossed into Central Time, it’s actually more like a 10:30am start as far as our bodies and the sun are concerned. No problem though since we have another sub-40-mile day on the docket.

A solid tailwind blew us through the 14 miles of Tyndall Air Force Base, though we weren’t going nearly as fast as the F-22s (or maybe F-35s) that were shadowing us. We heard the roar of three or four passing overhead before I actually saw one, making me wonder if Trump’s idiotic belief that “stealth” planes are invisible actually held some merit, but no, it turns out they just did a really good job of sneaking from one puffy cloud to another. And perhaps their speed means their sound and their position don’t relate in the way that they do for “normal” planes.

It was when I was looking up “do they fly F-22s out of Tyndall?” that I first learned about 2018’s Hurricane Michael and what a huge (but now nearly-invisible) impact it had on the region. Apparently all of the 18 F-22s that weren’t evacuated before the storm were damaged, though repairable, which is good news for a $190M airplane.

Our destination for the night was on the next barrier island up the coast from Tyndall, but since there isn’t a bridge across St. Andrew’s Bay joining them, we needed to take the long way around through Panama City. The bridge back to the mainland was a rare shoulderless one (as was the road for a couple miles after that), so it was a bit stressful especially since the drivers around the Air Force base seem to “feel the need for speed” much more than the relaxed rural/tourist drivers of the last week.

During our last three nights in motels, HGTV has been playing a lot of “Beach Front Bargain Hunt”, and as every episode starts, we wonder “will it be a place that we’ve ridden through?!” Our map shows that there is very little US coastline remaining that we haven’t traced, so the answer is usually “yes”, but yesterday there were episodes about Panama City Beach and Gulf Breeze/Pensacola, and the answers for those were “no, but we’ll be through both in the next few days!” While we aren’t looking to buy a condo along the Gulf Coast, scenes from those episodes were at least helpful in warning us that our time in rural emptiness was coming to an end, so the more-aggressive driving wasn’t a total surprise.

Panama City initially had the feel of a town that hasn’t recovered from the hurricane as quickly as Mexico Beach did, but that also might just be the nature of its east side’s industrial low-income history. Once we made it to the city center, and especially onto West Beach Drive, the neighborhoods became significantly more-attractive.

Just before leaving Panama City on the west end, we rejoined with US-98, our low-stress friend for the last week. But somehow it had turned into an absolute monstrosity during our brief separation, now four lanes in each direction! And while it certainly wasn’t bumper-to-bumper, traffic was using most of those lanes! Somewhere between the east end (where it wasn’t too tough for cars to get around us in the single passing lane) and the west end of Panama City, a huge gusher was apparently flooding the route with a new influx of traffic. We still had a shoulder/bike lane, so it wasn’t scary, but the final miles to St. Andrews State Park weren’t especially fun.

By the time we got to our unshaded campsite, Rett was woozy from the heat, but by the time she showered the sun was low enough to at least be cooler, and for our tent to work as shade. Now that we’re in Central Time, sunset is “early” by the clock, at 5:30pm. With the now-clear skies, condensation attacked immediately when (or maybe even before) the sun dropped below the horizon, so we had to be on our shit to get everything packed in its place as soon as we finished dinner.