Days 110 & 111: O'Leno and Paynes Prairie State Parks

Wednesday was my turn to ride, so I got out and installed my new saddle.  I think I may have discovered part of why my old saddle was becoming uncomfortable the closer I'd get to riding 50 miles in a day.  The bottom of most bike saddles consist of two parallel bars or rails that are attached by a clamp to the bike's seat post.  So I sat the old and new saddles on a picnic table and placed them on their rails.  This was to see if the new saddle was taller, which would require that I lower the seat post a bit.  It was clear that the rails on my old saddle were bent, most likely from a crash years ago.  So it is likely that the slightly deformed saddle had caused a bit more pressure on my right side than my left, and it was that extra pressure that would cause me to become more uncomfortable as the miles piled up.

Woo-hoo!  Spiffy new jersey!

So I managed to do 42 miles, pretty much all of them into a fairly stiff and gusty quartering headwind.  The fact that I had lubed the chain the day before helped me to maintain a decent pace of almost 17 mph.

About 5 miles from our campground I was run off the road.  Some sort of work pickup towing a slightly wider trailer decided to pass me on a road with no shoulder as another car was traveling in the opposite lane.  He squeezed the pickup by me without causing any alarm, but he was misjudging how fast he was overtaking me, so the trailer squeezed me close enough to the edge of the pavement that I had to bail out onto the grassy verge.  Unfortunately, that's just another day at the office for us.  It usually takes us by surprise, as we'll ride for hours on roads with no traffic, then traffic will build quickly as we enter into a less rural area.

So we stayed at O'Leno State Park on Wednesday night ($20.16, power, water and showers).  The roads are more rustic (at least on our campground loop) than the other Florida parks that we've been in, but other than that it's another great campground.

We had been invited to stay the night with Julie Braden and her papillon Tiffy, who live in Lake City, FL.  I had met Julie on Ancestry.com when I had just begun digging into my Malone and Hunter roots, and she provided me with some information that helped focus my early research efforts.  We aren't related, though one of her ancestor's siblings had married a child of my 4th great grandfather, John Hunter, Junior.

We didn't take Julie up on her offer to spend the night, in order to stay on track to stay at St Augustine this coming Sunday.  But when she offered to let us do some laundry, we couldn't refuse to do so and also have the chance to learn a bit more about her and her family.

Alea rode on Thursday.  It was in the 70s early in the morning, with lots of rain showers throughout the day.  Needless to say, the humidity was close to 100%.  She was fortunate enough to have had a good shoulder, bike lane or bike bath nearly the entire way, but nonetheless got soaked and covered with road spray.

A swamp at the north end of Payne's Prairie Preserve.

She stopped riding just SE of Gainesville, where we drove off route to Payne's Prairie's Puc Puggy Campground ($19.98, power, water and showers).  It rained most of the afternoon, so we drove into Gainesville for dinner, only to get trapped in near gridlock traffic.  After about a half hour of inching along, we eventually were able to find a place to eat.

Aha!  The reason that University of Florida located in Gainesville,
(Alea is a UF Gator)

Earlier in the day we got booted off our MiFi connection.  We understood why after getting stuck in traffic.  Imagine all those people calling to let people know that they'll be late or won't be able to stop and pick something up on the way home, and it's easy to understand how easy it is for the cell towers to get overloaded.  This is probably an acute problem in Florida, where a local newscast claimed that in the winter the population swells by more than a million more people, most of them arriving right about now.