Citrus Hills to Ocala – Wet, Narrow, and Pretty Much Nonstop

Well, our wishes did not come true.  The rain did not hold.  It began as we left the hotel at 9, and steadily increased throughout the day.  It was not until we were about 6 miles from our hotel that it dissipated somewhat.  

We had a short ride on the connector trail that took us back to the Withlacoochee Trail, where we continued north for a few miles.  Then we rode a heavily traveled narrow county highway with no shoulders for four miles, connected with a four-lane highway that had a three-foot wide bike lane and rode it six miles, then got onto the Marjorie Harris Carr Greenway.  It is a lovely trail, winding almost constantly through the woods, with some nice ups & downs.  Had it not been raining we would have ridden its whole length of 15.8 miles, but jumped off the trail after about nine miles, to take another narrow, no shoulder, extremely busy county road into Ocala.  We only had one very short break during 38 mile, six hours point-to-point ride.

We had carefully packed most of our belongings in water-proof bags and put them in our panniers.  Then Rob wrapped the four panniers with garbage bags we had packed for such occasion.  Success!  All that stuff stayed dry.  But our shoes and gloves and bike shorts were soaked.  We were also pretty cold by the time we got to the hotel.

Long hot showers, followed by a delicious Mexican restaurant meal, warmed us up nicely.  Then we went to work getting ready for tomorrow’s ride.  Rob cleaned the bikes and gave them a good maintenance check, and Diane did the laundry, including washing and drying our shoes and gloves.

And now we are ready for another good day of riding tomorrow—to Gainesville.  It will be mostly road riding, but we intend to use back roads as much as possible.

Dear Readers, Just two pics today.  It was just too wet to use the camera. Hope to do better tomorrow. Rob 

I have prepared trip maps for most of  our daily ride. And Diane likes a daily narrative of turns and miles along the route.  I often use Google Maps to check our location and progress throughout the day. But I like maps as back up to my smart phone.  In addition I made notations  on the map of services along the points of interest.  As you can see from the pic above and the one below, water intrusion ruined the maps.  In addition my smart phone battery just barely got us our new truncated route and died about one mile from our hotel.  

(Diane's narrative fared better that my maps)