Squeaky Sand, Steamy Sea (USA Day 159)

Finally, the sun rose this morning. What a shock. Delighted by this new celestial orb and its presence in our sky, we danced out into the dawn air and promptly leapt inside again, shivering. Turns out Jesus forgot to turn the heating on.

We left early, wearing all our clothes and some of each others’, screaming at our fingers for them to warm up. They didn’t. The northerly wind blew us south, over some massive and busy bridges, until we found ourselves riding east along the Gulf Islands National Seashore with white-quartz beaches to our right, pristine and neat, and the turquoise gulf slopping back and forth behind. The entire sea was blanketed in steam, a mildew of haze that clung there for hours until the air heated up enough for the effect to fade.

The crosswind blew all morning and we struggled along, trying our own two-person chevrons along the almost-empty roads. You must trust that they work: professional cyclists do them and you know they’re right. They wouldn’t wear such silly shorts and shave their legs unless they were right 100% of the time.

I can’t remember the exact moment I stopped thinking about my fingers, but when I checked in on them they’d utterly forgotten them morning’s pain. In fact, by forty miles as we scuttled along the much-less-interesting Highway 98, we’d gotten positively hot! The panhandle towns we cycled through boasted water parks and ‘tropical superstores’, huge hotels and moped hire. Even off-season, these felt alive with grabbed opportunities. The beaches still had beach-dwellers. The mopeds still had riders. A rowdy gang of mid-50s women with T-Shirts boasting ‘Ladies in Destin, Fall ‘19’ trundled past, proudly letting the world know that the cups they all held contained margheritas.

Every time we rested, we’d find a boardwalk that squeezed between two houses on stilts and led down to the beach, to sit on a dune and watch the lack of waves, the pelicans zonking into the water for yet another fish, the occasional dog-walker or wave-jumper. The sand is not our sand. It squeaks beneath the feet. It’s much finer than most sand too: the consistency of caster sugar. Whiter than shell sand, even, and less sticky. It tumbles off your legs and back to its beachy brothers with little more than a glare and a stern word. We never stayed long, but never had to look far for the next good snack spot. This coastline is faultlessly beautiful.

We passed 80 miles around 5pm, just as the sun began to set. The perils of late-year touring didn’t get us today. But we’re not going to get blasé: this weekend, not only will the clocks go back, but we’ll also pass into the Eastern Time Zone again. We’ve tried working out how that will affect our daylight hours, but quite frankly it’s beyond us. We’ll just have to wait and see.