Shortly after Bill and I arrived home from our epic Northern Tier ride in 2024, we received a phone call from our friends, Mark and Debbie in Ontario asking if we wanted to join them for a Gulf Coast ride in the Spring of 2025. So, here we are ready to head to New Orleans to begin the almost 1,200-mile ride on Sunday, April 20.

We plan to finish in Key West, FL on May 11 with two rest days along the way. For those of you that have a good memory and are good with math, you have already calculated that the average mileage is much shorter than the average riding day on our cross-country trip.

If you want to follow along, I will be using this 2024 epic ride website to journal our journey. As it was last year, I cannot guarantee that I will post every day (and in fact, I think there will be fewer changes in the terrain on this trip than we experienced last year so it could be less than interesting). Anyway, if you want to see a lot of beaches and the gulf waters, tune in here.

We are healthy this year and hope to enjoy the ride and the sites on the route. There are about 25 cyclists on the trip as well as three support vehicles and we only know Mark and Debbie so I expect we will make a few friends as we ride and relax après cycling. We are staying in hotels/motels and we will dust off our shower rating system to help us distinguish one place from another, to keep it a little entertaining and to take the focus off the smokey smelling “nonsmoking” rooms we might experience.

Stay tuned, I’ll send installment number one soon!