Friday, November 23, 2012 – Cocoa:

            Finally woke up to a calm day – bright blue sky, and the wind has died down considerably.  I got to do one of my favorite things and that was to take my coffee and sit up on the enclosed flybridge – it’s like a cozy sunroom when you are not underway.  The air can be a little cool, but the flybridge is toasty warm, and you are up high, and have a great view all around you.  Bob and I sat up there and planned the day, which basically consisted of getting out the bikes and going grocery shopping.

            This seems like a relatively simple plan, doesn’t it?  Ha!  Think again!  First Bob had to get the bikes out of the lazarette – but they weren’t just stowed in the lazarette – they were stowed behind everything else in the lazarette.  Ok, Bob finally gets them out, and then has to put everything back in again and make it fit the way it did before which isn’t easy even though the bikes have been taken out.  Then we have to get the bikes from the boat onto the dock, which isn’t easy because there is a piling right in the middle of the gate opening where we exit the boat, and the bikes are very unwieldy creatures.  It’s fine for us to get around, but rather difficult when you are trying to wrestle two bikes even if they are folding bikes.  So that challenge is met, and we take the bikes to a sunny part of the dock where we can unfold them and set them up out of the breeze.  Ok – that gets done.  Now we have to find the baskets to put on the back of the bikes to hold the groceries.  Bob seems to remember he put them up under the seat in the flybridge.  So we find them and they are full of spare parts which have to be removed along with several other items so the baskets can be slid along the floor to a space where they can be lifted out – then, of course, all the spare parts and other stuff that came out of the seat compartment has to be repacked.  And that gets done.  Now all we have to do is find enough bungee cords to attach the plastic baskets to the back of the bike.  That becomes a bit of a challenge because the bicycle seat is in the way of the basket properly fitting on the back of the bike.  As a matter of fact, I find I can’t ride my bike because in order to fit the basket on my bike the seat has to be raised too high for me to ride comfortably.  I’m already feeling a bit nervous about riding these bikes – they’re weird, and I haven’t been bike riding in a long time.  So we decide that we’re really not going to buy that many groceries, and off comes the basket on my bike.  Next Bob has to find the cables that we will use to lock the bikes up so no unscrupulous person can make off with them while we are buying bread and milk.  Once we find the cables, then we have to find the locks and the key.  Eventually this all gets done, but this has taken a long time.

            We are now ready to take the bikes out of the marina complex and go for a little ride.  So Bob is on his bike, and this nice man happens by, and he says to Bob, “Say, excuse me, Sir, your tires are too low, and with that bike is will be much harder to peddle and you will tear the inner tube and the air valve.”  Oh.  (I knew this was going to happen).  So back to the boat with the bikes we go - Bob’s son gave Bob this gizmo that among many other amazing things can put air in your tires.  As it so happens, this gizmo happens to be up on the flybridge under the seat where the baskets came out of.  So Bob wrestles the thing out of its storage place, and replaces all the other stuff that had to come out first, and he gets it down and on the dock (did I mention it’s heavy?), and lo and behold, it is blinking that it needs to recharge itself before using.  Aaarrrgghgh… Bob uses it anyway, and it seems to put enough air in the tires so we think we can make it to the grocery store and back again without incurring a flat tire. 

            So back out of the marina, and this time we don’t run into anyone foretelling any doom and gloom as we prepare to ride off.  We decide to go to the little bakery and café where we got the wonderful croissants yesterday and have lunch since it is almost 1:00 p.m.  By this time we are hungry and fed up dealing with the folding bikes, and as Bob leans his bike up against the sign post in front of the café, he says, “Oh let someone come along and have the darn things.”  So we didn’t bother to lock them up, and no one came along and took them – darn.   We did sit at a lovely little table outside the café in the shade right next to the bikes so that may have had something to do with the fact that no one ran off with them.  I think it was because anyone looking at the things would think they would be very uncomfortable to ride and they would be right.  We did have a wonderful lunch – the sandwiches at this little bakery/café are different and delicious – I had an Ocean, which is salmon, egg salad, lettuce and tomato on tomato bread, and Bob had a turkey club, which he said was one of the best he ever had. 

            Now it is time to head off to the store.  We have heard that there is a Publix (our new favorite grocery store) close by, and everyone we have talked to has told us a different way to get there, but they all insist it is only about ½ mile up road.  Yeah, right.  We take the route that seemed at the time to be the best one, and we peddled and peddled, and peddled mostly on a major highway, but at least it had a sidewalk.  Finally after several days, we arrived (oh no, I meant several hours – no wait…that’s not right…it only seemed like several hours – maybe twenty minutes).  This time we locked the bikes up and limped around in the store for the few groceries we needed. 

            Now, getting the groceries back home was another challenge.  We took our own bags, and I took the light stuff, eggs, bread, etc., and was able to fasten the bag onto the back of the bike with a bungee cord.  It seemed to be pretty securely fastened.  Then Bob took the rest of the groceries that would fit into the plastic basket on the back of his bike.  Unfortunately, as he was riding to the store, part of the basket (and when I say basket – these are like those big, plastic milk carton things) broke where it sat behind his seat, but we have more bungee cords, and we think his basket is also securely fastened. 

            So off we go.  This time when we get out of the parking lot, we decide to turn another way and go off into a residential area where someone had given us different directions.  Now, I don’t know why this is, but I cannot possibly keep up with Bob when we are bike riding.  And it’s not just that I can’t keep up with him – he finally turns into a minute dot he gets so far ahead of me.  I have resigned myself to this, and hope that he eventually looks around for me.  So I am riding along, and Bob disappears from view, and I peddle faster to catch up even though by this time I think my legs are going to fall off, and I might fall off the bike and just lie in the road and hope someone comes along and runs over me and puts me out of my misery – when I catch sight of him.  But…uh oh…the groceries appear to be all over the road.  I catch up to him, and he tells me that he turned around to look for me, and that’s when the basket slid off the bike.  (Thank Heaven I had the eggs…)  So we are fixing the basket back to the bike and picking up the groceries, which don’t look the worse for falling off the bike, and this nice man comes out of his garage, and offers to help.  We, of course, say, “No, that’s all right.”  But he says he has some bungee cords he can give us, and goes to fetch them and helps us secure the basket more securely than before.  After many “thank you’s” we are on our way again, and finally arrive back at the boat.  The route we took back to the boat ran along the river, and was much easier and prettier than the route we took to get to the store.  Live and learn!

            Finally, the groceries are put away, the bikes are wrestled back on the boat, and are secured on the stern ready for our next adventure, which will probably be to return the bungee cords to the nice man who gave them to us, and we will go buy our own!

            …and I thought our adventures would end when we got into Cocoa!