The longest day ever.

7.13.07

The longest day ever.

A1A is a quirky road by the sea and near Daytona and Cape Canaveral it has some places where it just stops and doesn’t go through along the coast. You find yourself facing a sign that says road dead ends in 7 miles and there is no access to the mainland.
Now for real estate value that is where I want to live. For touring down the coast this was a nightmare. I managed to avoid any big waste of time and miles but HYW 1 is a poor substitute for riding next to the water where it is at least 3 degrees cooler. The heat was fierce welcome home to Florida in July. I always tell everyone it isn’t to bad here in the summer you can cool off at the beach with a jump in the water or you are usually inside somewhere in the AC. Not today, today A1A was just brutal on my body. The NOAA weather band said it was 98 with a heat index of 110. There were several rainstorms that I was able to ride through and I enjoyed the few minutes of getting soaked and a little cooler. The last one when I was on I-95 at 70 mph was a little bit scary wondering if I would hit a puddle and hydroplane or not. The cool of the storm was so good to my overheated body. I don’t think I ate the right lunch seafood, and I don’t think I really did enough hydration. In fact I had a power-aid and a couple of red bulls. The last hours on the bike before I arrived in West Palm beach were just pain my butt ached, my head hurt, my stomach felt lousy, every bump was just beating my kidneys to death. I think the hardest part of the day was the route, A1A has just a million stop lights and after riding for 5 hours I had come only about 100 miles. I was averaging less than 30 mph and all that stop and go shifting and holding the bike at the stops was really hard on me. Now I have stayed away from too much whining about how the conditions are but for the riders out there it is something they may want to consider.

About Vero Beach I was just cooked even though home was a potential 4-5 hours away it seemed way to far. I called up my friend in Christ who lives close to West Palm Beach to see if I could crash at her pad. It turned out Rebecca was house sitting at a beautiful home inland so I made it there and my was it a special place. Rebecca’s friends from church had invited her to live here for a while in the guesthouse next to the horse paddock and coral. This home is on a large acreage so the horses have plenty of room, and the pool was perfect after a long ride. Florida pools are not cool they warm up in the sun and run in the 80’s but it was soothing and getting out the breeze was cooling.

Rebecca works with Shepard care a Non-profit organization that helps with crisis pregnancy. In a nutshell it is an adoption agency but they are sponsored by the church so that there can be less abortion in the world.

After I was reconstituted we went into Palm Beach for Sushi, it was so good!
Rebecca however was on the phone the whole time brokering a deal between a birth mom, a family, and the adoption agency about an adoption they had been working on that had fallen through and then here at 11 pm on a Friday night the birth mom changed her mind and wanted to go through with it. This lead to a lot of calls back and forth between about 5 parties and Rebecca god bless her puts her whole heart into these things.
Between bites of sushi she was able to pull it all together by midnight. She was off to resign the papers by 9am at the office. The Non-profit world needs people like Rebecca that want to see the world a better place and are willing to put in long hours of selfless devotion to the cause with not to much in the way of compensation in this lifetime.
I am sure here reward will be in heaven.

Here is a picture of the pool house and the corral behind it.