One Year After

A little over a year ago I finished a cross-country bike ride with my good buddy Drover. I never did finish my blog about the trip so a year later I figured it would be a good time to finish up the blog and maybe share a few things I've thought about in the year after. So after leaving Pensacola we made a stop in Tallahassee where we had another couch-surfing host set up. While waiting for our host to get off work we toured some of the capital buildings and eventually made it over to the public library. Public libraries have been some of my favorite places we stopped along the way and I vowed to make better use of the public library in my community (still haven't gone to one). We met up with our host and went to a fair and got to pet some camels and other crazy animals. In the morning we grabbed breakfast and continued on our way. I guess Denny's has this all you can eat pancakes deal for 4 bucks or something now, we could have really used that back then. So we rode for a couple days and I think we went through Ray Charles' hometown. One of the benefits of not having any sort of pretense of a plan are the surprises when you run into things like this. Eventually we found ourselves within a days ride of St. Augustine and the conclusion of the trip was becoming more and more real. The spot in St. Augustine that we wanted to visit most of all was The Castillo de San Marcos, the only real castle in the United States. Being medieval history nerd for much of my adolescent life I was in heaven seeing the architecture and way of life that would have existed in this sort of building. My other favorite part of the castle was the cannons set up around the walls. The castle passed hands between French and Spanish and Americans and there were cannons from each occupation. The French cannons were beautifully crafted and had scriptures passages embossed all along the cannon where as the American cannons were all black with a small indentation: U.S. 1860 and that was it. Explains a lot about both cultures. So as night was setting we crossed a bridge over to the island that the hotel we had reserved was on. We got lost trying to find the Castillo de San Marcos and also got lost looking for our hotel. We eventually found it and enjoyed a night free from worry of being caught trespassing. The next morning before dawn we rode our bikes to the ocean parked them and ran into the ocean completing our cross country trek from ocean to ocean. We left the beach after several pictures and got an in depth description of the Sandusky trial from a stranger we met on the beach. After that we rode to a relative of Drover's in Daytona beach and made our final plans to return home. We packed our bikes in shipping boxes and shipped them off and caught our plane back to Arizona. Then it was back to life as normal except now we had really nice calves. So a year later as I think about the trip one of the things that I find most interesting is that throughout our whole trip we only locked our bikes a handful of times and usually, even in the roughest neighborhoods, left our bikes completely unsecured and unguarded. Both Drover and I decided that if our bikes got stolen that would be the end of the trip and we would hitchhike to the nearest airport and fly home with what ever possessions we had left. As far as theft go we didn't really see a threat of it. We never felt like we were going to be brutally murdered and as far as people went the only negative experiences we had were almost being run off the road by cars in Texas. So did I learn anything on the trip? I don't know, but I think I realized that people aren't as bad as we sometimes make them out to be and that the horrible things people do are generally the outliers. But what do I know, I barely passed statistics.