October 31 – November 3, 2017
After some challenging cycling in South America we decided to take a vacation and head to the Bahamas for some sailing.
Andrew writes: I can barely remember the time spent in transit. I do recall thinking that next time I’ll break it up into a few days at each spot, because we have a lot of flexibility with time. A highlight for me was eyeing up the lineup of big cargo ships waiting to go through the Panama Canal, just as the sun was coming up in the east. Just beautiful.
Once we landed in Fort Lauderdale and arrived at Ray and Denises, they made us feel right at home. We got to celebrate U.S.’s biggest “Day of the Dead” parade with them, and rode all over Fort Lauderdale. It was also a big boat show that week,and there were some honking huge, or as Ray would say, “Yuge”, boats.
Overall, Fort Lauderdale is a nice town, but there is still some culture shock being back in North America, even after only 6 months away.
Amanda writes: Andrew I debated this big change in plans for about a week before making the choice and booking flights. For brief moments I still wonder if we’ve made the right choice and I just come back to; everything happens for a reason. Yes we were mere weeks from reaching the bottom of the planet but we’ll come back to that. The opportunity arose to sail in the Bahamas which I put into the once in a lifetime category and so here we were. Packing up all our possessions and hopping on a plane, or I should say many planes. After a few years doing this it seems to be getting easier. Long layovers, customs, immigration, more customs, more bag searches and so on. After 36 hours we arrived in Ft. Lauderdale to an incredibly warm welcome from our warmshowers hosts.
Warm showers is an online community of cyclists who host other traveling cyclists. We don’t normally reach out to people if we’re not technically cycling in and out of their city but we did so on this occasion to see if we could find someone to store our bikes and most of our gear while we went sailing in the Bahamas. Ray and Denise said they were happy to store our gear and we got a chance to stay with them for a couple of days before heading out. Ray and Denise reminded us how much we miss the WS community. Like minded people, easy going and so great to chat with. Not only did he go to the trouble of picking us up at the airport, then we shared beers by the pool and he showed us around the town. Then we got to volunteer at the day of the dead party, drink more beers and see some cycling routes. Ray and Denise are a class act and I hope to see them again.