January 20, 2024
Day 1 - Hagen’s Cove Park to Grace Gardens Campground
It’s Cold in Florida!
Woke up at 12:30am, three of Jude’s friends were still hanging out while he packed. We said our goodbyes with plenty of tears from the girls. It was a big deal especially for Elizabeth to say goodbye to her son for three months.
On the road by 1am, we arrived at Hagen’s Cove Park by 5pm ET. The drive was unusually eventful for a couple reasons. For starters, I ran out of gas for the first time, and only 20 feet from the pump. It was frigid outside, icy, and on an incline. No one was there to help Jude and I push, so I bought a two gallon jug and filled up the truck with enough gas to drive 20 feet! I refilled the jug and told Jude we would stop and help the next person we saw stranded. About an hour later, just outside of Brundidge, Alabama, we saw a guy pushing his car to the side of the road. We stopped to see if he needed some gas, but he had just gotten two flat tires. He seemed a bit flustered , so we offered to drive him somewhere so he could figure out what to do next. We moved our bags to the bed of the truck to make some room for Dirk in the back seat and then drove him to the next gas station so his sister could pick him up.
Now for the biking part: we pulled into Hagen’s Cove Park, a small sandy spit in the middle of Florida’s Big Bend. This is a vast area where the Gulf of Mexico touches a low-lying, marshy, mangrove-y part of Florida with numerous river deltas colliding to create a brackish swamp full of fish, birds and manatees. There are no beaches here, so this is authentic, unpretentious Florida: insanely loud airboats, RV retirement communities (no condos), homes with yards full of old boats, broken down trailers and odds and ends, pine forests as far as you can see, hunters, dogs, trucks, and towns with names like Coon Hammock. We unloaded our bikes from the truck and then loaded them with our gear. We dipped our wheels in the Gulf as the sun was setting and set off East, bound for St. Augustine.
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We traveled 16 miles on a sandy road, only pushing our bikes through two sugar sand sections but spinning out numerous times. This was a Google maps shortcut special - apparently we were on private property because a hunter driving his truck with his wife and dogs barking in the back stopped us and asked if were members. When we told him where we were headed he said he wouldn’t tell anyone and just keep heading straight. We carried on and finally came to asphalt. After a quick break to sort out an issue with Jude’s panniers, we headed 18 miles down the road toward Grace Gardens Campground. It was now very dark and the moon and stars were brilliant. We stayed just warm enough in the 40 degree temps which felt fine to us, but our feet did get very cold - tomorrow we’ll put on our shoe covers. At 9pm, after almost a mile down a sandy side road, we pulled into a driveway containing several cars in various stages of repair. We met Bob who was working on one of the cars and asked him if we could camp in his yard for the night. He said he and his wife stopped hosting campers last year, but he said he would let us and showed us where we could pitch our tent, get water, and even charge our phones. Going into this trip, I knew that we, and Jude especially, would need to rely on the kindness of strangers, and Bob was one of those strangers that took compassion on us and showed us kindness. Thanks Bob! We set up camp and turned in quickly, warming numbed toes with hand warmers.
Today's ride: 33 miles (53 km)
Total: 33 miles (53 km)
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