65 km 3h45
Our boat has been found again. We’re still not sure why it wasn’t on the port agent’s schedule, but our travel agent in Germany contacted the captain of the ship, the captain contacted the port agent, and the port agent let us know that the boat is scheduled to dock on Friday around 1530. We’re to follow up on Thursday to confirm.
We went on a ride and reconnaissance mission today. We wanted to check out the Florida Beaches and get a sense of where the different entry points are for Port Everglades. Tomorrow we should find out which of the port entrances we need to present ourselves at in order to board our boat on Friday or Saturday.
Fort Lauderdale has a large stretch of public beach – over 10 km long. The beaches look nice and sandy and very calm – although we did see at least one person carrying a surf board. Large segments of the Fort Lauderdale beach are also sea turtle nesting grounds. As a result, the street lights are covered (or not turned on) for periods of time between May and November (http://www.physorg.com/news119422262.html). We noticed some hooded lights as we road along the coastal street (route A1A).
The streets that line the beaches here are not as packed with cheap motels as the streets of Maine and New Hampshire were. In Fort Lauderdale you see many more expensive homes and high priced condominiums. Scott noticed that a lot of the condos had their windows covered with the hurricane storm protection. We wonder if this is mostly on units where people are still in their summer homes a little further north. The great migration of people to Florida for the winter doesn’t begin until November.
After a nice ride up the coast we took the TriRail train back to Hollywood. It was nice to be able to take the train and we were happy to discover that the “2 bikes per car” limit is not enforced – at least not during the time of day we were riding. Although putting our bikes on the train was rather painless, we’re not sure we would have wanted to do it with loaded bikes, as maneuvering in the cramped space on the train with heavy loaded bikes would be challenging.