Tag: Florida Keys

Day 7: 53 miles from Marathon to Key West

This marks the end of the Week a Year rides along the East Coast Greenway.

Done!

We have made it to Key West and the end of the 3,000-mile East Coast Greenway. It’s an especially happy moment for those who have now ridden the entire route, with its ups and downs (I’m envious; I still need to ride from Providence to New York). It’s also a sad moment because the end of the annual Week A Year rides means we won’t have an obvious reason to gather every year. Hopefully some of us will still ride together.

So, yes, we ended at the oversized buoy marking the southernmost point in the U.S. There’s a line of people all waiting to get their photo taken there, so it feels, well, like a tourist trap. Far cooler, I thought, and more suitable for us was the multi-colored arch of bike wheels the city of Key West created for us in a park a couple of blocks away.

We weren’t the only ones loving it. City officials said non-cyclists were taking photos there all day. It will get even more attention on Saturday, when the two-day, 165-mile Miami-to-Key-West Smart Ride wraps up, and I hope city officials then give it a permanent spot.

Actually, it’s a cool idea to borrow for the East Coast Greenway’s NYC-PHL ride next year.

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Day 5: 74 miles from Miami Beach to Key Largo

Sometimes Florida surprises cyclists, and I mean that in a good way.

Sometimes Florida surprises you, and I mean that in a good way.

Today we had lots of trail. Not in the wooded, shady way but in the separated from three lanes of crazy traffic on U.S. 1 kind of way. First, though, we had to get out of Miami Beach and into Miami. We had more of that lovely beachfront trail in Miami Beach — the Atlantic Greenway — down to the tip of Miami Beach, past some of the amazing Art Deco buildings and then back north to the MacArthur Causeway Bridge.

Then came the bike lane on the bridge next to rush-hour traffic. All you can do is ride in a group and keep hoping that Florida traffic engineers actually get on a bike one day and think about ways to make this better.

Continue reading “Day 5: 74 miles from Miami Beach to Key Largo”