Florida Tour: Day -1

7:00 AM is when this story begins and a long day that it will end up being. Kady and I after a long and restful night of sleep being loading my 2 door Honda Civic with 4 touring bikes, 12 full size panniers, sleeping bags, bike parts. . . everything you would need to tour with, and maybe some extra! By 7:30 we are wrapping up the loading, at 7:45 we are on the road. FLORIDA/WARM WEATHER BOUND!

To make a long story short, around 6 PM we meet up with Joey & Josh somewhere around 100 miles south of Atlanta, GA. Josh is Joey’s good friend who has been studying abroad in New Zealand. Joey has spent the last week with Josh in Miami, Josh’s home town. We all talk and scarf down a quick meal at a Sub-Par Subway, and are soon bidding good-byes. Back to the road we go with an even more packed car.

A few hours later, we are so close we can smell it, but must pick up one more passenger! Jessi! He flew into the Tallahassee Regional Airport from Charleston, SC where he had been spending time with his parents. As we pull up to the huge terminal that is the TRA, Jessi is walking out with a huge duffle, lord knows how we’re going to make this work. After a quick adjustment, my gear is strapped to the roof alongside of the two Long Haul Truckers, and we’re again on our way to camping. This is when it gets very interesting. . .

I had spent some time researching the Appalachicola National Forest. Here are the facts: we can camp anywhere in the forest that isn’t private land, hardly any of the forest is private land, we were going to camp the first place we could find. The first place we could find ended up being. . . PRIVATE LAND, according to the gentleman who politely came over and tell us with his thick southern accent, cigarrette in hand, after we had set up our tents and half-way unloaded the car. He gave us some directions to the actual “campground” and we were loaded and on our way.

Several miles later we were again, lost, unsure what to do but had stumbled upon a paved bike path that conveniently ran through the middle of no where. We stopped, looked at the map, and found that no camping sites were listed. Next option, call the sheriff. He politely told us where to go which happened to be close to where we just were, so we just off on yet another leg of this adventure.

After what seemed to be hours of driving down an almost abandoned sand paved back road, a campground appears out of no where. Albeit a campground, it was not the usual “campground.” People here were shacked up and ready for hunting. Mobile homes were brought in what seemed to be permanently, many trailers with no owners to be seen, and the gooseneck that had a plywood house built on top of it. A few trailers were accompanied by a host among a slew of dogs, dog cages, toyota pickups (of course with dog cages in the beds of the trucks), and of course the inevitably loud and annoying generator.

At this point we were “taking what we could get.” It had been a day of 15 hours of driving over 1000 miles to get to this point as well as approaching one in the morning. We gladly jump out of the cramped car, throw our tents up, and sleep in the ten degree frost laden Florida Land.