azazil.net

I’ve been tagged by Ian with the Scattergories meme.

Here are the rules:

Use the 1st letter of your name to answer each of the questions. They must be real places, names, things . . . nothing made up! If you can’t think of anything, skip it. You CAN’T use your name for the boy/girl name question. If your name happens to start with the same letter as mine, sorry, but you can’t use my answers!

• Famous singer: Grace Slick
• Four letter word: Geek
• Street Name: Ganja (street name for Marijuana)
• Color: #DAA520 (aka GoldenRod)
• Gifts/Presents: Giraffe (I really have received one of these!)
• Vehicle: GTR
• Things in a Souvenir Shop: Gourmet Gator Cookbook
• Boy’s Name: Galahad
• Girl’s Name: Guinevere
• Movie Title: Good Will Humping
• Drink: Guinness (puh-lease!)
• Occupation: Gasket Inspector (Hey, I almost chose Gynecologist, and no they’re not the same thing!)
• Celebrity: Gordon Liu
• Magazine: Guitarist
• U. S. City: Gallup (home of the Devil’s Highway)
• Pro Sports Team: Green Bay Packers
• Fruit: Guava
• Reason for Being Late for Work: Gave up the 9 to 5 — try not to hate me!
• Something You Threw Away: GPS :-(
• Things you Shout: Gah!
• Cartoon Character: The Great Gazoo

Thanks for the tag, Ian. I hope I haven’t bared my soul too much with my answers ;-)

I’ll pass the torch to Frank, Simon, Maia and Charity. Have fun with it guys!

Already 2 days behind schedule, and making a 400 mile detour to take in some of the Florida Gulf Coast (ostensibly to avoid some bad weather), Tave was keen to add a visit to Sarasota to our itinerary. Since the fast route back to Orlanda from Naples along the interstates took us within 10 miles anyway, we decided that it would make a good mid-point stop for the journey home.

With an early start to beat the weather we were making good time, and reached Sarasota around 11:30am. While refuelling the bikes, I was surprised to discover that Sarasota had a bay area surrounded by several keys of its own! With barely a cloud in the sky we quickly headed to the nearest, Bird Key, where we stopped for half an hour to stretch our legs and admire the view. Notice the bottle of factor-45 sun block we are using up at a steady rate in the bottom right corner, and the John Ringling bridge behind me as I look out over the beautiful Sarasota Bay. If only we’d found these earlier, we needn’t have bothered with the South Florida Keys!

A friendly couple with a pickup full of dogs stopped to chat when they spotted Taves Street Bob, to suggest a stage 1 exhaust kit and chrome lower forks to finish the bike off properly. We discovered from them that the notorious hurricanes rarely make it to this part of Florida, and that he hadn’t seen one here in his whole life. Tave and I were both really taken with Sarasota, and plan to find an apartment here for a future trip. Orlando is a great central point from which to explore Florida, but is geared heavily to tourists and is not even part-way as pretty as many of the other parts of the state we’ve visited this time around.

After our short stop, we needed to quickly finish the rest of the journey back incase the weather turned. But, soon after getting back onto the interstate, I was devastated as my beloved sat nav leapt to its death, and smashed into lots of tiny pieces on the road when the plastic part of the bracket connecting it to the handlebars of my bike sheared off. As it is only a few months old, and has only been used moderately from the bike in that time, I’m going to try to claim under the warranty. The rider model isn’t made anymore though, so I’m not sure what they will be able to do. Gutted. :-(

All in all, despite (because of?) the traumas, our Florida Coast Road Trip has been quite an adventure, covering some 900 miles over the last 5 days. We’ve all had a blast, but I think I need to plan only 100-150 miles of scenic riding per day into our next trip to avoid the sunburn, and numb-bum we’ve endured this time around!

Related Articles

1. Key West Road Trip
2. FL Coast Day 1: Boca Raton Beach
3. FL Coast Day 2: Key West Beach
4. FL Coast Day 3: Alligator Alley
5. FL Coast Day 4: Naples Beach

With more than 600 miles and almost 20 hours of hard riding over the last 3 days, we wanted to make a gentle start to today before embarking upon the final 250 mile leg back to Orlando. After a late breakfast we packed up and went directly to the lovely beach pictured above, where Tave and Megan spent a happy 3 hours or so snorkeling while collecting a bucket load of shells and getting sunburnt on their backs ;-)

Around 2:30 the sun disappeared behind the clouds as we got back on the bikes and set off towards I-75 for a fast route home, but once again, within 15 minutes of starting the engines, the heavens opened for a real downpour. Considering how bright the weather had been so far, we decided to stop for food and try again, but even though the rain had stopped at the restaurant, we had only travelled 4 or 5 miles before we had caught up with it again. This time, the rain was hard enough to make for poor visibility, and it would have been foolhardy to continue, so we turned around and booked another night at the Best Western. Watching the forecast on television, we could expect a similar day tomorrow with sun and clear skies until noon, before more storms set in. We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing and preparing ourselves for a sprint in the morning to get back to Orlando before the rain was to start…

With the prospect of a day of snorkeling and sunbathing, Megan was up and ready to leave by 9am. Unfortunately, as I was checking out I noticed that there was a weather warning for storms approaching form the North. We certainly didn’t want to be on the lower keys during heavy weather, especially as it was forecast to last a few days :-( We decided we would just get as far as we could while it was still safe to ride and then wait the weather out in the next hotel we reached.

Within half an hour of setting out, dark storm clouds were filling the sky ahead of us in the East, and to our left in the North, and sure enough we were riding in spitting rain soon after. Despite the rain not really setting in fully, the wind was blowing hard enough that the tiny raindrops felt like needles sticking in my face and neck. Especially my neck, where I had burnt in the sun over the previous couple of days. I found that if I held my shirt collar closed with my hand and sucked my lips in I could avoid the worst of the pain, and determined to reach at least Key Largo before giving in and stopping if the weather didn’t get any worse.

The girls said that if we saw a nice beach, they wanted to stop and go snorkeling despite the rain… after all they were going to get wet anyway :-) Sadly, we didn’t see a nice beach along the whole of the Keys, but we had at least made it as far as Homestead on the mainland before the rain began to fall heavily. As we stopped for lunch there was visible clear sky in the West and out to sea in the East, but black clouds in the direction of Miami.

An hour later, we had dried out and the rain had stopped again when Tave reminded me that we had wanted to see some of Florida’s West Coast, so maybe we should head towards the blue sky and find a nice beach near Naples? We might even be able to stop and take an airboat ride through the Everglades…

Optimism has always been my weak point. Within 15 minutes of setting off, the needle rain had started again, and we could see lightning to the North. Undeterred we ploughed on West along SR-41 through the Everglades wilderness parallel to Alligator Alley until we began to worry that we would be caught in the storm miles from anywhere. We stopped for Key Lime Pie and coffee at a cafe alongside one of the roadside airboat ride companies to see whether the weather would worsen and force us to head back to Homestead, or pass by allowing us to make progress towards the West Coast. While playing with the GPS I discovered that it was 50 miles in either direction to the nearest gas station, and that we had barely more distance left to Naples than if we retreated through the rain back to Homestead.

With storms still raging to the North we were told that we couldn’t take an airboat ride while we waited, since being sat on the tallest metal object in a storm was asking to be struck by lightning. Megan amused herself by dropping dorito’s into the water off the decking to be eaten by a hungry Gator, but only when the airboat pilots had assured her they couldn’t jump onto the decking where she was standing :-)

Thankfully, the downpour passed while we were pondering, and we decided to keep going through the needle rain and stop at the first accomodation we reached. After another 200 mile ride on the day, we finally reached a The Best Western Naples Inn where we laundered our wet clothes and settled in for the night.

Still exhausted from the previous day’s riding, we barely checked out from the hotel in time (with Megan still half asleep) as we set off for the day. We stopped for an early lunch right away at a nearby Chili’s so that we could orient ourselves.

With over 200 miles left to Key West, and even though the US 1 is a faster road, we realised there wouldn’t be enough time to make it much of the way back from Key West today. Unfortunately, our hotel coupons book only showed hotels in Key West itself, and 100 miles nearer in Key Largo, so we planned to spend the night at Key West.

Getting through Fort Lauderdale and Miami in lunch time traffic was more time consuming than we’d hoped, especially as Tave and Megan were hellbent on buying snorkels for themselves enroute… so we had to stop a couple of times to shop in between the bathroom and drink breaks. Consequently, it was already 5pm by the time we crossed onto Key Largo from mainland Florida ;-)

From here on in the ride was incredible, especially with the sea all around us as we crossed seven mile bridge (from the scene in True Lies where Arnie flies a Harrier after a section of the bridge is blown up). Tave had a lucky escape when a shirt on her rack came loose in the wind and caught in her rear wheel… thankfully not on the belt side, so she was able to stop and pull it out before the wheel locked!

It was close to 7pm by the time we crossed the final bridge into Key West itself. Again, exhausted from another 8 hours of intermittent riding we booked into the first hotel we reached under no illusions that we’d find cheap accomodation on Friday night at Key West. Although at $89 for a room for the 3 of us, with breakfast included, we didn’t fare too badly.

With less than an hour of daylight left, and Tave and Megan itching to use their snorkels we quickly headed to the public beach on the south side of the island, where I took the photo above. The girls were disappointed though, as the beach was man-made; there were no shells to be found; and the water was clogged with seaweed. We decided to order takeout, and get an early night so that we could make an early start the next day and find a real beach on one of the other keys.