Incredible Adventures Have A Process

Have you ever been in that situation where you and your friends or family are talking about some seemingly impossible trek, journey, or trip that you would love to do one day? The problem for too many is that "one day" never actually comes. I want to prove to you that there is a way to pull the trigger on those crazy ideas, and that the process to making it happen is easier than you might think. I can't promise that you will have as much fun reading these posts as I had living it, but I can promise that you may have the urge to go on an adventure of your own after you're done.

The Idea 💡

Over the past week, Ryan (@bananaskin) and I went on a pretty incredible adventure along the Gulf Coast of Florida on our road bikes. The trip came about like any other adventure: we started talking about all the places we thought we could ride to and back within a four day period, and spitballing all the cool things we could do there. At first, we talked about riding to Key West, but the road traffic this time of year is pretty life threatening. We decided instead to ride to the #1 Beach in the United States: Siesta Key, FL!

Screenshot from weather.com

The Preparation

For Floridians, it's not common to own warm weather clothing (unless you're a snowbird). This fact always makes camping difficult for us natives during the winter months. It meant that our bike packs were going to be pretty heavy with all the extra clothing needed to compensate for not having good cold weather gear.

Aside from the clothing issue, we needed to figure out a good contiguous bike route. Fortunately for us, Strava is a thing. We picked a route fairly quickly with the help of its "My Routes" feature. After a few final augmentations, we imported the route to Google Maps and added all the necessary stops (famous/not-so-famous restaurants, bars, and interesting places).

Once our packs were sufficiently full, we found a way to make them fuller by adding many non-essential (or essential depending on who you're asking) items such as prepackaged energy gels and chews, extra camera lenses, extra camera, bathing suit (might be warm enough to swim), flip-flops, batteries and batteries for the batteries, extra tubes, extra lights, toilet paper (never know), hand sanitizer, and sunscreen. My bike easily weighted over 31 kg.

Since this was the first time that I'd ever done any kind of bike packing, we made a point to test out our fully packed "rigs" on what seemed like the coldest day of the year. It was freezing, it was tough getting used to the dynamics of the loaded bicycle, but it was exciting to try everything out before our epic adventure.

The Execution

On Tuesday, December 26, 2017, Ryan arrived at my house in Fort Myers, FL, at 6:00 AM with his fully loaded bike in the back of his truck. After he unloaded his bike and we topped off our tires with air, we took all the necessary instagram/snapchat photos. By the time we were done lollygagging in the 50 degree (F) weather, it was 7:00 AM. We finally started for Siesta Key!

The Story

The stories and shenanigans of our awesome adventure are too much for one single posting (just feels like too much), so I will be splitting the stories from the four days of the trip into four additional posts. Stay tuned to hear about our encounters with Redneck Jesus, having a brain hemorrhage (it's a drink) with Cole at Munchies 420 Cafe, and napping on the beach after several frozen beverages at the Daiquiri Deck...

See some of the tour highlights here: Instagram, Strava

Be sure to follow Ryan on Steemit!

Scott Kelly
@adventureforme