I took a moment to look at our plan for the ride and thought I’d share this so everyone would understand our expectations.

We’re leaving Saturday 5/31 and the goal for me to return to work is Monday 8/4, that’s a total of 65 days.

To get back in time to start work on 8/4, we have to start driving home from Florida (in a rental van) no later than Saturday morning 8/2. (Of course, we’d like to leave earlier to visit places on the way back, but this is the limit in order to meet my goal for getting back to work).

This leaves 9 full weeks for biking or 63 days of riding. Yes, I know that we’re calling it our “57” ride, but we decided to give ourselves more time when we changed the ride from “Going to Florida” to “Going to Key West” – adding 500 miles.

The simple math is:

• If we do 38 miles per day we will finish the ride, but will have no free days at all
• If we do 50 miles per day we have 48 days riding, and 15 free days
• If we do 60 miles per day we have 40 days riding and 23 free days
• If we do 80 miles per day we have 30 riding days and 33 free days

Only the first 600 miles are hilly after that it gets pretty flat. Note that Carolyn does not think that the words “Only” and “600 hilly miles” should ever appear in the same sentence.

If we assume we do 40 miles per day through the hilly part (15 days) and then do 60 miles per day for the rest of the ride (30 days) we have 18 free days.

I expect that on average we will do better than 40/60 miles per day. So conservatively, we can expect to have 15-18 days for tourism, either on the bikes or in the van on the way back.