Ribbon of Highway - Route 1 - Leg 4 2012

Leg 4

Florida

February 2-6, 2012

Thursday, February 2

Back to Boca in February – what a trial! This will be a short leg because so many things are going on that I have to wedge it in so that the BMW will be staged in Ponte Vedra for Leg 5 in March to NOLA. I had originally planned to cut across the peninsula to Sarasota (lovely town - lots of art, beaches, beautiful harbor, great restaurants, Armand Circle and beaches), but that’s 230 miles across and even more up he Gulf Coast and then back across up to Jacksonville, pretty hard riding for an old geezer like me, so I may forego circumnavigating the circumference of the peninsula and just take a leisurely wander up to St. Augustine. It is actually quite liberating to not know exactly where you are going or where you are going to stay. It is a microcosm of what this ride is supposed to be all about. Our lives are too organized, too scheduled out, every detail planned with appointments and reservations. Very efficient but limiting. Spontaneity is all about what is not scheduled. I’m looking forward to not knowing exactly what I’m going to do or where the next few days, just seeing what happens.

Aided and abetted by extremely mild winter weather,

Occupy Wall St.

is still with us. I think it’s a toss up whether we are all more sick of them or the Republican primary debates. I wish the presidential hopefuls would quit taking pot shots at each other and focus on what they intend to do to fix this mess the country is in. O’Bummer isn’t any better, telling us of his latest fairytale about how he is going to fix the housing crisis (again) with a new bail-put program for underwater homeowners. Same old same old, more money form Uncle Sam will make everything better.  Instead of sound bites and debates about open marriage, I wish candidates would give us some real information so we can decide who will be the better leader and which plan we like best – isn’t that what voters are supposed to do?

At least meatier topics are in the news now. The Keystone Pipeline has become a political football, O’Bama catering to the environmentalists who claim that this pipeline running through Kansas and Nebraska will be a disaster (have you ever seen a map of all the pipelines that already criss-cross this country? I have a natural gas pipeline that runs 200 yards form my house!). But I don’t think that’s really the issue. This oil comes from Canadian oil sands. It’s a new source of petroleum. We have huge reserves in oil sands and oil shale that we have not exploited. The environmentalists don’t want to go down the oath of extracting oil form the oil sands or the oil shale. Cutting off that source of carbon based fuel is more important to them than energy independence from the sheiks (they would rather pursue ghettos of mirrors in our deserts and forest of windmills across our mountains, seas and plains), and anything that would bring down the price of gasoline pushes us further form that Holy Grail. Thousands of jobs in the middle of a depression (ooh, dast I say it?)? Sorry guys, green energy is more important than your paycheck. This impasse is symptomatic of what is wrong with our country today: we are roughly split down the middle and can’t agree on much of anything. Rather than finding solutions, politicians on both sides take positions. It doesn’t matter which side of this debate you are on, we have the resources, intelligence and capability to resolve it, but we don’t. There is nothing wrong with this country that isn’t the fault of and could not be cured by 545 people in Washington. That is why our “representatives” have such crappy approval ratings.

Hey, some good news I bet you weren’t aware of! A little known trigger provision in our laws since 1990 automatically cut off the U.S. funding of UNESCO (22% of UNESCO’s budget) when UNESCO voted 107-14 to approve full membership for Palestine! I wonder why we haven’t heard more of this? I also wonder if somebody found a back door way to make up the difference to UNESCO?

Will the Euro collapse and send the world into depression? Will Israel attack Iran to destroy its nuclear weapon capability – a threat that has been both well known and credible for well over a decade and which nobody, not Clinton, not Bush, not O’Bummer, had the foresight, balls and fortitude to address? Will Iran retaliate with a bio-terrorist attack in the US? More importantly, will the Patriots or the Giants win the Superbowl Sunday? And most immediately, where will I sleep tonight?

I stay in the casita of some friends in Boca. They are so generous. They give me my own little house next to their pool. They kept my bike in the garage for a month and a half, picked me up at the airport, even went out to Starbucks at 6 a.m. this morning to get me a Grande and heated up some black cherry pie for breakfast, while I was on a conference call to China. I am so grateful to have friends like this all over the country – really, all over the world. I don’t know how I would pull off this serial Odyssey without warm hearted people like them!

Friday February 3

Got a late start today. Combination of weather, raining a little in the morning, and suddenly a lot of work that needed tending to. Never fails, does it? I spend 80% of my days rattling around an empty office with nobody contacting me about anything, and then day I try to slip away suddenly the roof falls in. I finally get on the road a little after lunch, take the Camino Real to

Ocean Boulevard

, and after a quick stop at the Boca beach, head North to Palm Beach. The rain has been pretty much blown out to sea by a “cold’ front coming through, so its partly sunny and in the 70’s – perfect riding weather.

Today I drove 36 miles up the coast and except for a few hundred yards at Briny Breezes in Gulf Stream, I’ll bet I didn’t pass one residence that cost less than $250,000 – and those were the less expensive condos. (You know you are among the condos without looking past the sidewalks, as they are full of people in their 70’s and 80’s out for their exercise walks. No walking in the malls here, no sir – but the strides are the same!). For the houses, my guess is you start at $500,000 and add zeros.

It just blows me away how much wealth there is in this country, and Palm Beach is the land of he wealthiest. Along this stretch, you start in the out-of-reach neighborhoods, full of Italianate mansions with sweeping staircases, balconies, 30 foot glass windows, and even turrets, many with porticos to drive into bricked courtyards around huge fountains, all screaming “look at me! I’ve made it! I’m rich, aren’t you impressed?” then you ease into the really-rich neighborhoods, where there are so many gated entrances to the grounds that they have to be labeled “Exit Only” and “Service,”  sprinkled among ocean front golf courses all marked “PRIVATE.” Of course, everything is impeccably manicured by dozens of Hispanics all wearing the same blue uniform shirts. Its probably illegal to drive a dirty car in these communities. But then you get into the unimaginably-wealthy neighborhoods where it’s all about concealing the palaces behind the walls. This is the land of the Kennedys, the Flaglers, and the Lauders. You can’t see in, by design. High walls, and smartly trimmed hedges as high as 20 feet, and when there is an entrance, there is likely an ornate landscape feature that you have to drive around. I saw 2 Rolls Royces,  a Bentley, a Bugatti and a Ferrari all inside of 30 minutes. Kind of put my struggle ever whether to spend a few thousand dollars to put some new hard wood floors in our living room into perspective…and reminded me of why I left New England so many years ago. The haves have so much that even when you make it to the one percenters you can still barely see the foothills behind which starts the climb of Alps of to the truly wealthy. At my boarding school a very nice guy across the hall, below average student but very nice guy, got 40 acres and the house of his choice in Litchfield County, Connecticut as his high school graduation present. High school. I got $100. And a week later, I spent that on my first New Haven Railroad monthly commuter ticket into New York for my summer job, while he was on the Grand Tour of Europe. Hey, you can’t blame him for being born into wealth, but I could sure blame myself if I stuck around to rub my nose in it. Besides, we all swim in the same ocean and soak up the same sun, he doesn’t drink any better Scotch than I do, and the girls I dated were better looking and much more fun!

So I’m glad I made that drive, it was beautiful in its own way, but I won’t be hurrying back. And tonight I’m sleeping in a nice little bed and breakfast right across the street from the beach, managed by a very cute gay couple. What could be better than that?

And so to prove the point to myself, for dinner I had a Hendricks martini and stone crab while overlooking the surf. It doesn’t  get any better than that! J

Saturday, February 4

I doubt any of the gazillionaires in Palm Beach woke up to a “continental”
breakfast of toast-your-own bagel, jam and cream cheese in little plastic tubs, a selection of Yoplait, and coffee and orange juice in paper cups. Reality over a cup of java.

Leaving the breathtaking coast line of Palm Beach, I headed West on 98/441 into a different kind of Florida. It did not take long for the mansions to end, and after a brief ride through the-big-mall-area-in every-US-suburb, it gives way to public housing projects. I pass a big and busy Paintball field. Whenever you see paintball businesses, you know you are on land that nobody wants!

A big road sign says West Palm Beach County, Gateway to the Glades. Pretty soon I am doing 75 in the middle of vast sugar cane fields, stretching to the horizon in all directions as far as the eye can see. This is not mid-west farm land. No houses, no gas stations, no trees, no barns, no villages, no country stores at cross roads, no nothing except drainage canals and sugarcane fields and big tractors. I’ve read of this, but the reality is startling. Where are the glades? This is a modern day corporate plantation, one vast agro-engineering project. Whenever you see workers, incongruously they are wearing orange hard hats, OSHA gone stupid again. The black guys are in the ditches and on the tractors, the white guys are in the pick up trucks. The soil is some of the blackest, richest I have ever seen.

Touring by motorcycles is a lot like riding horses for long distances. Its difficult to have a conversation, people ask me what do you do? You are mostly alone with your thoughts while very much in your environment, breathing sweet flower smells when you cross a slough or the distinctive smell of cane burning with an intensity you can’t have in a car, feeling the rain drops if it starts to sprinkle, buffeted by gusts of wind, and of course no “climate controlled” temperature. It is not an activity to escape from yourself. For hours at a time, you think about where you are going, where you have been, what you have done, what’s going on around you, what you wish to do. You have time to turn things over and look from different perspectives, and to work out a lot of thorny problems. You may ride your motorcycle away from something or to some excitement, but in between you learn a lot about yourself. If you are afraid of introspection, don’t ride!

Finally a building. A big sign says

Sugar House Road

, and steam is rising from the huge corrugated steel sugar mill. And large institutional building at a crossroad, which turn out to be state buildings. One says medical center but the look like prison compounds. There are large shed that look like field equipment repair facilities, and then a small neighborhood of single story concrete houses painted pink. I turn North on 441 toward Lake Okeechobee. I’ve always wanted to see this huge lake, sitting in the middle of the amps of Florida surrounded by the Everglades.

I am soon disappointed. I pull into Pahokee, according to the map on the shores of Lake Okeechobee. The first thing I see is a group of idle young black men clustered around a dusty building that says Discount Liquor. (I wonder, have you ever seen a liquor store that says Expensive Liquor?). A sign proudly says Pahokee is the home of Ricky Jackson, Hall of Famer – sorry, don’t recognize him. A strapping young black man with chiseled shoulders is walking along the shoulder of the road, and the first thing that springs to mind is “field hand.” Run down trailer homes are interspersed with Pahokee Housing Authority concrete public housing and old tumbledown wooden shotgun houses on stilts. Pickups out number cars 6 to 1. Old black women in dumpy non-descript dresses push old grocery carts down the sidewalks accompanied by young teenage girls in skin tight shorts, the past walking next to the future and it all looks the same. I also see a mixed couple, black man and white woman, proof that despite the poverty this is still the equal opportunity New South. Downtown, more groups of black men drinking beer and from sacks in empty lots next to empty buildings, only these guys are old. It’s easy to tell the white part of town, but it isn’t Palm Beach, either. The nicest building in Pahokee is the sheriff’s office. If you’ve come to Pahokee, you’ve pretty much come to the end of the line.

Palm Beach, Pahokee. The contrast is too stark. It’s wrong. If I had to live in Pahokee, I’d be a Democrat, too.

I drive along

Lake Okeechobee Road

, and

Lake Shore Drive

, and don’t see the lake. In fact, I drive on 441/98 all the way to Okeechobee and never see the lake except once. The lake is behind a fifty mile long, fifty foot high dike, with limited access allowed every ten or 20 miles. On the West side of the road, dike. On the East side of the road, a small strip of what I imagine used to be the landscape, with an occasional home on stilts that has seen better days, with those drained farm fields stretching behind them. The only place I see the lake is on top of a big overpass crossing a flood control channel, where you can see over the dike to a gigantic bathtub of water. Everything about it says “impoundment.” Thank you, Army Corps of Engineers. The lake is like the Great Lakes in that it is so big you can’t see the other side. No islands, no primitive waters blending into channels though marshes and hammocks choked with fronds and palm trees and everglades at an ill defined shoreline. Just a bath tub with a dusty rocky rim. The “

Lake Okeechobee Scenic Route

” is a bad joke.

Even more pathetic is the rim of water that surrounds the dike at its base. There is maybe 200 yards between Route 441 and the dike, and in this stretch a channel maybe 50 feet wide, with boat lunches at every access point to the dike. The first time I saw a For Sale, Waterfront sign, I laughed out loud. Then I saw enough of them to realize they were serious! Houses back up to it, and pretty soon I am in RV Park Heaven. What’s even more surprising, the crummy little parks are full! Why? What’s here worth a vacation? The bass fishing must be very good. I suppose if the only comparison is Pahokee, this could pass as Palm Beach. And right in the midst of all this, I pass a sign that says “Polo Event Today”, and gates that direct in spectators with another for trailers to some polo field off behind some trees far from the highway. I’m clearly missing something. Go figure.

I cut North at Okeechobee. It’s the first real town I have been through since West Palm Beach, unless you count Pahokee. Chain stores, gas stations, a Holiday Inn, and family restaurants with all you can eat buffets for $8. Lots of Indians, which isn’t surprising as there is a reservation just to the West. From Okeechobee North, the landscape changes. This is horse and cattle country, real eastern cowboy country. I pass one ranch that advertises “Cattle, Citrus and Catfish.” Ranch after ranch with flat spreading pastures dotted with Angus and Herefords, and the local high school mascot is the Brahman. I would think I was in Kansas except for the palm trees. The ride becomes quite beautiful, with those palm trees gradually giving way to live oaks draped in Spanish Moss, and then more and more of the Southern Pines. I have an up close and personal encounter with a big and gorgeous bald eagle that flies up not ten feet next to me when I disturb its feast on some road kill. Close up look at its big hooked yellow beak, white head and black and white wings and body, simply awesome! Later I pass an intersection that seems to be in the middle of nowhere, but there’s a pickup parked there with two little girls sitting behind tables, while two men in cowboy hats, probably their fathers lean against the pick up truck and chew the fat. The back of the pick up is full of boxes, and a big hand lettered sign says “Girl Scout Cookies.” I should have taken a picture!

Where 441 heads West to Tampa, I cut back over to the Coast, and winding up SR 490 and SR520 to I90. Very pretty. A few miles on the Interstate to Titusville, then over to the Martin Island Wildlife Refuge North of Cape Canaveral. This is worth the detour. Finally a barrier island that is not all high rises and fast food joints. The road is a pretty  park way though what I imagine what the Florida Coast would be like in the wild. It compensates a little for the

Lake Okeechobee Scenic Route

, although it is a little disconcerting to see all the Waterfowl Hunter Access signs in a wildlife refuge....

I accidentally explore new Smyrna Beach until I figure out you can’t get to Daytona Beach from there without a boat! There is a little thing called Rose Bay and Spruce Creek in between. So with an interesting little detour, I again across the intra-coastal on the Silver Beach Bride to “The Most Famous Beach in the World”, Daytona Beach. I’ve been by it many times, but never stayed here, so I say what the h and go right to the heart of it, Main Street, the Pier and the civic auditorium and get a room at The Hilton, with a room on the 9^th floor overlooking the beach. You can open the doors and listen to the surf, and the Slingshot is right outside my window. Two people sit in a cage and are slung about 150 feet straight up into the air between two steel towers, and then free-fall back toward earth, head over heels, bouncing up again and over on two big bungee cords amidst lots of screaming and laughing. Very cool.

The beach lives upThe beach lives up to its hype. Great rolling breakers, wide smooth hard packed sand. I wander up and down it with some Gentleman Jack on ice in a paper cup, and am quite content to take it all in while getting bleary. Several groups of Chinese (!) tourists laughing and making one legged poses in the water for their friends to take photographs the way only the Chinese do, one girl sitting down in the waves fully clothed. Why don’t they just wear bathing suits like everybody else? The hotel is overrun with girls volleyball teams who must be in town for some kind of tournament, so of course there is a shortage of beach towels and the hot tubs are choked rim-to-rim with 15 year olds. But it’s all fun. Maybe I’ll come back during bike week some year, totally different crowd and totally different kind of fun! Dinner of spiced boiled shrimp and fried fish at a local institution called the Ocean Deck – wonderful! - and then to bed early after a great day’s ride!

Sign of the Day? Has to be a toss up. “West Palm Beach County, Gateway to the Glades”, “

Lake Okeechobee Scenic Route

”, or “Waterfront Property For Sale.” Sad.

Sunday, February 5, 2012

On a whim, left Daytona Beach to the tunes of Celtic music, bagpipes and fiddles, driving North to Ormond Beach and then East on 40. I debated whether to go up the coast on AIA, which is a pretty ride, but been there, done that so I decided on the inland route.

I come to a stoplight by a small cemetery with an old archway that reads Pilgrims Rest. Right by the road is an old tomb with FATHER in big block letters, and a small Confederate battle flag. I notice three or four rounded brick tombs rising from the dirt a little further back, also with the Confederate battle flags, and then I quickly survey the rest of the cemetery. I can see several more graves with the memorial flags. This must have been an astoundingly high percentage of the able-bodied white male population of Ormond Beach back in 1865. Still being remembered.

After the now-familiar Florida pattern of expensive waterfront, decaying but renovating old city on the mainland side of the intracoastal, followed by subdivisions and large shopping centers, the I-95 corridor, and then newer subdivisions on the far side, 40 quickly gives way to piney woods and horse farms. This is real horse country, with ranchettes, equestrian centers, and cross roads named Pinto, Appaloosa and Rodeo. The ranches phase out, and I am soon riding through a pine forest. The temperature is in the low seventies and the aroma of pine needles is strong. HOG radio 95.7 is blasting Bon Jovi, Rock and Roll Fantasy, Bad Company, Bob Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band, A Long Way, Detroit Wheels, Santana, the Grateful Dead.  Couldn’t resist, gotta swerve the bike back and forth a little bit while listening to the music, head bobbing to the beat! Life is good.

Lots of other bikers are out this early Sunday morning. Most of them are older guys, some of the more hippie types sporting big white beards. Maybe its because the motorcycle romance of the freedom of the open road created by Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen and Captain America in Easy Rider has not translated to the post 60’s generations. Maybe it’s because only the older guys have the money to buy these big road bikes and the free time to get out on the road. There are more and more women riders, too, and fewer and fewer look butchy. That’s great for them, but I’d much rather have my “lady” behind me, thighs on each side of mine where I can reach out and stroke them and squeeze a knee, or lean back and feel her chest pressed against me, maybe even get a back scratch or a neck rub. J That’s two-up riding!

I am now clearly in English Florida. Rivers named Halifax and St. John’s, lakes named George. Pulling into Barberville, I have to stop and take a photo of an old house converted into a store that features the largest collection of cast bronze garden statuary that I have ever seen, anywhere. Elephants, moose, Indians, children in donkey carts, acres of the stuff. How does a store like that make it in Barberville?

And past Barberville, a warning sign – bear crossing. Cool!

I pass up turning North on Route 17 that cuts between Lake George and Crescent Lake in favor of Route 19. hey are both marked as Florida Scenic Highways, but 19 seems to skirt up the West shore of Lake George. I’m hoping to catch views of the water turn.

NOT. Never even a glimpse of the lake from the highway! But I do turn into a public recreation area at Silver Springs. What jewel! Hardly anybody there. I had heard often a bout canoeing to beautiful cold freshwater springs that bubble up in the Florida forests, but I have never done that or seen one. This was fantastic. Much larger than I expected, you could see the billows of freshwater rippling the surface as the water continuously rises through four feet of crystal clear water. The photographs do not do the colors of the water justice. You can see the fish like they are in aquarium, and you can wade right in and swim with them. Some kind of merganser or duck suddenly surfaced. What a great place to spend and afternoon picnic with friends.

While there, I meet some fellow bikers from Canada, a couple from New Brunswick to be exact. They have hauled their big Honda down in a toy hauler, then they ride around in big looping runs. He is jealous of the BMW, says he love his Honda but always wanted a Beemer. We swap stories about where we have been and where we are going. They are doing something very similar to me, traveling the United States before they get too old and decrepit to no longer be able to do it. They spend 2 months at a time, then drive their truck and trailer back up to winter. Last year they did Texas, this year Florida. They gave me some tips about good and not so interesting places to ride in Nova Scotia, and were terribly enthusiastic about the ride around the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec, felt it was even better than the Cabot Trail around Cape Breton Highlands at the top of Nova Scotia. I resolved to add it to my itinerary. Nice people. We wished each other well and went our separate ways.

Despite never seeing Lake George, Route 19 is a very pretty drive. I pass a fair grounds advertising bull riding and barrel racing, Saturday night, Shoot, I just missed it – that I would have gone to!  Definitely big ranch and cowboy country.

I cut back over to the coast and St. Augustine at Palatka. As I enter the oldest town in the United States, I pass the Showboat carwash. This is real Americana. Nowhere else but the lazy car-crazy culture of American do you have a car wash made to like a floating palace! Think about it, to wash you car all you need is a bucket of soapy water, a rag or sponge and a garden hose. Doing it in the driveway at home on a hot Sunday afternoon is fun! Instead, we pay $5 to drive some mechanical monster that does a lousy job but in twice the time – and this mechanical monster is made to look like a Mississippi Riverboat sternwheeler. I recall having seen a Whale of a Wash someplace where  you could pretend to be Jonah as you drove your car into a gigantic whale. Drive-ins that look like hamburgers. Heck, the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile. This is America! I resolve right then and there to begin taking photos of all these icons of the fading American car culture. Drive-ins and car washes! My motorcycle odyssey now has a new mission!

I stay at the Bay Front Hilton, right on the Mantanzas River across the street from the Lions Bridge. This is one of my favorite Hiltons anywhere. Its architecture blends right in with the old buildings on either side but inside of course it’s all the up to date modern amenities. The last time I stayed here Coachmen, ironically also on a Super Bowl weekend – ancient history, now!

I walk a block to the Acapulco Mexican restaurant right across the street from the old Spanish Fort where Geronimo was imprisoned. I get a table outside on the second floor balcony overlooking the fort and the bay. Acapulco has the best freshly made guacamole anywhere. That and a couple of beers are lunch. What next to do in this city? Stroll the streets and poke around curio shops and art galleries? Done the Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum and even the Alligator Farm with the albino alligator! Know the neighborhoods and the campus of Flagler College, I found something I had yet to do – Villa Zorayda. Greta choice. A wealthy aristocrat from Boston with decided to build his summer home in St. Augustine in the early 1900’s, and he constructed a 1/10 scale replica of the Moorish Alhambra Palace in Granada Spain. It was the structure of that architectural style built in St. Augustine and it led to the building of Casa Monica and all the luxury hotels and building in the same style, giving the city the character that it has today. Villa Zorayda is really fascinating. It has been a private home, a private club, a speakeasy, a casino and now, a museum filled with priceless antiquities, including the Scared Cat Rug – 2,400 years old, 4 feet long and woven entirely of Egyptian cat fur from the Nile. A several hundred year old 3-D carving of Columbus. All kinds of weird and wonderful stuff, and the house is cool all by itself!

Cajun dinner of gumbo, blackened red fish, red beans and rice listening to live acoustic guitar at Harry’s, then watch a little of the Giants beating the Patriots.

Sign of the Day, on a church outside of Ormond Beach:  “A dusty Bible leads to a dirty life.” Well, there you have it.

Monday February 6

Over breakfast, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal, “No Need to Panic about Global Warming.” I’ve read a lot of books about global warming in the last few years. I believe in climate change -  hey, we had woolly mammoths before wine grapes were grown in England and Greenland wasn’t called green because it was covered with ice - I am just very skeptical that we as humans have a lot of causative effect, i.e., blame. I am suspicious of the science behind “carbon footprints.” Sounds like a modern day Bogeyman to me, a justification to force people to do things they otherwise would not do. And then here is this article, signed by 16 scientists of really impressive pedigrees saying “Enough!, we will no longer be intimidated into silence – the world is NOT flat!” A Nobel Prize winning physicist, apparently a supporter of O’Bama in the last election, recently resigned from the American Physical Society “because I cannot live with the [APS] policy statement: The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring…We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.” The article cites the “inconvenient facts” that there has been no global warming for the last decade and much smaller than computer model predicted warming over the last 22 years. They go on to detail scientists who have been treated as heretics and viciously attacked for the heresy of questioning global warming dogma. Interesting. Sounds like the history of another religion… Oh, well, it’s been in the mid to high 70’s and great riding weather in North Florida in February. Who am I to complain? God grant me the wisdom not to worry about things I can do nothing about…

Just a skip up the road this morning to Ponte Vedra on AIA, across the bridge to Vilano Beach and then up the coast through Guana River State Park. As many times as I have done this ride, I always look forward to doing it again – it is one my favorite stretches of roads anywhere in the U.S. of A.

550 miles. Short and sweet. I park the bike again in a friend’s garage, and after coffee and pleasantries, head for the airport.