Category: Bike Rides and Routes

Today was such a perfect Florida riding day I thought I’d head over to the Palm Beach Lake Trail to talk with some of the folks using the path. Son Adam said he’d meet me along the way.

Diane Buxbomb of West Palm Beach, was the first person I encountered after joining the trail at the Middle Bridge. She was accompanied by Shushu or ShuShu. [I’m really not up on the spelling conventions of small dogs in pink chariots.]

Diane says she’s on the trail about once a week, sometimes with Shushu (ShuShu), sometimes on her bike.

Joey was the second dog encounter

It looked like it was going to be a Dog Day Afternoon because Joey was the next thing that caught my eye on the trail.

He was riding with Mary Frei and Ed Ferguson, who said that 90% of their riding is done on the Lake Trail.

We didn’t have much time to talk because Ed said they had to hurry to get home before the football game started.

Oh, so THAT’S why the streets are quiet.

Bennett was trying out his new bike

Adam caught up to me just before we encountered Brad, Lori and Bennett, 6, south of the Biltmore on the way back to their Palm Beach home. I doubt that Bennett knew that the Lake Trail was originally built by Henry Flagler in 1894 to give his guests a place to stroll, but he was enjoying it anyway.

My memory may be slipping, but I think the trail may have been renovated as part of the 1976 Bicentennial Year celebration. At any rate, it’s one of the most used linear parks in the area.

First they bike, then they play tennis

This group of folks from the Jupiter area had already been to the Inlet where Palm Beach Docks Annie used to live and was sitting down to enjoy lunch.

They aren’t a “bike club,” one of them explained. They are a group of friends who like to bike. After their ride, they were planning to play tennis.

(In case anyone was wondering, it takes a lot of effort to shoot a picture where virtually everyone is chewing on something.)

Dave Rosenthal’s first ride since knee surgery

Dave Rosenthal said he was having a good ride, all things considered. This was the first long ride since he had knee injury back in September. And, yes, he had been a runner.

While we were talking he commented that he had seen our headlights and taillights, but wanted to show us something his wife had bought for him: some Nite Ize SpokeLits to go between the spokes on his front and back wheels.

He has a red one on the front wheel and a green one on the rear one. They don’t put out a lot of light to the rear, but he says they are very effective from the sides.

He thinks they might have helped him when he was hit by a motorist who was “driving like a U-Boat commander.” (Click on the link to hear him describe it.) He can laugh about it now, but it wasn’t funny at the time.

Kathy Strongin rode it for the first time yesterday

And she liked it well enough to drag her visiting grad student daughter from Seattle along today. “I wanted her to experience it. It was beautiful,” Kathy said. “This is like the best-kept secret.”

“Do you ride in Seattle?” we asked Jenna.

“My roommates do,” she dodged. (We took that to be a “no.”)

Kathy lives in Wellington and rides in her neighborhood, but I suspect I’ll see her on the Lake Trail again.

The Randalls came up by Tri-Rail

John Randall from Clearwater and Doreen Knoll from Portland, OR, hopped on a Tri-Rail with David and Jo Alice Randall from Hollywood, FL, to ride the Lake Trail.

I never realized you could take bikes on the local commuter trains. It would be a great way to go south from West Palm Beach to Broward and Dade counties without fighting traffic and the hassles of parking.

I wish the Dolphins had made it to the Superbowl

Not because I give two figs about football, but because the roads were deserted on my way home. It would be great to have that happen more often.

I don’t want to rub it in to you folks who are snowed in, flooded out, blown away or still stranded at O’Hare Airport, but today was the kind of day that makes even a non-Florida fan like me appreciate the state.

It’s not ALL good news

See, the water temperature is 74 degrees, five degrees cooler than the air. That would be chilly. I don’t get in unless it’s about 94.

Then, there are possible rip currents. The lifeguard went on to add Man of War sightings and child-eating pythons. (OK, just kidding about that last one.)

Despite the warnings, the Lake Worth, FL, Beach was packed. Based on the acres of pale flesh, I’d say the Snowbirds have arrived.

I’d sure like to have the sunburn ointment concession in South Florida.

Back to my childhood

Just as I was starting to get back on the road, this 1959 Buick Electra passed. My folks had the LaSabre station wagon model that looked almost exactly like this. My dad, mother and my two brothers and I piled into that car in Missouri in 1959 for the Great Florida Vacation. I’ll never forget that car.

“That’s close enough”

I took my driver’s test in that land yacht. It has massive fins fore and aft and a hood that looked like the deck of an aircraft carrier. I passed the written test with a perfect score, didn’t kill anyone on the driving portion, but then we got to the dreaded parallel parking test. It was a hot summer day in a car 38 feet long and 12 feet wide. It had no air conditioning. It had no power steering. I did OK until the last second, when I touched one of the orange pylons, which would normally mean flunking the whole driving test.

The instructor looked at this scrawny kid, dripping sweat from wrestling that beast and said, “Kid, in THIS car, that’s close enough. I’m gonna pass you.”

My kid brother Mark, for whom nothing is sacred, doctored a photo of him and his brother, David, standing next to the LaSabre for a promo piece that must not have been too successful, ’cause he’s still as poor as the rest of us.

South to the Boynton Inlet

I generally ride north, but I thought I’d cruise south on A1A from Lake Worth to check out the Boynton Inlet. There’s construction on that stretch of road and it’s supposed to be for local traffic only, but another pbbt (Palm Beach Bike Tours) rider said that he rode it earlier in the week and it was fine.

What little shoulder there was was taken up by Bob’s barricades, but traffic was light and respectful. It was such a nice day that I think everyone was in a good mood.

Boat traffic wasn’t heavy, but it was probably higher than it was a few weeks ago when you had to mortgage your home to fill the tank.

Glad to be on a bike

The parking lot at the park was jammed. Watching cars making endless loops waiting for someone to pull out of a space made me really happy to be on a bike.

All in all, I must have seen at least three dozen riders on every possible description of bikes during the 22-mile spin. Looks like I wasn’t the only one enjoying the day.

Bridges have been on my mind lately. I just finished reading Death in the Everglades: The Murder of Guy Bradley, America’s First Martyr to Environmentalism. It goes into great detail about the Barefoot Mailman route down the east coast between Palm Beach County and Miami in the days before roads, trains and bridges.

About the same time, I stumbled onto a great website for bridgehunters, run by James Baughn, webmaster of my old hometown paper and producer of The Pavement Ends blog. I decided to sign up as an editor and start documenting some of the bridges I ride over in S. FL.

Glaze, like the donut

While looking for a place to shoot an overall of the bridge, I stumbled onto a small fishing pier at Bryant Park where I met Charles Glaze (Glaze, like the donut) and his friends, Shawn and Terry “we don’t have a last name.”

Charlie and his buddies used to dive off the highest point of the bridge into the channel below. Charlie says “it’s not so bad. People think we’re trying to commit suicide, but we’re not. I dive, not jump. That keeps my weight behind me. It ain’t as bad as people think it is. I don’t do that anymore, though,’cause the judge done put the fear of God into me.”

Feel everybody’s shorts

“My buddy, he jumped off one night and somebody called out the police (pronounced po-leese), so he swum underwater until he got underneath the dock to hide. “Feel everybody’s shorts,” the cops said, “cause if they’re wet, it’s him.”

How long ago did this happen?

“Oh, about two-and-a-half weeks ago.”

Original bridge built in 1919

A wooden span over the Intracoastal Waterway was built in 1919, but the 1928 hurricane wiped it out.

It was replaced by a concrete drawbridge in 1937. It carried traffic until the new bridge was built in 1973. The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) inspected the new bridge in 2007 and gave it good passing grades. That should make the 10,900 folks a day who go over the 1,566-foot bridge feel better.

West end of 1937 bridge condemned

The middle of the 1937 bridge was demolished, but the east and west ends were left for fishing piers. The west end was condemned by the Florida Department of Transportation this year as being unsafe. To the dismay of local fishermen, a six-foot-high chainlink fence was erected to keep them off the pier.

Charlie doesn’t see what the big deal is: “They don’t have any problem putting a big truck out there to launch fireworks. They couldn’t put enough people on that bridge to cause it to collapse.”

Big hole in the fence

Judging by the big hole in the fence and the number of fishermen seen on the pier this week, it looks like the No Trespassing signs don’t scare off everyone. That’s not to say there’s not some level of enforcement. The Palm Beach Post’s police blotter column Sept. 18, 2008, noted that two men were arrested for trespassing on the bridge.

The county plans to demolish the old bridge as it makes improvements to the Snook Islands Natural Area. The remains of the old bridge will become fish habitat. Eventually, the city and county will join forces to build a 500-foot boardwalk, a 567-foot fishing pier and a gazebo near the habitat.

Popular with peds and cyclists

The bridge provides a shortcut to the Lake Worth Beach on the ocean. Scores, if not hundreds of walkers, joggers and cyclists cross the Intracoastal here every day on their way to and from the mainland.

It’s not hilly down here

Cyclists in S. FL don’t see many hills. In fact, if you want to get any hill training in, you’re pretty much limited to bridges like this one and the Blue Heron Bridge in Riviera Beach. Both bridges have wide shoulders.

I like back roads. You never know what you’re going to find. When the boys were little, we took the less-traveled roads from West Palm Beach, FL, back home to Cape Girardeau, MO. Our path took us near Tuscambia, AL, where we stopped to visit Helen Keller’s home.

We probably had a tour book something like this one that led us from there to the Key Underwood Coon Dog Memorial Graveyard.

Finding it is an adventure

It’s seven miles west of Tuscambia on U.S. 72. Turn left  (south) on Alabama 247, go 12 miles, turn right and follow the signs.

Trust me, anytime directions say “follow the signs” something is gonna get interesting.

We were pulling a small utility trailer

We were in a small Mazda 626 with two adults and two squirmy – “He’s Looking At Me” – kids and pulling a small utility trailer behind us when we made the turn onto a narrow gravel road. It was getting late in the afternoon and the road seemed to go along forever.

We’ve got company

I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a cloud of dust about a tenth of a mile behind us. I didn’t hear Dueling Banjos, which made me feel better, but figured I’d keep an eye on the mirror just in case.

We finally saw the sign and made the turn into the cemetery.

The dust cloud disappeared

While the wife and kids piled out of the car, I noted that the following cloud of dust was gone, but that the car hadn’t passed us. Oh, well, he may have pulled off.

The kids amused themselves by wandering around collecting chiggers and reading the stones.

Troop, owned by Key Underwood, was the first dog buried in the graveyard. On Labor Day, 1937, after being hunting companions for 15 years, it was reported that Underwood wrapped Troop in a cotton pick sack, buried him three feet down and marked the grave with a stone from an old chimney.

Visitors appear

About 30 minutes after we had gotten there, a car pulled in and a couple got out and walked up to us.

“We saw you pulling that trailer behind you and thought you might be conducting a burial, so we wanted to give you a little privacy,” the man said, respectfully.

We thanked them for their consideration and assured them that all of the folks who had arrived at the graveyard would be leaving with us.

Grave markers are unique

Some grave markers are commercial versions with professional sandblasted lettering like you’d find in a human cemetery, but most of them are homemade and reflect the personality of the dog and his / her owner.

Some are carved out of wood and are rotting away. Others are simply names gouged into cement or stone.

Bear was memorialized with a welding bead spelling out his name and dates on a rusting piece of sheet metal.

Nearly 200 dogs buried there

Underwood told a reporter that he had no intention of establishing a coon dog cemetery. “I merely wanted to do something special for a special coon dog.”

There are standards and rules

The hunter told columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson in 1985 that a woman from California wrote him wanting to know why he didn’t allow other kinds of dogs to be buried in the Coon Dog Cemetery.

“You must not know much about coon hunters and their dogs, if you think we would contaminate this burial place with poodles and lap dogs,” he retorted.

Stipulations, even

“We have stipulations on this thing,” William O. Bolton, the secretary/treasure of the Tennessee Valley Coon Hunters Association, and caretaker of the Coon Dog Cemetery was quoted on the organization’s web page. “A dog can’t run no deer, possum — nothing like that. He’s got to be a straight coon dog, and he’s got to be full hound. Couldn’t be a mixed up breed dog, a house dog.”

It’s a beautiful and peaceful place

The cemetery is very well taken care of. We were a little disappointed to see that almost every grave was decorated with plastic flowers that looked out of character for the place. We assumed that they had probably been placed there as part of the annual Labor Day celebration since we visited in October and they looked fresh.

The celebration runs from 1 to 4 P.M. and includes music, dancing, food and a liar’s contest. Official Coon Dog T-shirts and camouflage caps are available.

The gravel road has been paved these days. If you are interested in going there, drop me a comment and I’ll give you the GPS waypoint for the place. I’ve seen at least three different locations shown for it on different maps.

Bug spray is advisable (mosquitoes were heavy late in the afternoon) and keep an eye out for ticks.

Be considerate

Oh, and if you see a car pulling a trailer turn in, give them a few minutes of privacy.

It’s the custom.