January 19, 2020
Day 4/5/6: Not a lot of riding going on...
Actually, no riding went on. Well, 10 miles on the final day
There was a line of storms moving towards NE Florida and the hour by hour forecasts now said rain would reach Palatka by 8am and Mt. Dora by 10am and be steady rain vs. showers. My route from Mt. Dora to Palatka had three alternatives: a 76 mile ride that took farm roads through the Ocala Forest (scenic and probably lowest traffic, but zero places eat/water up); a 66 mile route that took slightly bigger roads (more traffic, but food/water at 15 and 52 miles); and a 72 mile route that just took Rt. 19 all the way (the most traffic, more places to stop, but still a stretch of 25 miles with nothing.)
The fourth alternative was to call Carole, have her drive up and shuttle me. Based on the forecast and the roads I'd be on, I chose that alternative. Carole would ping me before she left in the morning, just in case the forecast had changed. But, it had actually gotten worse - radar showed heavy rain in Jacksonville and rain already in Palatka at 6 am. If this was a "real" tour I would have either gotten wet or waited it out, but I had a rigid schedule to get back, was doing this for fun and had that easy bail out alternative.
So, Carole drove up and I put the bike back on her car, we had a nice tour of Main Street Lake Dora (cute, cute, cute) and went through the downtown farmer's market - of course, the weather stayed dry as a bone. We started driving to Palatka on the 72 mile route and other than a 20 minute stretch, the entire trip was rain free. The route would not have been fun in the rain -70 mph traffic, small, inconsistent shoulders and a few bridges that had no bike lanes. But, if I had toughed it out, probably only 20-25 miles in the rain.
To compound things, found out I could not load a bike onto Amtrak at Palatka, because it is an unattended Amtrak station and there is no baggage service there. I let the bike icon on the Amtrak web site fool me - you have to look at the detailed .pdf route schedule to see which stops have baggage service and will load bikes. Luckily, I ended up being able to do a one way Enterprise rental of a pickup truck and returned it to Enterprise in Jacksonville and was going to ride the 4 miles to Amtrak. But the nice Enterprise guy said "Don't be silly - I will drop you off." So, zero miles that day.
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At the Jacksonville Amtrak station, the train arrived on time just before 5pm, and dozens of craved nicotine addicts came running off the train. Apparently, the attended stations where they handle baggage are also "smoke and stretch" stops - the station looked like I remember the teacher's lounge in high school at lunchtime. I handed the bike off to the baggage car folks and settled in for a 14 hour, mostly sleepless but actually early arriving 14 hour train ride to Washington DC's Union Station - where it was 23 degrees at 6:30am.
I rolled the bike over to the Bike Station, used my access fob to get in and get to my locker and put on two layers of bike clothes. The Bike Station is an interesting looking building but it is unheated - a very invigorating place to change clothes in below freezing weather. In Venice, I had gotten a pair of cheap wool gloves at Lowes and those acted as glove liners under my full-finger biking gloves. I felt pretty toasty.
I put the bike on the elevator to the Metro Rail system, got on a train to Glenmont MD with my bike and at about 8am was outside getting on the bike - and it was 17 degrees.
The ride home from Glenmont starts with what is normally a fun downhill, easy to speed up to the 25 mph range, which I did - and immediately froze my face off, as I had neglected to pack one of those bank robber face masks. By 9am I was back home.
Today's ride: 10 miles (16 km)
Total: 236 miles (380 km)
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