May 12, 2008
Day 0: St. Augustine, Florida - Sightseeing
My brother Greg had agreed to drive me from my home in Kentucky to St. Augustine, Florida, where I would begin the tour. By the time he arrived late Sunday afternoon, I had been ready for hours, checking and re-checking the contents of the panniers. We were taking Greg's Honda Civic, having determined that my decade-old, inconsistently maintained Camry (oil change schedule: every 3,000 to 30,000 miles) was in all likelihood not capable of the long drive to Florida.
It was chilly and rainy - it didn't feel like a propitious start for a bike tour - and by the time I figured out how to secure my bike rack to the small Civic, it was dusk.
We would be driving "straight through" to Florida. I spent the first few hours nervously looking back over my shoulder every few minutes to make sure the bike was still attached to the car. It was stormy and eerily windy as we drove over Jellico Mountain in Tennessee, but after that the weather calmed down.
Despite my semi-sincere offers to help with the driving, I remained a passenger the rest of the trip. I would occasionally doze off, but then would awaken when Greg practiced his "amusing" impression of Kenny Rogers singing "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town." I would be lying if I said I never get tired of that.
The long drive through the night passed without incident, aside from some of the usual mild bickering that is typical of our road trips, and we arrived in warm, sunny St. Agustine around 9:00 in the morning.
After procuring a fairly cheap motel room north of the town, we crashed for a few hours, then drove back into the city and checked out things there. We had lunch at a slightly pretentious, touristy place, where my brother (a wannabe foody who takes dining a lot more seriously than me, a quantity-over-quality guy) was displeased with his cold grouper, then walked around looking at all of the historic stuff in St. Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied city in the USA. While touring Fort Matanzas, we (and a group of rowdy twelve year old kids on a school field trip) were taken aback by the sight of a woman dressed wildly inappropriately for the historic tour; I was so startled by the miniscule leather thong bikini she wore that I didn't think to take her picture (and I photograph virtually everything even mildly interesting).
Later in the evening we spent what seemed like hours driving around town, as Greg the gourmand searched in vain for a bistro he had heard about, and I grew increasingly hungry as we passed by perfectly acceptable Dairy Queens and Subways. Dinner was taken care of finally, however, and we retired to the motel.
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