36.1 mi / 13.2 mph / 327 ft. climbing
Home: Gulf State Park

I had to dash across six lanes of semi-highway over the last couple days to go to the Publix grocery store, so I wasn’t looking forward to riding out on that same road. There is no shoulder/bike-lane, but there is something I haven’t quite seen before: sharrows, painted tight up against the white line (rather than the middle) of the rightmost lane, but appearing every 50 yards or so, as if to say “no, really drivers, bikes are allowed to be here, that last sharrow marker you saw was as real as this one, not just the bones of a flattened cyclist!”

We survived the stretch with only a few close passes, and then the world spread out wide on the Pensacola Bay Bridge. Modern bridges are a cyclist’s delight, and this brand-new bridge is one of the best we’ve been on. In each direction, the three travel lanes from the surface road continue, but a full-width shoulder is added to the right side, a near-full-width shoulder spreads out the left. And on top of that, both directions (a rarity!) have a wide bike/pedestrian path.

Which we didn’t even use! On the Pensacola side, we needed to head west (left), and the wall separating the bike/ped path from the main road means that extra steps would have been required to make that connection, while we instead smoothly crossed an exit and then three lanes of high-speed traffic without pause (traffic kind of came in bursts and our timing was lucky), probably saving ourselves 5 minutes. It’s another place where Florida gives us the option to behave like either cars or pedestrians, and while that probably makes drivers angry with jealousy, we love the ultimate flexibility.

We continued west on FL-292 for some 10 miles, but soon after we restarted following a Walmart stop, it appeared that I might have made a dangerous routing mistake. We’d generally had a bike lane or shoulder the whole way, but suddenly the road narrowed, the speed limit cranked up to 55mph, and most-consequentially, the traffic volume didn’t drop. Any two of those three conditions together is manageable, but when all three are in effect, lines of cars back up behind us (because there is enough oncoming traffic to making passing difficult), and then when they pass, they come dangerously close to us. Sometimes as a way of expressing their frustration at having to wait, but mostly as a way of expressing their mindlessness. When a driver stuck behind us finally sees an opening, it’s usually no problem for him to pass safely. But all the cars behind him then just follow the leader, assuming “if the guy in front of me is going, that means I can go too”. By the time the fifth car in line is going around, the oncoming pickup that was a quarter mile away when the train began its move is now nearly being forced off the road as that fifth driver needs to shoot the quickly-narrowing the gap between us, trying to decide whether to err on the side of the 55mph oncoming 2-ton vehicle, or the two soft people atop their two-wheelers.

Luckily every mindless driver made it through the gap without contacting steel or flesh, and the shoulder returned after “only” three miles of white-knuckle riding.

A look back showed that we weren’t supposed to be on that road; a technical oversight in my route-creation meant it missed a turn that would have had us on a much more-comfortable route for that stretch, adding only slightly more distance. See, the routing app that I use (RIdeWithGPS) often tries stupidly hard to keep us off perfectly-rideable roads when it’s set to “bicycle routing” mode, so rather than tediously dragging its generated route back onto the road I want in 100 different places, I’ll sometimes set the routing mode to “driving” in order to get it to automatically select the sensible road. So I believe what happened is that in using that method to improve the routing on an unrelated section of road miles away, it also updated the routing for this section without me noticing, putting us on this “more efficient for cars” (and perfectly safe for them!) road (Sorrento Rd. rather than Gulf Beach Highway). Lesson learned! (though I also really wish RideWithGPS would add a “bicycle routing for non-wussies” mode, so that I wouldn’t ever need to switch to “driving” mode).

The state border between Florida and Alabama carefully runs through the center of Perdido Bay, making some extreme zig-zags as the bay takes a snaking path to reach the Gulf. But then just a mile from reaching that outlet, the border says “fuck it, this is a pain”, and just cuts right across Perdido Key in a random spot. This is good for us, because the non-bridge location of the Alabama welcome sign made it easier to stop for a photo and reflect on our time in Florida.

Excluding our “home” states of Washington, Illinois, and New York, the 77 days we spent “living” in Florida trails only California’s untouchable 120 days (3rd place is Montana at 55 days). The 1300 miles we rode through the state is just ~150 miles short of what we did in California, and far ahead of any third place contender. And qualitatively, Florida was a pleasant surprise, with more variety, far better bike facilities, and less “Florida Man” than I expected. I never would have guessed that I’d be sad to leave!

We entered Gulf State Park through the “back door”, riding nearly four miles on a nice bike trail that led right to the backside of a campground loop. Then it was three-quarters of a mile of riding past slide-out RVs before we made it to one of the 8 tent sites in the enormous park. It’s at least another three-quarters of a mile to the entrance station at the “front” of the park, but thankfully I didn’t need to make the trip! Unlike Florida State Parks, my confirmation email here said that if your site is paid for, you can just go directly to it without stopping at registration. Wow! Not only is it nice that we could skip the step (and the extra 1.5 miles of riding), it’s nice that they told us that we could skip that step! Alabama is trying really hard to compete!

It was cool to see that several of the RVs nearby were decorated for Mardi Gras, something we’ll soon see more of in Mobile. For dinner, we enjoyed leftovers from the Super Bowl feast that Rett had picked out for me yesterday.