Day 62: King of the Road!!!

Spanish Moss on Oak Tree near Suwannee River, Florida

Trailer for sale or rent 
Rooms to let fifty cents
No phone no pool no pets 
I ain't got no cigarettes
Ah but, two hours of pushing broom 
Buys a eight by twelve four bit room
I'm a man of means by no means 
King of the road

-Roger Miller

It's funny how when you're riding along certain songs come into your head.  In this case we passed by a lot with a sign, "Trailers for Rent".  So we started singing this song.

Kings of the Road -- that was us today.  Great day.  We got a fairly early start out of Madison (8:15 am after another great Waffle House breakfast) and headed out south on highway 53.  We wove our way through various county roads through pine "plantations", through a little town of OBrien and eventually ended up paralleling US 129 on the Suwanee River Greenway bike trail through the town of Branford, , the onto US 27 just past the Ichetucknee State Park into Ft. White, then High Springs, FL.

Florida, as Texas, continues to surprise me with what it includes.  Not all beaches, palm trees and pink flamingos   Today we saw huge pine "plantations" -- great expanses of deliberately planted pine trees that are grown to feed the pulp mills of the south.  It was pretty strange seeing pine trees growing in perfectly spaced rows, then every so often, a big area that had been harvested and was totally barren with sandy soil exposed.  How do they even grow anything in that sand?

We also saw (and smelled) dairy farms, cattle and chicken ranches.  The chicken ranches were right out of "Food Inc"  -- big barns that smelled of chicken shit, sounds of chickens, but no chickens in sight.  They're just in those barns eating grain and waiting to be slaughtered.  We also saw a huge cotton field today, as big as any we saw back west.  We crossed several rivers including the Suwanee ("way down upon the Suwanee River") and the Ichetucknee.

As we were passing through High Springs today about 3:10 p.m., all of the sudden Rick veered sharply to the side of the road and stopped.  He had spied.....yes....a DIVE BAR.  No really, it was a bar called The Dive, flanked by plastic pink flamingos   A must stop.  We enjoyed some chips and queso and beer  before we finished our final 8 miles into Alachua FL, a suburb of Gainesville, on highway 441.

Total miles today:  83.11
Time:  5:40
Avg:  14.67

Tomorrow we will push on to East Palatka.  After that, it's St. Augustine and the culmination of this "quest".  It's hard to believe it's just a couple of days away!

At Dan & Amy's house, Tallahassee, FL