Today I headed over to Mike’s backyard to play gravel bikes. He has been talking about his local ride for a couple weeks and it was time to go check it out. We parked inside this tall fence and Mike assured me that it was ok for us to be riding on this military training area.
This is pretty typical of this area, big wide straight roads with occasional sand traps. In the distance is a group of riders which I rode with on Sunday. Paul and Bob are living down in Destin and apparently use this as their training grounds too. They were doing the loop in the opposite direction. I tried to get a good picture of them but by the time I pulled out the camera they were well down the road.
There were lots of rolling hills with occasional creek crossings.
The whole area had a weird post apocalyptic feel. Mike is a former Special Ops guy so he felt right at home. It the distance we could hear explosions and cannon fire. Again, he reassured me we would be fine!
This was pretty much my view all day, Mike was rolling with fresh rested legs and I was still trying to recover from the hammer fest two days ago.
The ride included 11 miles of empty pavement.
At one point we rolled across these mobile missile launchers which were apparently targets for air drops…..
Towards the end of our ride came the rollers. Who says Florida doesn’t have hills? By the way, no rattlesnakes were seen.
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