Day 48 Recap - Money, Opulence, and Contrast on the Gold Coast
Yesterday’s ride was tough. Today’s was tougher. It was hotter, the wind in my face was up to 20 mph, I rode five more miles than yesterday, and I endured an early rainstorm (albeit a brief one) that kept my socks soggy for the rest of the day. Honestly, I did not enjoy cycling today, except for a few times when the wind died down or was shielded and I remembered how much I really like being out there on my own power. But even when it sucks, it’s still an accomplishment. I’m up to 2,100 miles and am three days from Key West. This odyssey will soon come to a close, but it seems that Mother Nature is throwing a few extra tests my way before I get to raise my bike over the Southernmost Point.
One important thing that I did today was drink a lot of water. I planned four stops for food and water, and I drank a total of 5 liters from my water bottles and more when you count what I drank the restaurants I ate at for breakfast and lunch. As a result, I actually feel pretty good this evening. So, remember: Stay hydrated, kids!
I tried to take a photo that showed how windy it was. This is about the closest I came. It was the kind of constant wind that immediately knocks down any decent cycling effort. I spent a substantial portion of the day in third gear, two or three gears lower than my normal cruising gear.
Here’s a picture of the rainstorm coming at me as I crossed the St. Lucie River. Luckily, the storm only lasted about 10 minutes.
For about five miles, the road paralleled the railroad tracks that form the main North-South line up and down the Florida coast. This same line was behind our motel last night. Personally, I like the sound of trains, so it didn’t bother me, but it is definitely a “feature” that was not mentioned on the motel website!
After a pancake breakfast at Harry and the Natives, I turned toward the Gold Coast, and it was really quite gilded. Jupiter Island was the first town I went through. Unlike Ponte Vedra, where the owners of the huge homes like to show off their ostentatious houses by putting them right up against the street, the residents of Jupiter Island hide their palatial estates behind privacy hedges. You could sometimes catch a glimpse of the hugeness if you looked down a driveway or in between some bushes, but overall, I felt like these folks were confident in their wealth and valued their privacy more.
At the end of Jupiter Island, I had to cross two waterways to get to the next island. They both had drawbridges. The first was open to let a barge through, so I waited with the rest of traffic on that one to cross the Indian River.
By the time I got to the next river crossing (the Loxahatchee River), the same barge had made it’s way around and I had to wait for it again! The barge is circled in the photo below.
That brought me into Singer Island, which had many tall resorts and apartment/condo buildings. You can see them arrayed along the coast from this photo, taken while crossing the Lake Worth Lagoon.
At this point, I thought I was pretty “fancy-housed” out. But then I got to Palm Beach, which outfancied any fancy I’d seen before. I mean it was ridiculous. I suppose the land here is super expensive, and if you’re going to buy super expensive land, you need to put something like this on it:
And that wasn’t even the most opulent house I saw! There were whole compounds sequestered behind ornate gates.
What I found particularly interesting about the Palm Beach ecosystem is the comparison to West Palm Beach, the community on the other side of the Indian River, where I guess many of the service industry people actually live. Their “main drag” looked like this:
While the Palm Beach main street looked more like this:
I ate lunch in this area at a place called Surfside Diner. Except for a center island-bar, it really didn’t have much of a diner feel. It was filled with aging men, over plasticized aging women, and their pretty, youthful progeny (or people attempting to sell them real estate). Across the street from the diner, there was a shop called Aristokids.
And the onslaught continued as I proceeded down the coast through the other Gold Coast communities. If I wasn’t cycling (against the wind!) by individual mansions of every architectural style or posh members-only yacht clubs, I was in the shadow of mega-resort complexes or condo buildings like these in Boca Raton.
I think it’ll only be more of the same on tomorrow’s trip from here in Richmond Beach (where we are staying at a tiny, privately-owned motel, thank you very much) to Miami Beach.
http://ridewithgps.com/routes/10565965
Mercifully, I built in a relatively short day (less than 50 miles), so I can rest up before hitting the Keys on Friday.
