Day Fifty-Two

I woke up early and my mind was already buzzing. I stumbled around for a while without coffee, then once properly fortified, started organizing gear into what goes with the bike, what gets shipped separately and what stays with me on the train to Boston.

I went online to order the bike shipping service through BikeFlights. I can drop the bike box off at a UPS store, but it must be ready to ship. I need a scale to weight the box and a way to print the shipping label. 

I need some new clothes, too. I won't be wearing my day-glow yellow cycling jersey anywhere but on the bike. Also, I'm now a medium, not a large. I've worked too hard for to wear what's now in my closet back home, potato sacks. And in complete contradiction to that last sentence, I need to find a French bakery. I haven't had a good croissant in two months. 

After visiting REI in Winter Park, to get some clothes that fit, I settled in at a French bakery to get some writing in. Joan texted that her flight landed 30 minutes early, so I beelined it to the airport. Then Joan and I drove back to the coast, to the spot where I had stopped riding yesterday. 

We parked a few blocks from the ocean beach and I pulled the bike out. Flat front tire. Perfect! It had gone flat in the night, so I knew it was a micro-hole. In fact, yesterday, after rolling over some broken glass, I got off the bike to inspect the tires and pulled a few tiny glass shards out of the tire treads. I also found the smallest imaginable steel wire sticking out of the front tire. It has stuck in there, and as tire rolled it was slowly being pounded through the tread. I pulled it because it would be working the hole larger as I made miles. I figured I might be lucky enough to finish the ride before it finally went flat, which I did. I pumped the tire up knowing it would last through my final photo shoot with Joan and being walked across the sand. I pulled on my riding clothes for the last time. I hadn't washed them from yesterday and they were sticky, but not for long because I was about to go swimming in them. 

I haven't had someone to take pictures of me since I was on the beach in Santa Monica with my nephew Jens. Joan and I talked through the final shots of me riding towards the beach and walking into the surf. We took several takes to stitch together a good video of short cuts, and I was in no hurry for this to end, now that the end was so close. 

The day was hot inland but just pleasantly warm on the sand, with a sea breeze. The pavement of the parking lot was too hot to walk on barefoot, but the sand was nice. There were a lot of people on the beach, but not so much as a look up or a head nod towards me. I was just part of their daily traffic. I walked into the surf with the bike over my head, turned to Joan and dipped the front wheel. Lying the bike carefully on the beach (to avoid getting too much sand in the gears and brakes) I ran back to the surf and dove in. The water was warm! Being a Pacific Ocean person, I didn't expect that. My swim in Santa Monica back on April 1st was more of a dunk and go because the Pacific Ocean water, even in Southern California, was just 57 degrees on April 1st. Here at Cocoa Beach, Florida, on May 23, the ocean temperature is 79 degrees. I had forgotten how warm the Atlantic gets. 

And suddenly, it's over. When you summit a mountain, you are at point where if you lift your foot, there is nowhere higher to put it down on. But, you still have to get down the way you came up, under your own power, while you are fatigued, in degrading snow conditions, with gravity now accelerating your mistakes. At the end of a bike ride, on the other hand, it's just over, wherever you are. The transition from being a cyclist to being a regular tourist with way too much luggage is instant. I just melt into the crowd of everyone else visiting Florida on a holiday weekend. 

Joan and I celebrated quietly with sushi and I started sending texts to family and friends, with the photo of me in the ocean with a bike over my head. "Done!" is what I texted. There's still plenty to accomplish to get everything and us all the way back home, but  that buzz of mental and emotion energy inside my head and heart is quiet.