Palm Beach Bike Tours

Ken Steinhoff spent more than 40 years in the ink-slinging newspaper business where he had a license to be nosy. Palm Beach Bike Tours renewed that license in his retirement years. The blog is ostensibly about cycling, photography and using GPS technology to figure out where you're going and where you've been. It's really an extension of his lifelong effort to tell the stories of "ordinary people doing ordinary things", which sometimes turns out to be pretty extraordinary. If all that sounds like something in which you might be interested, please sign up for the PBBT RSS feed to keep in touch.

I posted earlier about the East to West Coast (of FL) ride my kid and I did at the end of 2007. The total distance was about 180 miles over three days. (OK, we cheated a bit, too. When we got to the urban riding portion of the trip, we bailed. After all, cars and congestion are the same on either coast.)

Then I read Alan Snel’s account of riding from the East Coast to the West Coast, 170 miles, in ONE day.

A tip of my magic foam hat to him and his support crew.

He elected to ride SR 60 across the state. It’s been about 20 years since I went across that way, so I’m assuming that the road is a lot better than it used to be.

In the old days, you could always count on hitting rain just about the time you were getting to phosphate country and the roads would have deep depressions where the heavy truck traffic had washboarded it. Those ruts would fill up with water and make it hydroplane city. If you got there just as the rain was starting, you’d find the phosphate dust would turn the road into a skating rink. The road spray would coat your windshield with a white film that you coudn’t wash off with windshield washers.

Whew! Brings back a lot of bad memories.

Read more about Alan’s The Ocean2Gulf Bill Fox Memorial Bicycle Ride.