20.6 mi / 12.1 mph / 18 ft. climbing
Home: Kosta’s AirBNB

My thermometer read 48℉ at 9:30pm last night, and bottomed out at 42℉ when we got out of the tent at 7:30am. So quite a difference from five days ago when the heat of the Florida Keys (overnight lows 30 degrees warmer!) chased us out of a campground and into an air-conditioned motel room. Last night Rett had seen a raccoon dash in and out of the jungle riverbank at the back of our site (the park cautions against camping with children at the site due to the river!), and this morning we were surprised to find that he had returned and knocked over Rett’s incense burner, which had been sitting just outside our tent under the rainfly! Both surprising that the rascal had been bold enough to reach under the rainfly, but also that he seemed to make no attempt to get into our bags. Poorly trained youngster, I guess?

Our short day meant that we had plenty of time to visit with our neighbors, a couple from Wisconsin who cycle far more than we do! Their two recumbents were racked to the rear of their small Winnebago RV, and they tend to settle near trails for a period and accumulate 1000 miles per month! (Dennis also smoothly dropped in various statistics regarding their RV-usage, suggesting he has an affinity for spreadsheets equal to mine!) They generously gave us a tour of their RV, and our recent tough days in the Keys made such a luxurious life more-attractive to Rett than it might have felt to her a couple weeks earlier. I wasn’t feeling the pull as strongly, but it was at least informative data for a variety of potential futures. I hope some time off will reinvigorate Rett’s relationship to our two-wheeled approach, but as always, if not, we’ll figure it out!

We started out with a return directly to the Legacy Trail that our neighbors were here to ride (and that my parents have also cycled!), and certainly if all cycling routes were this easy and relaxed, no one would ever need an RV!

Our late start meant that Calusa Brewery, a mere 8 miles up the path, was open, so we stopped for beers and lunch. Something about rolling up to the cavernous space, lively on this early Sunday with cycling groups on the patio out back, flashed me back to a time 30 years ago when places like this simply didn’t exist. But now craft breweries are so culturally-familiar that it would almost be unusual to not find a place alongside this bike trail serving beers and food that a 1990s American couldn’t imagine (although this place didn’t adhere to the expected culture of beer flights, and only did “half pours” instead).

It oriented my mind to see many improvements that human society is able to implement with the passage of time. Yes, there are always setbacks to progress, and progress is distributed unequally, but to me at least it’s clear that our direction is broadly forward. Take this bike trail that we’ve been riding. It was once a rail line, then became an unused rail line, and was repurposed into something much more useful for the community, a place for recreation and active transportation.

Continuing that incremental progress, there were two bridges being constructed along the path, which will make the road crossings both safer for cyclists, and less-disruptive to drivers. In fact I wonder if this type of stepwise progress is an intentional strategy of trail-builders: pave asphalt over rails using a minimal amount of tax money, and wait to ask the community to pony up the much-larger amount of money for bridges until the drivers have spent a couple years being annoyed by the cyclist-activated crossing signals, at which point they happily pay?

Then when we left the trail to head north to Bradenton, we were granted nice wide bike lanes with a double-line buffer; StreetView revealed that just a year ago, we would have been squeezed into a much narrower space. Yes, at some point the green paint might fade, but that regression will likely be offset by an improvement somewhere else.

Days 2-11

We settled into an AirBNB in Bradenton for the holidays, in an unintentional near-perfect calendar match to the 12 night break we took in Wellington, New Zealand last year. This time it was less motivated by the need to avoid dangerous New Zealand holiday traffic, and more about just doing our best to enjoy holiday traditions.

Unfortunately I got bait-and-switched by the three-blocks-away movie theater promising to show “Love Actually”, but that just meant we had to execute that tradition traditionally, on the couch in front of our TV (we did go to the theater later to see ‘Nosferatu’).

Being back on American soil (and in a state with enough upscale northern transplants) meant that I was able to acquire a goose from the local Publix, and thus continue a Christmas tradition that belongs just to Rett and I. Cooking it meant also acquiring a roasting pan, a thermometer, and a few other items to supplement the AirBNB’s kitchen, but that was a small and worthwhile extra investment.

Other traditions, like baking crescent cookies, were ways to connect with our absent families and remember Christmases past that we spent with them. But when I was making Rett’s mom’s cinnamon rolls for Christmas breakfast, and I swept the loose crumbs of cinnamon sugar off the counter and into my hand, I was surprised to have the physical memory flash me back to our Wellington AirBNB, and then to our Palm Springs AirBNB a couple years before that, where I had done the same motions. Apparently we have been holiday nomads for long enough that we’ve actually developed emotionally-satisfying traditions that were birthed wholly within this strange life of ours! A similar thing happened when tasting Rett’s from-scratch egg nog.

One last connection to family was perhaps the final element of the unintentional (but appreciated!) tour of Rett’s family history that has been a unifying element of this East Coast tour. We’d selected Bradenton for our break almost entirely because it was a place where AirBNB’s were relatively cheap, and then selected our specific unit on that same basis. So while we knew in advance that Rett’s mom’s father Charles was interred in Bradenton (along with Uncle Larry‘s mother Muriel), it was another amazing coincidence that we were within a mid-afternoon run from the cemetery, where a short search brought us to their resting place. Hopefully they were as glad to have an unexpected holiday connection to family as we were.

Beyond that, I took care of a bunch of chores, including washing our down jackets and our sleeping bag (the latter being a major task, involving the bathtub and then days spent redistributing the down across the baffles as it dried). And we got rested up to roll on into 2025, the 5th calendar-year of our nomadacy!