Day 126 – Pensacola, FL

It’s been an interesting past couple of days and my legs are all beat to hell.

Because of weather I had to cut the first day out of Dothan short which meant the second day was 85 miles in the glorious Florida sun. I made the mistake of not eating until lunch time and thus didn’t have enough carbs and therefore glycogen in my body. When you are hauling a lot of gear in the hot sun for many hours the body really craves glycogen. When it is depleted and you still want your body to do stuff it responds by NOT DOING ANYTHING!! This happened at the 65 mile mark so I had to stop a few times and eat and eat and still felt like total crap and actually still do not feel totally recovered.

Odd that it happened to far into my trip, but all the more reason to make sure that I pay attention to eating to feed the machine. I also blame it on my reduced beer intake 😉

This morning I woke up and took a nice soak in the Gulf. The sand is amazing the water clear and refreshing (check out video)

I got a tip from a fellow camper to have breakfast at the Doughnut Hole Bakery. It was yummy, the steak sandwich was literally a massive piece of steak between two pieces of bread. The couple sitting next to me, Daniel and Rachel, were having a little date vacation to celebrate their 6th wedding anniversary. I got to talking to them and found out that Daniel has done a bunch of non-denominaitonal outreach work both in Florida when in college and also in Nicaragua over the past 6 years. The most interesting thing was that the kids he helped in the beginning are now teaching the younger kids in the community about how to live a more fulfilling/better life.

I went out to get my water bottle for the server to refill and said goodbye to Daniel and Rachel as they were stepping out. It turns out that they pick dup my breakfast for me while I was outside. So big thanks to both of them for such a generous gesture!

Back on the road I was struggling along and got to a part of the road that had a lot of construction so the road had no shoulder and a jersey barrier that forced me into the lane. A guy in a pick-up truck followed me for about a mile with his flashers on to a make sure no one ran me over. HOW COOL IS THAT. I gave him a big wave as he passed me once I could get off the side of the road.

At the next gas station I stopped for some ice and he walked up to me and introduced himself and said get what ever you want to drink and eat. Turns out his name is Steve and he though what I was doing was pretty cool. After a moment of disbelief at his generosity both on the road and in the store I got some stuff. On the way out of the store he showed me his chameleon name Kong. He was soooooo AWESOME! Check out the pictures below. Big thanks to STEVE. You are the first driver out of 50,000+ that have passed me that has done that.

I’m tired. Good night!