Florida Trail: Overseas Heritage Trail Day 4
January 9, 2022
Mile: 48.5 to 69.6 (21.1 miles)
Start: Coconut Cay Resort, Marathon, FL
Finish: Lime Tree Bay Resort, Layton, FL
- Animals seen today: iguanas, pompano fish, pelicans, plovers, chickens
- Keys crossed today: Marathon, Vaca, Fat Deer, Long Point, Crawl, Duck, Conch, Long Key
At 5am Shannon woke me up from a bad dream and I decided it’s probably time to drink some water to clear my head and use the restroom. When I went to grab toilet paper, something large, black and with lots of legs scuttled over the roll of toilet paper scurrying onto my hand, over my leg and almost into where the sun don’t shine. I swatted the creature as fast as I could and screamed bloody murder. Shannon jumped out of bed and asked what was going on. I told him some huge bug crawled over me in the bathroom but he laughed and thought maybe I made it up. Maybe the drawstrings on my shorts fell across my legs when I was half-awake but I swear I had seen and felt giant insect legs on me. Shannon went into the bathroom chuckling as he searched for the offending varmint.
“I don’t see anything!” he cried. Frustrated and freaked out, I replied that I knew there was something in there.
He closed the door, turned on the light and started looking around. “I still don’t see any- Oh sh*t!” Shannon cursed.
He grabbed some toilet paper, smashing the enormous scurrying body of the 4-inch-long cockroach whose antenna made it closer to 5 or 6 inches long. He said he only was able to smush half of it and the other half kept moving because the cockroach was so freakin big. He threw it in the toilet, flushing 3 times for good measure to make sure that the nasty demon cockroach didn’t come back from the hell that Shannon sent it to. What a freakin’ nightmare!
In the morning Shannon brought up the cockroach with the hotel front desk and she said oh that’s not a cockroach, it’s a palmetto bug. But we looked that shit up and it’s definitely a type of freakishly large Florida cockroach. You can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a flippin’ pig. Anyways, the hotel ended up taking $50 off our bill for the inconvenience or hush money to not review the cockroach situation but I’ll take it. The screws holding the shower drain in place at the hotel had been removed out of the drain and I felt like it was like in the movies where people do that to hide drugs or money. Who knows, I was just glad to get out of there.
Since both of our feet hurt pretty badly but we still had 21 or 22 miles to hike today, we decided not to hike but instead use the free bike rentals at our next hotel to pedal power our way down the trail to get the mileage done. An old hippie guy named Don picked us up to drive to our next hotel. He was super sweet and had inherited a house in the Keys and lived there for a while. He told us about Hurricane Irma that had come and wrecked the Keys in 2017. Afterwards his yard was so filled with seaweed piles that it took a full two weeks to remove it all with his neighbor’s front end loader. 6 or 7 dump trucks had to come to rid his yard of seaweed waste.
Don said his tenant had stayed on in the Keys when Hurricane Irma hit with 150 mph winds and an 8 foot storm surge. He had given his tenant keys to go upstairs when the water rose. Well the water rose and his tenant was on his way up to the second-floor apartment but as he was heading upstairs the key fell and dropped into the murky water. Now the tenant was stuck with the hurricane in full force but somehow he managed to scurry up into a small room on the side of the house above the waterline where he lived for 10 days, surviving the hurricane with no power and only the freshwater and food that he had on hand. And I’m not sure really why anyone would stay during a hurricane, especially if you were just renting an apartment.
Don dropped us off at our hotel for the night where we borrowed the single speed bikes to pedal 44 miles. We only had one helmet that we were going to switch off with because the others were the size of a yarmulke and bright pink and the third helmet was broken everywhere. Frank was a young guy working the desk of the hotel who was super cool and interested in our trip and helped us out a lot. Frank and his coworker Terry asked us all of these questions about our trip. Frank even tried on Shannon’s backpack which looked absolutely enormous on him. We thanked them for their help and soon were on our way attempting to bike 42 miles to make up for the mileage we left off yesterday and the miles we had to do today. I’m still counting the miles since they were foot powered and we did the route freaking twice!
Biking was so much easier and faster on the paved paths and it was definitely more enjoyable today to bike vs. walk. The trail took us through long stands of mangroves and buttonwoods and we were off the highway for a while which was nice. Also being on a bike we didn’t have to switch sides going over the bridge like we usually do when hiking and there’s nowhere to go on the bridge but to join traffic. Even though we were on beach cruisers, the miles flew by and we took some photos along the way of the interesting sites that you only see on the roadside in Florida. Shannon posed with a manatee dad statue and we started calling him “Shanatee” thanks to my sister’s creative thinking. Giant sharks, old train cars and towering spiny lobsters on the side of the road begged us to stop. When we got to the park that we stopped at the previous night, we were relieved and surprisingly still had a lot of energy in us for having pedaled 21 miles on a single speed bike.
We turned around and stopped at La Niña Cuban restaurant for lunch. It was not a very fancy place but had great reviews and most everyone inside the restaurant spoke Spanish. It was packed! Some people left after their lunch break and we snuck in at a table outside. We quickly realized that the outside of the restaurant was overrun with Keys chickens aka the descendants of Hemingway’s prized poultry which are a $2,500 fine if you kill one of them and a cool $1,000 if you feed them. We were promptly greeted by not kidding you a dozen chickens. These enterprising chickens had found a good thing at the restaurant and were feeding and breeding at an alarming rate. Baby chicks, teenage fledglings and mama hens were jumping on the benches and picking at fallen rice, beans and even cannibalizing chicken remnants. Yes we definitely considered the sanitariness of the restaurant and hoped for the best.
Our sweet waiter came over and we tried to communicate in Spanglish about my gluten allergy. I’m learning Spanish from a podcast but haven’t gotten to the episode about sickness and allergies. He was super nice and it was great that they also had pictures on the wall to communicate with gringos. Shannon had roasted pork, rice and beans and sweet plantains and from myself an entire yellowfin snapper fried on the grill bones and fins and all. The food was freaking delicious, super fresh, super yummy and super filling. I don’t think I’ve had a meal that has hit the spot like this one had in a long time. We did have to shoo the chickens away a couple of times as they got too close to us. Some people even put out their extra rice and beans on the tables and the chickens went crazy. The feral chickens attacked the rice which seemed to be their favorite food with fervor, 3 or 4 of them all at once jumping on the table. It made me wonder how sanitary this place actually was. But oh well, a little chickenshit never heard anyone right? Blechhh!
Full of energy from delicious helpings of Cuban rice and beans, we turned our bikes north and pedaled back to our hotel. On the way down we had wondered why the 21 mile trip was so fast and hadn’t realized it was because we had an enormous tailwind pushing us along. On the return trip the strong headwind made it a little bit more challenging biking back but we did it without incident and made it back to the hotel. I do feel like biking you see a little bit less because you’re going faster. But you do cover more mileage so when your feet feel worn down and you’ve got more blisters than toes and are covered head-to-toe in chigger, no-see-ums and mosquito bites, it’s probably best you take a day to rest. Or in our case bike 42 miles on a single speed beach cruiser.
Back at the hotel, we were barely able to walk straight, hobbling over to the check-in area by wobbling side-to-side after sitting on the bikes all afternoon. We washed up, did some sink laundry and checked out the restaurant next door. It was pretty touristy, catering to the AARP crowd obsessed with Midwest sports teams. We decided it was okay to just go to the grocery store across the street and bring some food for dinner back to the room. On our way out to the store, one of the larger and older gentlemen working at the hotel approached this girl who is maybe 90 pounds soaking wet. He was 30 or 40 years her senior and asked her bluntly how much she weighed. She said she didn’t know and it got kind of uncomfortable. He started hitting on her, asking her about the music she was listening to and mansplaining how the music he liked was the coolest. It was freaking gross but I’m sure this kind of stuff happens a lot in the Keys. We walked past her, I tried to catch her eye to make sure she was okay with how weird the situation was but she seemed to be fine with it so we left her alone.
Dinner was a jar of olives, cheese sticks, bananas, chips, gummy rings and some alcoholic drinks. I only got through about half of my drink and realized I must’ve been dehydrated because a headache hit me almost instantly. We spent the rest of the night just lying in bed, occasionally hobbling outside to look at the palm trees down below. We had arrived at the resort too late to snorkel or swim safely in the shallows since around sunset or evening sharks are out patrolling. But we had a great time and before we knew it we fell asleep. Life was good and it felt good to get off our feet today.
