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Bike Camping Adventure
Life doesn’t happen on the couch
Mary Shanklin
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Our breath steamed and our headlights refracted the rain as we navigated our bikes around slippery rocks and roots along a dark, narrow footpath in the Etoniah Creek State Forest.
It was the first Saturday night in February and our group of six friends were midway on a three-day bike camping trek across Florida.
Most people my age would have balked at a trip like this. “Thanks but no thanks...I prefer hotels...I need to clean my garage that weekend.”
For this particular group of intrepid adventurers, life doesn’t happen on the couch.
We started our 225-mile adventure on the Gulf of Mexico in Steinhatchee. It was a glorious course devised by the celebrated route architect Karlos A. Rodriguez Bernart. Picture the Florida that early explorers knew. We just picked a stormy weekend to do it.
As my contemporaries paired wine with dinner back home, we squinted into the darkness looking for orange trail blazes painted on trees. We had trail notes to get to the Iron Bridge Camp Shelter but no Internet.
Threading our way deeper into the forest, a loud bang ricocheted in the tree canopy. Someone’s tire exploded in what is known as a pinch flat. Then, I heard a dreaded thud. My own rear tire had flatted.
Things quickly worsened. A rider missed a turn and disappeared. A one-person search party set out on foot for the missing rider, leaving her flat-tire bike behind in the wet palmetto leaves.
Our remaining band of four stood debating options and shivering as temps neared the thirties. We trekked on by foot, trying to pump warm blood through our shivering limbs.
Then we hit the swamp.
Read the full version of journalist Mary Shanklin’s cross-Florida bike trek in the Spring edition of Growing Bolder.
