Gator Country Hell Week: A Prologue

It all started in January 1997 when three friends and I started out to tour Florida by bicycle. Riding totally unsupported (meaning we were either using panniers or towing B.O.B. trailers with our gear), we set out to ride 800 miles in 8 days, and see all the parts of Florida that the tour books overlook.

We found it.

The result was an organized bike tour called Gator Country Hell Week starting in December that same year. The only difference is that we provide full support to our riders, and the only thing they have to do is ride their bikes from one motel to another. It's still about 100 miles a day, but there's a hot breakfast, 2 rest stops, and a cooked lunch along the way.

It doesn't get much easier, does it?

The tour is now in its 9th year, and I sit here on the eve of the eve taking a break from packing the van and trailer. We'll drive down to Fort Myers tomorrow from the Tampa area, where we will meet 27 riders from all over the US who have chosen to put winter on freeze frame while they work on their tan lines.

On the morning of the 28th we'll roll out of Fort Myers headed east, with the final destination that day in Clewiston, the historic sugar town. From there we'll meander across the state to Avon Park, Plant City, Brooksville, Winter Garden, Bartow, S. Lake Placid, and back to Fort Myers on the 4th. All told, we'll have pedalled over 800 miles in 8 days...right on formula as we laid it down in 1997.

This year we're using a new route, with 75% of the miles never seen before on this tour. We'll be incorporating several of Florida's premier paved bike paths, as well as dozens of lonely rural roads through orange groves as dense as Iowa corn in summer.

As I explain to everyone in their folder of maps, cue sheets, and other information, there is no real logic to our route. To see it on a map would have anyone wondering if I was drunk when I laid it out. In a car, one could easily cover the distance in half the miles.

But that's not the point. Our goal is to see the other Florida, and to do it on safe country roads as much as possible. We're not concerned with theme park rodents or rollercoasters. We just want to be able to ride our bikes all day and satisfy that endorphin jones we've been nursing ever since it got cold back north.

And so we zig and zag across the state, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. We'll ride through strawberry fields forever, never-ending orange groves, and oh-so-sweet sugar cane fields.

Hopefully we'll even see a gator or two.

I'll be back with road reports as the trip unfolds.

Dr "Grab My Sunscreen" Gerlich