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a long bike ride on marginal bikes
Friday, February 28 2025
location: room 107, St. Pete Beach Suites, St. Pete Beach, Pinellas County, Florida
First thing this morning, Gretchen set out on her own to explore the nearby beach. She kept sending me video clips from her phone of things she was seeing, including pelicans, cormorants, a black-headed gull, and various manifestations of the archetypal Florida Man. One such man was walking in a hurry with a noticeable limp and no shirt. Another was prospecting for treasure on the beach using a metal detector.
I made a couple cups of coffee with the coffee maker before realizing I needed to add shims of some sort beneath the coffee pot so it would be tall enough to engage the drain allowing coffee to flow into it. I made these shims using bits of thin gravel stones from the landscaping outside the door. When Gretchen returned to our room, she had an orange she'd found floating in the gulf and wondered if we should worry about eating it. It seemed perfectly good, so we each had half of it. It had picked up a detectable amount of salt from the sea water, which wasn't a bad thing.
Eventually Gretchen and I set out in search of something for breakfast, knowing there weren't many options for vegans in St. Pete's Beach. First we went into a big rambling bodega where some sad looking older gentleman was parked at a video slot machine gambling away his pension. Gretchen bought some pistachios that didn't turn out to be very good. After that we wandered to some Italian deli called La Casa Del Pane, and I waited outside (since I was barefoot; I didn't want to wear shoes in this climate and hadn't brought flip flops) while Gretchen found things for us to eat: a quart of frozen minestrone soup, a focaccia, and a loaf of very good multigrain bread.
Walking on the streets of St. Pete Beach, I couldn't help but noticed all the signs talking about legal and grey-market drugs such as marijuana (or CBD) and kratom. One place selling cannabis claimed that one didn't need a "card" to buy it there. Since Florida is state with only medical marijuana, this implied that either enforcement of the provisions related to medical marijuana are extremely lax or that the cannabis shop has a doctor on staff to write prescriptions for anyone coming through the door.
After that, we borrowed a beach umbrella and two beach chairs from our hotel and set up on the beach overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. Our janky umbrella didn't fit inside the screw-into-the-sand base we'd brought, so I improvised a fit by wedging in bits of shell and gummy stems of seaweed. It was difficult for both of us to fit in the shade of our umbrella, so parts of us were sticking out in the sun. I'd occasionally play Spelling Bee or read articles on my phone, but the glare from the sand and the surf made this difficult. So I'd end up watching the birds. A pair of osprey showed up and flew slowly over the water looking down for fish. For such a beautiful day, there were surprisingly few humans on the beach.
We were there doing the sitting-on-the-beach thing for awhile before going for a stroll southward along the shoreline, occasionally letting the gulf water lap across our feet. It was too cold for swimming in (though a few people were out in the water), but a little on our feet felt nice. Along the way, we passed clusters of gulls and terns resting on the sand, the ones with their heads not tucked into their wings facing into the wind. There were at least two species of gull present, one being that smaller black-headed species I'd been seeing that I later learned was the laughing gull. Some of the laughing gulls had black heads flecked with grey, and we assumed they were older gulls.
The hotel where we were staying had two pools and other fun amenities like one-speed bicycles we could borrow. We reserved a couple of those for a plan later today to ride them seven miles across the Pinellas peninsula into St. Petersburg proper. But first we spent a few hours lounging near the pool. The water in the pool was considerably warmer than the gulf, so Gretchen was able to do some swimming. Temperatures at the time were in the low 70s Fahrenheit.
When the time came to do our big bike ride, we first had to swap one of the bikes with a different one, as it turned out to have a flat tire. The bikes (they were Huffys with bombproof Ashtabula cranks) had paniers, baskets, and even a slot to put a cellphone, but they were otherwise very basic. They were also heavy. But I thought they'd be okay for the flat terrain of coastal Florida. We followed a course Gretchen had mapped-out beforehand that took advantage of a long stretch of former railway turned into a path for bikes & pedestrians, the Pinellas Trail. (Though most of the other people using it appeared to be riding electrified scooters or eBikes.) It gave us a good view of the backyards of suburban Pinellas County, with its trailer parks, extensive murals (though not much actual graffiti), and flood-management structures. Occasionally we'd see buildings that hadn't been fully repaired after the twin hurricanes of 2024.
The only "hills" on the entire route were place where the roadway we were on had to rise up to cross either a body of water (such as on the Corey Causeway) or a major highway (such as US 19). I was finding the bike riding almost effortless and, if it weren't for what it was doing to my ass, could've ridden like that all day. Gretchen, on the other hand, was not loving the experience. Of course she's smaller and less muscular than me and was having to power a bike that was the same size as the one I was riding, so it made sense that it would be more difficult for her. But by the end, she was thinking up ways to maybe leave the bikes locked up somewhere and taking a Lyft back to the beach.
At the end of our seven mile bike ride, our destination was Good Intentions, St. Petersburg's only vegan restaurant not specializing in an Asian cuisine. We arrived at about 5:00pm, which is either lupper or the senior citizen early-bird-special hour. Our waitress had a disarmingly fun affect, and we had a good meal. We started with tempeh "wings" and then I had very good burger with fries, while Gretchen had two different salads. The first was a wedge salad, which she thought was amazing, followed by a Greek salad with what she found to be a discordant sweet note in the pickled beets. I drank a locally-brewed hazy IPA called Green Bench Turbid #7 that might've been the best IPA I've ever had, so I went on to drink a second one.
By the end of the meal, we'd figured out that there was no easy way to abandon our bikes, so we tried to begin our ride back to the beach so that we'd get there before dark, since our bikes lacked lights and Florida drivers seemed less willing than New York drivers to share the road with wussy people who had chosen decidedly gay transportation options. First, though, Gretchen wanted to get some baked goods at a vegan bakery called Valhalla. When we got there, they'd been pretty much cleared out of all the good stuff, and there were no savory options of any sort. So we ended up getting some sweet baked goods that all later proved disappointing.
We managed to make it back to St Pete Beach Suites a little after sunset, while there was still a fair amount of light in the sky. We were helped somewhat by both the latitude and the longitude, which conspired to push sunset to 6:30pm, far after what it is at this time of year back in Hurley.
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The Dolphin Pool at St. Pete Beach Suites. Click to enlarge.
Me at the poolside this morning. Click to enlarge.
An older laughing gull on the beach today. Click to enlarge.
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