St Augustine Feb 15 - Stan's Excellent Cross Country Ride 2025 - CycleBlaze

February 15, 2025

St Augustine Feb 15

  My brother encouraged me to go to St Augustine Alligator Farm because he expected that I would find many birds there.  There were many Roseate Spoonbills and some others. I have seen Yellow Crowned Night Heron on about 10 previous occasions and there were three today.  I never had more than one at a time in the USA before.  I have seen worse conditions for gators and crocs, but still they didn't have much room.  They had some caged birds I had seen in other countries such as White Rumped Shama and White Crested Laughing Thrush and Sunbittern.

Roseate Spoonbills
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Spoonbill and White Ibis
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I went down to the old city, but it started raining and I am not sure if I saw it or not.  Many tourists were wandering around.

Our group is then 9 paying participants and 2 support people. One of the support people will leave us in Austin TX and someone else will take his place. They will take turns riding in the back as sweeps. There are 3 Johns and 2 Bills of 11 people.  The plan is to usually have breakfast at 7 and be on the road by 8. There may be some exceptions as we go along.  We have an odd number of people and I got the single room tonight. Yes!

A pause in the meeting
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Food!
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This is the first time this group has tried the route east to west and we are the test  group. Few of them, besides the support team have done a trip longer than a week, so I have much more experience there.  We are expected to carry our lunch with us each day. I am not sure if I will need to get a bigger bag for the bike.

   We start tomorrow and some of the people have not taken their bikes for test rides. It will be interesting.

Today's ride: 10 miles (16 km)
Total: 30 miles (48 km)

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Jeremy ZornsYou're being quite humble here; I think you've gone cross-country at least twice before, right? ;-)
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1 month ago