Rarely do my bike trips have any hard deadlines, but this one this year is very different. I need to be in Daytona Beach on Tuesday when I have an appointment at Daytona Beach Triumph for new rear tire and they are going to store my bike for a few days. I will be flying to Philadelphia to do another CSAPS shoot later this week.

It is 675ish km from KW to DB, and basing that drive on going there Saturday, I didn't want to have to do it in one day. I presumed the drive back would be much easier after seeing the mass exodus Sunday morning, but I wasn't taking any chances. Departing KW around 1100 this morning I found the road to be quite deserted at times, I think I caught the 25 car convey of 11AM departers and once I had systematically passed them all it was clear sailing.

In about 90 minutes (my original going there estimate!) I found myself at the junction of Garden Store Road. I was pretty sure Monday morning wouldn't be the same as Saturday afternoon, but I also have rules about driving the same roads twice, I avoid it if at all possible.

Instead I took an obscure Toll Road called 'Sound Card Road'. The Toll Booth was a little sketchy, and it was manned by gap-toothed hill billy sitting on an upended Garlic Butter pail. I thought at first I mighta got taken for my .50 cents, but in the end it was worth it. The road was cut right through the 'Glades, no shoulders, the Carribean sea at times lapping the shore not 3' from the edge of the road.

Man those guys should be serious proponents for the elimination of global warming, they are at times 6" max above sea level. I saw a show on the history channel that said if both the ice caps melted completely, the oceans would rise 200+ feet, and that would make Florida gonzo my friends:



I put this image in because I haven't fixed my camera dilemma yet, so I couldn't shoot any video while underway. I am going to start dropping into camera & dive shops, of which there are a lot of, to see if to see if they sell GoPro accessories. Otherwise my blog may dissolve into a purely text version, which will undoubtedly cause a loss of readership.

On that note you may find it interesting that as of today our blog has received over 600 hits.

Before I left Edmonton I had Echo Cycle perform the annual maintenance on the Rocket and they noted my rear tire had about 30% tread wear left, I was hummin and hawin as to whether I should put a new one on or not. At $400.00 bucks a tire + installation, 30% is a lot. There are only 2 manufacturers that make the 240 mm wide tire.

I elected to wait until my Daytona Beach date and ended up putting about 6700 more kms on it. I noticed when I was at a gas station today that some belts were starting to show through on the centerline of the tire. By the time I finished for the day the belts were visible around the entire circumference. I only have about 200 km left before DB, I will have squeezed every single kilometer out of that skin.

I'll show you, and the Echo Cycle service manager a picture of it when I park it tomorrow. I am sure he will have a fit. I feel confident riding on it because I once put 1200+km on one in worse condition coming home from Montana.

I stopped for the night in Vero Beach although I stayed in a mo'tel off the Interstate so I never did see the beach or the ocean. The had the ubiquitous luke warm pool so I had a dip and a couple of Jungle Joos's before seeking out dinner at the local Sonic's.

It was only months after I got home that I found out that Vero Beach is the site of the fossils from a homosapien known as 'Vero man' who presence proved human existence during the Pleistocene era. Sadly I never strayed further than 500' from the Interstate so I was oblivious to all this history!

Talk soon!