March 5, 2015. In Sunny Florida.

The squawking birds woke me up early this morning--each morning it gets a little earlier... Dianne said "birds? what birds? I don't hear a thing". Sigh.

We got on the bikes at 9 AM and rode on Tampa Road, but it was very busy--7 lanes of traffic and bike lanes in both directions. We soon decided to take a shortcut to the Pinellas Trail, where it was much quieter.

We rode south to Dunedin where we stopped to see the dolphin structure welcoming us to town.

 

 

We continued riding south into Clearwater (and into the wind). We stopped at a bike shop where Dianne bought a new bike mirror. Notice the cool handle on the door!

We left the bike path then, and rode to Clearwater Beach, past the Aquarium where Winter the dolphin lives. We took a series of bridges down to Sand Key and on to Belleair Beach.

We crossed the Belleair causeway back to the mainland where we rode through a neighborhood of huge fancy homes built in the 1920s--this is the real "Old Florida"!  I stopped once to take a picture of the bridge we had crossed from Clearwater to Clearwater Beach.

Soon we were in Clearwater again, where we got back on the Pinellas Trail. It was nearly lunch time when we met Ed riding the other way--I had emailed him earlier in the week to see if he wanted to ride with us but had not heard from him. (He went on the Natchez Trace ride with us a couple of years ago). We yelled, he stopped and came back, and we all went to lunch in Dunedin.

After lunch we rode to Honeymoon Island State Park because Ed had never been there. We stopped at the Visitors Center and the beach (where Dianne and I walked with Jan on Monday).

Shortly after we got back on the Pinellas Trail we said goodbye to Ed. We rode the trail as far as we could, then it was into heavy traffic for the last 4 miles. What a great ride! We had intended to ride 40 miles today, but ended up with 48 sunny windy miles.