Yesterday we spent the day docked at the island of Antigua.  I had been there once before, on the last Disney cruise we did, but Delaney and I did an excursion, and stayed on the water the entire time, so we saw nothing of the island.

This time I decided to take a different approach.  Now, part of my motivation was purely a compulsion to stick with my training plan no matter what (I’m not terribly flexible, sometimes), and part of it was just that at this point, I ride so often that it’s a habit—and without it I begin to have cravings.

So before we left home, I did some research online and found a bike shop.  I gave them a call and made arrangements to rent a mountain bike for the day (they don’t have road bikes available—in hindsight, it’s a darn good thing).  So when the ship docked, I took a cab to the far side of St. John’s, the port town, and found the bike shop.  They gave me a bike, a pump, and a lock.  I brought my mountain bike shoes from home, but forgot the pedals, so I wound up having to just wear sneakers (no cages, even).  I also brought my own helmet, which the guys in the shop found fascinating—apparently they’d never seen a Giro Pneumo before.  Not terribly surprising, given that I never saw anyone else wearing a helmet, even though I saw LOTS of people on bikes.

So they plotted out a route for me, gave me the map, and I headed out with a water bottle and a few US dollars.  It was a fantastic ride—one that I will remember for the rest of my life.  I first had to wrap my brain around the idea that Antiguans drive on the left-hand side of the road—and they have round-abouts (traffic circles, in American English).  My first round-about was five minutes into the ride, while I was still in town traffic.  I got into it, then couldn’t quite get myself out at the right spot, so I made a slightly wrong turn, and just turned around down the block and tried again.  After that, the left-hand side of the road thing was a no-brainer.

I continued along down the western coast of the island, rolling through picturesque (if poor) little villages, where people waved and spoke to me.  I had to dodge chickens and goats in the road, but the drivers were unfailingly polite and gave me a wide berth, even when I was careening around potholes on the narrow little roads.

The roads were uniformly dreadful—I was really grateful for those wide knobby tires.  I’m not used to a mountain bike, so it took me a while to realize that I really didn’t have to avoid the potholes—when I started plowing through (and even over!) them, I had a lot more fun.  It was hilly, but the hills were generally short and steep, which I really enjoy.  Stand up, crank hard for a minute or two, then let it rip on the downhill.  My idea of a grand time.

The road ran along the western coast, just inside the outer perimeter of hills.  It ran out literally at the water’s edge, and turned back toward the east.  I rode for 30 or 40 minutes right along the coastline, with villages and jungle on my left and high cliffs above crashing waves, alternating with sandy white beaches, on my right.  It was absolutely spectacular.  A short, violent rainshower marred the view a bit, but only because I couldn’t see through the rain on my glasses.  It felt great in the heat.

At the top of Carlisle Bay, I stopped to buy a banana (a short little one called a Finger Rose) from a woman running a fruit stand on the side of the road.  She wouldn’t take money for just one, so I bought a bottled water from her as well, and told her to keep the little bit of change.

Just down the road, I came upon several teenagers hawking something they called “jellywater.”  So I stopped and bought some.  It turned out to be an immature coconut, which they hacked open for me.  I drank the water, then they showed me how to scoop out a white, jelly-ish goo that I suppose would eventually mature into the meat of the coconut.  It was just like it sounds.  But I enjoyed chatting with the guys; it was worth every penny of the two bucks that I spent.

So then the road turned back north, up through the middle of the island.  When I was at the bike shop, the guys plotting my route had asked me how I was on hills.   Not bad, I figured.  They warned me that Fig Tree Hill was pretty steep.  When I got back to the shop, I informed them that where I come from, we call that a mountain, not a hill.  All these islands were formed, aeons ago, by a massive tectonic upthrust—if you look at a map, you can see the curve of islands that popped up as volcanoes.  Some of them are still active (like St. Lucia), and some still have earthquakes (like Martinique), but most are just incredibly hilly, like small steep mountains poking up out of the sea.

Fig Tree Hill—definitely a mountain.  It was a good thing I was wearing sneakers—I had to walk twice.  At one point, a taxi van full of tourists crawled past me as I was laboring just to walk the bike up the incline.  I could see them staring at me through the windows; I felt a bit like an exhibit:  “See here on the left side, folks, we have a lunatic in spandex.”

The downhill would’ve been fantastic, except that there was a construction site at the top of the “hill,” and the trucks coming up and down had rutted and scarred the road so badly that even with the knobbies, I was afraid to really cut loose and go fast.  The construction site, just as an aside, was a complex of high zip lines being built up above the tree canopy and the gorge below.  I stopped for a minute or two (ostensibly to chat with the maintenance guy, but really to catch my breath), and he said that there are 30 lines up there, connecting platforms up in the treetops.  I didn’t try it, but I bet it would be breathtaking.

Further down the road, I came to an unanticipated intersection, so I stopped once again, this time at a roadside lunch stand.  These were all over the island, and they make our taco trucks look sophisticated.  Each stand consisted of a couple of folding tables covered by a tarp on poles.  This guy had seasoned rice, lobster salad, conch water, goat water, pig’s foot soup, cow’s foot soup, and some other kind of salady thing that I can’t remember.  I would’ve bought something from him, but none of that sounded like cycling power food.  Especially in the 85 degree heat.  So I got directions and soldiered on.

I got back to the bike shop uneventfully.  The whole ride took me two and a half hours, start to finish.  I was a bit smug about that, since the guys had plotted what they were certain was a three hour ride.

I know this is an insanely long post, but I wanted to think about what it was I enjoyed so much yesterday, and I’ve concluded that it’s hard to sum up.  I loved what I saw, I loved talking to kind people, I loved blowing up on that mountain, I loved the smells of food as I passed the lunch stands, I loved that every other person I saw on a bicycle called out to me some raucous, exuberant greeting—at home I’m lucky if I get a nod of the head or flick of a finger from another person on a bike.  So I guess it was the pure physical pleasure of riding a bike, plus the intellectual stimulation (although I’m not sure if that’s the right word) of seeing a new, and very different, place.