Let's Go To The Beach (Beach) (USA Day 176)

We awoke to find that the water had risen to very almost nearly the level of our tent, and thanked Poseidon it hadn’t come any further, or we and our electrical devices would be having a crummy morning. The sun rose shortly after we did, and spurred us on for our final day of riding. Mile marker 56. Mile marker 55. This is the final time I’ll load up my Strava route. This is the final time we’ll stop for coffee.

The whole thing felt surreal, so we washed off those emotions with a long dip in the ocean at Bahia Honda State Park, one of the only beaches in the Keys. (The rest is mangrove swamp or rocks.) Surrounded by palm trees and the local bird pest, which happens to be not pigeons or gulls but pretty white ibis, with their probing orange beaks and piercing stares, I sat in the shade and got on with my favourite beach-activity: watching for tsunamis. Amy used the snorkel for the first time since we bought it right at the top of Florida, and discovered that it failed to do the one thing you’d really hope snorkels would do. It let in water every breath. And yes, she had it on the right way up. Thanks for that suggestion.

Given our considerable distance from the shop where we bought the pathetic piece of junk, we couldn’t really return it, but Amy gave it a real chance, alternating between drowning and draining, until the whole thing became far too wet and she climbed out again. In the process, she managed to get utterly sunburnt on her shoulders and back. After six months of painstaking sunscreen-application at great expense of time, money and having un-sticky skin, this is a proper kick in the face. Nevertheless, it hurts and she’s red.

A one-legged ibis spent an hour or so trying to steal things from my table, so my main activity was keeping that situation at bay. Nearby, a man in the parking lot had climbed on top of his camper van with a deckchair, set up a pair of speakers pointing right at him, grabbed himself a cocktail and was loudly singing along to a very obvious selection of classic rock hits, complete with really creepy dancing finger/wrist combinations. I’m not judging: he was blissfully happy up there, singing half-remembered words to ‘Enter Sandman’ and wiggling his spirit fingers at the ocean. It’s just a shame that the rest of us just had to endure his highly audible and visible performance.

We realised, with a slight emerging horror, that we’d left a bunch of miles with very few hours, and still needed to get a grocery done before we plunged into the wilderness for another wild camp. Luckily, we met Ben outside the supermarket, who’s toured copiously across the world on his bicycle and invited us over to sleep at his. After a quick shower and change, we headed out for an absolutely incredible sunset over the bridge to No Name Key, which is my favourite name of a Key by a mile. Very cerebral. As fishermen jostled impatiently with their equipment and tugged away at their tackle, so to speak, we gazed at the sky and its reflections in the channel, watching the occasional tarpin fin whisk across the surface and disappear into the depths. This’ll be our last sunset before the tour is over. What a thought.

So it turns out that this wasn’t our final ride at all. In fact, we’ve left ourselves more miles tomorrow than we managed today. But that’s no problem – we barely rode our bikes.