Bike Florida

An amazing thing happened in Florida this weekend.

The sun came out. The temperature climed into the 70s. And people came out of their homes and automobiles to greet this first, encouraging, sign of spring.

After a long, long, cold winter, this was the sort of weekend most of us live in Florida to enjoy. I spent the weekend driving the back roads, beach cities and small towns of Volusia and Flagler counties. As ride coordinator for this year’s Bike Florida spring event, it is my job to calculate distances and plot lines on maps so several hundred cyclists will be able to find their way from one night’s campsite to the next. For the most part it’s a tedious and time-consuming job. But on this weekend in particular, it was a joy to get out and enjoy the best that Florida has to offer.

I saw people paddling canoes around Hontoon Island State Park. On Sunday we took a lunch break and sat under an awning at Bonnie’s Dockside restaurant, on the lazy St. Johns River, watching bass fishermen drift slowly past while a local musician sang Jimmy Buffet songs on the deck. Cyclists were out in droves riding The Loop. And Deland, renown for having one of the most attractive downtowns in Florida, was alive with strollers, diners and window shoppers. For a while I got out of the car for a fast bike ride between Lake Bearsford Park and Blue Spring State Park. Volusia County is in the process of linking up various parks and springs with an impressive and growing greenway system.

The lighthouse at Ponce Inlet. Part of the route for this year's Bike Florida tour

Oh yeah, and because Bike Week is coming up in Daytona Beach, the roads were already teeming with overweight, aging, Harley hipsters.

It was, in short, a perfect Florida weekend. The first sign of spring. And more to come. By the time Bike Florida’s Blueways and Greenways Tour rolls around, spring will be in full bloom and the cycling will be sublime.

You need to see it to believe it.

By Herb Hiller

“I will kill you if you tell anybody about this place.”

Nobody said that to me when I was lately in unincorporated Crescent Beach.

So I can tell you that if you need a break from whatever ails you, think about coming back after your ride through during this year’s Bike Florida.

Six miles north of the St. Johns County line, two-lane culture thrives, same as the advocacy that works to keep it.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings had a beach house here where she entertained Hemingway and Zora Neale Hurston. Butler Beach was the Negro resort, Summer Haven where the Pittsburgh Mellons hung out. You can rent many of the old houses and cottages.

Must-visit landmark accessible by free ferry is Fort Matanzas, a 1740 Spanish fort to protect the southern approach to St. Augustine.

Planning to come back?Time a visit when the South Anastasia Community Association (SACA) has a party scheduled or even – gasp! – a meeting. Any half-hour will immerse you in what keeps this place different.

The issues are familiar: how to protect what residents value against newcomers who view sandals-wearing nursery workers and kayak outfitters who prefer the low-scale, two-lane way of life with its oak-canopied dirt streets and fish camps equally woebegone.

Yachting elites want to dredge Matanzas Inlet, the last wild inlet along east coast Florida, with its memorable shifting sandbars and islets, as you will see on your ride. Never mind that precisely because wild, the inlet is the subject of intense study by government and university research labs.

Wouldn’t you want to understand why one of Florida’s few peninsular shellfish beds still safe for recreational and commercial harvest stretches for seven miles south of the SR 206 bridge here? You can eat oysters fresh from the dock.

Framing the narrow community are miles of uneroded beach (cars allowed) and, west across the Matanzas River, marsh and sub-tropical forest for hiking, paddling and wildlife watching from below Pellicer Creek in Flagler County to three miles north of Highway 206.

Surf Station, the home of $24 bikinis, and Coastal Outfitters at the Intracoastal end of “main street,” will fix you up with what you need. “Main” may be only a few hundred yards, but as Pat Hamilton explains, Cubbedge Road once connected Crescent Beach from the dune to the mainland by wooden bridge. How much more “main” than that does any street get?

Even the modern bridge got built with a draw. The draw drops back in place and you get the local version of a traffic jam: maybe 20 cars at the Crescent Beach light.

Pat, surely the most unorthodox real estate person you’ll ever meet, fights to keep development out. His family has lived here since 1959. “You see for us, A1A is a local street. We walk across to the beach or to South Beach Grill. We bike along the sidewalk. It’s our recreation and our being.

“Give up the central access to your neighborhood and you’ve given up your neighborhood.”

For years having successfully blocked A1A four-laning, locals got the county comp plan to call for keeping the road two lanes. But the fight never stops. Getting Scenic Byway  status for the road helped.

More importantly, locals formed SACA. Two hundred members signed up right away.

“Then consultants came in and wanted to put in vista towers atop the dune and stuff like that,” Pat remembers. “We said ‘No.’ Don’t build anything. Go away. Do your stuff someplace else.’”

By Mark Lane

The cool thing about bike riding around Volusia County is that it’s a sampler of the all the riding environments found around the state. It’s like experiencing all of Florida in microcosm.

West Volusia has a North Florida feel. County road riding which even features hills, the result of ancient dune lines. Parts of East Volusia feature beachside riding that feels a lot like southeast Florida. Riders enjoy straight-line A1A riding past past sea oats and palmetto scrub, that give way to hotels and condos as you head toward the middle of the county.

Northeast Volusia has the oaky, lowland feel of much of northeasternFlorida. Central Volusia is low and flat like much of Central Florida. There is city riding in Daytona Beach, country riding near DeLand.  Parts of New Smyrna have a surf-town, Keys ambiance to them.

Personally, my regular route is through The Loop, a route between theGranada Bridge in Ormond Beach and Highbridge Bridge near the FlaglerCounty line. If you take the basic Beach Street to Old Dixie Highway to Walter Boardman Lane to John Anderson Drive route, it’s a 23 mile route. But for cyclists who need more, it’s easy to find longer variations.

It’s a lovely ride especially the sections that go through a tunnel of oaktrees near Tomoka State Park and the swampy vistas lands along Walter Boardman Lane. This is the best of North Florida-Florida scenery but aslight detour to the east takes you along A1A and the beach and you’re in coastal Florida with a more Southeast feel. (For a map and description see http://www.ormondscenicloopandtrail.com/)

If you can’t decide where in Florida you want to ride, you should ride in Volusia County.

Mark Lane is a columnist for the Daytona Beach News-Journal

By Kay Semion

Even on the coldest mornings (by Florida’s gauge – 50-some degrees with achilled 9 mph northwest gale), The Loop’s essence amazes.

Along the marshes, the waters are still and steel-hued. The oak canopies drip with Spanish moss against a cloudless, stark sky. The saw palmetto line theroad and provide protection for wildlife (which you frequently hearrustling through the brush and occasionally see – including deer).  Heronand egret hunt for mid-morning snacks.

So it was on Sunday, Feb. 7, on my weekly ride of The Loop, a trail north or Ormond Beach, FL., popular with bicyclists, motorcyclists and runners. The Loop is not a bicycle trail, but motorists are generally respectful of cyclists because there are so many of us. The exceptions to that rule tend to flex their rude muscles during certain big tourism events – fueled by alcohol before hitting the asphalt.

Bike Florida riders will cycle through The Loop during low tourism seasonand can embrace the graces of Old Florida. Much of the area is preserved,so natural scenes have not changed significantly in years, which one can witness at one of the many side attractions – such as the 400-year oldFairchild Oak in Bulow Creek State Park. The actual age of the tree is inquestion (some claims say it’s 2,000 years old) but there’s little doubt that it was around for historic events, like the Second Seminole War in 1836. The age question arises because live oaks don’t produce naturalrings, I’m told, so core sampling gives guesstimates that can be off a fewhundred years.

But I digress – an easy enough thing to do when thinking about all thereis to see while riding The Loop. The 23-mile trip starts on Beach Streetin Ormond Beach, just west of the Granada Avenue bridge, goes north fornine miles to Walter Boardman Road, and then east-ish to Highbridge Road.Boardman is a super treat. You leave the canopies of the oak and pineforests within the Tomoka River basin and head into a marsh – where I oncestopped near an island to observe at least 15 species of Florida water birds, including the great blue heron, the great white, ibis and egrets.

It’s not unusual, either, to see gopher tortoise trudging along theroadside. You’ll also see a lot of fishermen and women – throwing linesoff the bridges, waiting for bites in canoes or kayaks on the TomokaRiver, or just sitting alongside the road on a lawn chair with a lazy linein the water.

On Highbridge, the scenery changes again. Here the road is lined with canary island date palms, which sit on a narrow edge along the Tomoka River marshes. Sometimes, the palms tumble halfway into the water, and it takes months, even years for them to fall all the way.  Just east of the Highbridge drawbridge (which bridges the Intracoastal Waterway and isn’t that high by modern standards), riders can turn south along John Anderson Drive or continue east to ride along the Atlantic Ocean on A-1-A.  It’s worth it to trek over to the ocean to glimpse not only the soothing waves but also to see the wildflowers growing alongside the road (a Florida goal is to make it a wildflower haven).  In the winter, you can sometimes catch a glimpse of a Right Whale frolicking in the waves.  To the north and south of Highbridge in this area is the dune scrub ofPeninsula State Park – home of scrub jays, the only bird found nowhere butin Florida.

But it’s also a beautiful trip along John Anderson, which follows theIntracoastal, known as the Halifax River in this area. There you can seethe remnants of old natural forests, basically palmettos, scrub oaks, andpine trees. The first part of the ride is intriguing because you can seelots of older docks in the marsh, causing you to wonder what was there afew years back. It gets a bit trafficky when nearing Ormond Beach bothalong John Anderson and A-1-A, so on weekend rides, I’ll often turn aroundand go back through the Highbridge, Boardman, Beach Street stretch.

Besides, that way, I get to salute the statue of Chief Tomokie in Tomoka State Park.  The park , three miles north of Granada Boulevard, is theformer site of Nocorocco, an ancient Timucuan village, and it’s for real. Chief Tomokie is not. He’s a legend, as they say, and it’s not clear whostarted the legend. Anyway, the statue is cheesy by any standards, createdby Fred Dana Marsh in 1955, and it’s falling apart. But it’s one of thoseFlorida strange “you gotta see this” monuments.  I love it.

The thing to remember about The Loop is that it’s a whole lot of Floridawrapped within 23 miles and a great bicycle ride.

Last week it snowed in 49 states, and even Florida got a bit of the white stuff in Pensacola. But if you’ve had enough of this brutal winter and long to cycle on  an open road that isn’t lined with plowed snow banks, consider joining us for Bike Florida’s 2010 spring tour, from March 27-April 1. We promise you won’t need a snow shovel to dig your bike out.  Ain’t gonna happen. Go to http://www.bikeflorida.org/ for details.