The Trip

Pictures at the bottom :)

The last leg of my Winter 2024 saga! ... and more temperature shock for me!

My friend Joe and I hatched a plan to cycle the East Coast Greenway (ECG) from it's southern end at Key West, Florida all the way to both of our hometown, Durham. The East Coast Greenway conveniently passes just a few miles from my childhood home, which was certainly part of why the idea occurred to me!
The ECG has a wonderful map tool and warnings, so we relied heavily on it for the majority of our trip, as it made planning specific routes a breeze.
I'd been wanting to try out cycle touring for a while, as overlanding in a car just felt too insulating from the places I pass through, and hitchhiking, while more exciting, is still insulating in a similar way. And walking is right out because that takes way too long!
So, cycle touring it is! I was extremely lucky and my father built me a touring bicycle as a college graduation gift, then I purchased all my bike bags and I was pretty much ready to go!
I would have still done the trip solo, but I knew it would be much more enjoyable to have a buddy, and who better to invite than my High School friend who recently hiked the AT? Joe took little to no convincing to buy a bike and bike bags to join me! He would prove to be an invaluable addition to the trip. Without him I would have undoubtedly been less enthused about getting up and pedaling on even the coldest mornings, and I would have likely ended up eating like a raccoon (Joe had his trip food systems dialed from the AT, thank god).

Anywho, enough with the background and on to the story!

I parted ways with Kim in the Miami airport and made my way out to meet my mother and my friend Joe with our bikes! My mother was generous enough to help us out with logistics and drive all of our bikes and Joe down to Miami, pick me up from the airport, then lug us down to Key West, all while working remotely during the week!
I landed on Monday morning, so we made tracks for the nearest library so she could work, then Joe and I started busily packing up and making sure we had everything we needed to get started pedaling!
My mother also brought us another fantastic advantage: Air BnBs.
While working remotely in the Keys while we pedaled, she was staying in various Air BnBs, so we would all stay together and she would give us a ride to where we would start pedaling every day and pick us up when we were done!
Better yet, we would only bring the gear we needed for the day and dispense with extra clothes and camping gear.
So we had quite the soft start, but it was much welcomed as both Joe and I were basically doing this trip off the couch and we were pedaling North through the Keys, working against an enduring headwind.
Other than the headwind, though, the Keys were a joy to bike through! We often benefitted from dedicated greenways or mellow sidestreets, which made the innumerable windy bridge crossings seem like brief unfortunate interludes.

Before too long, though, we were finally through the keys and on the mainland! We had a real treat of a journey away from the keys as well, as we had a ~10 mile stretch of flat road with a tailwind to speed us along towards Miami.
On this stretch, Joe did have our first run-in with our first occurrence of non-environmental unpleasantness. As he approached a fairly tall bridge, a sports car pulled over not far behind him, then, as he worked his way up the hill with no other cars around, it sped past him revving the engine! They literally went out of their way to be a jerk, which is a pretty impressive level of jerkhood.
On the other hand, we found Florida to be an incredibly welcoming and hospitable state! We made frequent use of Warmshowers, a site much like couchsurfing but marketed towards long distance cyclists! We found so many incredibly sweet hosts who would, more often than not, host us, give us a shower, feed us dinner, give us local information, and generally welcome us into their lives for the evening, and all for free! Several times we even stayed while another cyclist was staying as well. I was continually so impressed by the hospitality shown us by other cyclists on Warmshowers, I'm stoked to have a place of my own to host folks and give back a little!
Anyhow, the combination of my mother hanging around the first week and Warmshowers stays, we stayed super comfortable almost all the way through Florida!
As we moved North, though, it started getting tougher to find places to stay the night with permission. Through Florida we got really lucky with Warmshwers hosts and churches, but the going steadily got tougher and tougher.
Vero Beach, Florida was the first time we were stymied looking for lodging at every turn. There were no Warmshowers hosts available, no churches would answer the phone and the only one we were able to contact wouldn't allow us to stay, a fire station turned us away, and a bike shop employee had no other ideas for us. So we ended up stealth camping tucked next to a fence under a cell tower, cowboy camping on our sleeping pads on cardboard boxes! It wasn't the worst night to be honest, and affirming that we could figure things out if we needed to.
And so we continued up north through Florida, the seemingly never ending state! It was around midway through Florida that we had one of our roughest days of the whole trip. There was an enduring headwind of roughly 25mph, which is absolutely brutal on a bicycle. We'd also committed to doing about 60 miles that day to reach a warmshowers host; no easy feat with the wind robbing us of any momentum whenever we stopped pedaling for even a moment! Nevertheless, we persevered on and on, even into the night before finally arriving about an hour after nightfall! That spaghetti dinner was one of the best of my life.

That warmshowers host was also our last night in Florida! The next day we put away 56 miles and stealth camped a few miles into Georgia in a framed out first floor apartment in an active construction site of about 10 apartment buildings, another memorable camp spot.
This is where the states really started to flash past! Georgia was over before we knew it (I SAW MY FIRST WILD ARMADILLO IN GEORGIA), and we were into South Carolina! South Carolina started off ROUGH. The ECG follows highways 21 and 17 for a good ways there, and for those of you who don't know your South Carolina State Highways by heart, there's little to no shoulder on those things. To add insult to injury, the roads were also in classically bad condition, and all the deteriorating asphalt would get kicked onto the shoulder, creating gravel for us to contend with! Once it got so bad that I pulled over into the grass next to the road because the gravel was so thick I feared I would lose control and fall over. An afternoon and one full day of such treatment convinced us to abandon the ECG route and strike out on our own! This was just as good a place to do it as any, as the ECG traces the coastline all the way to Wilmington, NC before going Northwest again to make it to Durham. Not being extremely interested in a circuitous route, we opted to instead cut a beeling to Durham from our camp north of Beaufort, SC and it instantly proved to be the right call.
With Google Maps at our side, we ditched the ECG and started wandering the South Carolina country roads, which ended up being my favorite riding from the whole trip! SC was flat, had surprisingly good roads (after we left the ECG route highways), had easy stealth camping opportunities. What could possibly be better than all that??
We happily pedaled through SC for a few days, then made our triumphant crossing into North Carolina . . .

To be immediately greeted by headwinds and rougher roads. Tough reception, but we were still stoked to be so close to our goal! The weather in North Carolina proved to be rather unhospitable, but we made it work.
We camped our first night in NC in the back corner of a field and it was tough to get up in the morning from the cold, so we made a beeline for the nearest gas station and chilled out in there until it warmed up, then continued making our way North. We saw on the forecast that the next night would get even colder, and a rough estimate of our mileage showed that the next night would likely be our last, so we opted to splurge a bit and stay in a hotel! The hotel turned out to be hella swanky to those of us accustomed to camping in empty fields and under cell towers, and we relished the hot shower and soft beds.
The next day we got up in good spirits and started making our way home!
My parents met us with about 35 miles to go and my dad hopped on his bike to join us for the final leg, 20 or so miles of which was on the beautiful and beautifully flat Tobacco Trail!
With that victory lap we cruised right up into my parents driveway, completing our 3 week, 1,100 mile trip.

I'm writing this from the outdoor kitchen at Seneca Rocks, where I've been for several weeks now. The climbing season here has begun and I've slowly started picking up more work, but it's started slow. Thank god I came about $800 under budget from my winter travels, so I can float it until things pick up! I've dived in with climbing now that I'm back and I'm hoping to have a 5.11 summer (much like hot girl summer was a thing a while back).
As ever, I have more future adventures swirling around in this noggin' o' mine, but I don't quite have solid plans on what's to come yet. Whatever it is, it's going to be awesome!

Stay tuned for the next adventure!!

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