Following The Monarchs (USA Day 161)

We watched the sun rise over a perfectly still Florida swamp. The palms, backlit by streaks red and gold, barely moved in the still air. Across on the water, a heron waited patiently for his breakfast.

“Not far off paradise, is it?” I asked.

Then the beast of an air conditioning unit turned on and the morning was invaded by an almighty whirring noise, so we went back indoors to make breakfast.

This will be our last day on the Gulf, so we spent much of our morning taking in its stillness. We spotted an opportunistic seagull sitting on a pelican’s head, waiting until it caught a fish and then trying to pry it from the bigger bird’s beak. We watched a bird flutter low over the surface, caught a glimmer of its wing and realised it could only be a kingfisher. We saw hundreds of black and red monarch butterflies, flying south as far as their short-lived wings would carry them so that the next generation, or maybe the one after that, might make it to Mexico for Christmas. We haven’t spotted many beasts of the land down here. I’m sure there are alligators. We’re told there are bears. They get a few grey foxes. Two of those three can push off.

No tailwind today. In fact, the wind blew north-easterly and so did we, making the first twenty miles a total chore. By our second break I was a grunty shell, and turned off the road at the first glimpse of sea. We found a little bay pecked with dead tree stumps, littered with empty cans and dog poo, but beautiful nonetheless. I assembled some ham and egg-mayonnaise sandwiches that tasted great but fell apart instantly, so we spent the next twenty minutes catching airborne egg-bits and wiping yellow smears from all manner of porous surfaces. The bears will love us tonight.

Mercifully, the headwind let up a little and we were free to cycle into Apalachicola without much trouble. The towns are getting older again. This one even calls itself ‘historic’, which in America means ‘older than your dad’. The whitewashed city halls and wood-panelled churches were awfully quaint, but we found our little piece of Florida culture: cheap coffee and muffins at the gas station and a slathering local dog who wanted a bite and really wouldn’t leave us alone for anything less.

We passed a few more small towns on the road, but didn’t really stop. The sun shone the entire time, but it never got too hot: perfect riding conditions. This isn’t, and hasn’t been since Pensacola, the Southern Tier. That went north of here, inland, and will stay that way until the Atlantic. We haven no idea why, and are quite frankly dismayed for all the tourers who followed it faithfully. The ACA have a lot to answer for, not taking these coastal roads. They’re barely driven (at least at this time of year), you can’t move for beaches, it’s perfectly flat, straight as an arrow and the surface is great. What more do you want, a biscuit?

The daylight ran out as we pedalled through Lanark, so we searched for a place to camp. Amy had ringfenced a Catholic church just out of town with plenty of grass around it and a short hop across the road to the beach, so we rang the priest and ran the idea past him. He was quite frankly lovely about the whole thing, and apologised he wasn’t there to let us into the building. Bears, he said, are most definitely a thing around here, what with all the national forest just north of here, so we took his advice and ate our dinner across the road, watching the sun set for the final time over the Gulf. Fish jumped sloppily from the depths, breaking the glassy surface wherever you expected them not to be. Along the shoreline, storm-broken jetties slumped out at strange angles, disconnected from their gardens and houses, irretrievable now. Bats came out once the sky turned pink. They were after the mosquitos, the gnats, maybe the moths. Nimbly, they shot from their fluttering paths, changing direction quicker than our eyes could follow. I hope they feasted as well as the mosquitos did on us.

We’ve done all our bear-prevention activities tonight, behind our church, even though we gave our bear sprays to Denise and Keato a few days back in Dauphin Island. So if God fails to protect us and the bears come knocking, I’m going to have to reason with them. Maybe I’ll give them a bite of my muffin if they promise to go away.