Day 44 done with the southern tier route from San Diego to St. Augustine

Gainesville to st. Augustine

Figured I’d write this while it was fresh. I plan to go back and write about the rest of the trip too.

Started out from our warm showers place where we stayed in Gainesville. There was a very nice cat there!

Rolled to Taco Bell and had breakfast. Left town on what proved to be some of the best bike lane/ shoulders we’ve had on the trip. After about an hour it started pouring on us. We continued for another hour or two until lightning started to strike really close. At that point we stopped and had some lunch. I asked the worker at the gas station if this was a normal storm and he informed me it was much bigger than normal.

This seemed about right considering the fact that we had mostly headwinds all trip and had several big storms roll through areas we were in. Also was fitting that we started and ended the trip in the rain. We are from Pittsburgh after all.

We started out from the gas station and rolled the last 40 miles to st. Augustine.

We went straight to the beach where the attendant told us beaches were the places where you are most likely to be hit by lightning. We told her we had ridden 80 miles to get there and she just told us to be safe. We rolled up to the beach and left our bikes on the path way to the beach. We took off our shoes and all went into the ocean. It started raining harder once we got in the water. We spent just long enough to get in the water all the way and left.