Early Morning Ride Guarantees A Great Day

There's no substitute for an early ride before the sun comes up.

It assures the day will have wonderful meaning regardless of what you do for the rest of the day.

Keep on pedaling!

Vero Pedalers Hold The Gifford Bike Tour This Morning

Figuring the best way to get to know a community is to bike it, about 30 bicyclists hit the road Saturday morning for a tour of Gifford.

The Vero Cycling bike club joined forces with several Gifford community leaders to hold the "Gifford Bike Tour," pedaling several miles with pit stops at places such as Florida's oldest black church and the Gifford Youth Achievement Center.

Gifford luminaries such as Freddie Woolfork, local NAACP leader Tony Brown and Sheriff's Deputy Theodore "Teddy" Floyd strapped on helmets and pedaled with the Vero Cycling members on a breeze Saturday morning.

One of the most fascinating stops along the way was a chat at the Historic Macedonia Church, the oldest black church in the state of Florida.

It was a reunion of sorts for Vero Cycling club president Sharon LaPoint, who used to teach at the schools in Gifford and enjoyed pedaling the tour.

Saturday's ride was a special event ride for the bike club, which has more than 330 paid members.

Soaking Up The Stick Marsh On A Day That Really Feels Like Autumn

You know that feeling when spring weather kicks in after a long winter up north?

It's 74 degrees, no humidity and you have an extra pop to your step and boundless energy.

That's the feeling Floridians get when the long humid summer gives way to a cool crisp autumn for the first time of the year.

Like this past weekend.

It's usually late October or early November when the sweat-soaked shirts give way to dry tops and as a transplanted New Yorker I call this dry weather in Florida "regular weather."

It's why Floridians put up with hurricanes and emotion-draining threats of hurricanes and muggy months half the year.

So, today I dove head first into our lovely weather by cycling 30 miles in the morning from Vero Beach to Sebastian and back in the morning, and then taking the Pugsley to the Stick Marsh outside Fellsmere and Sebastian in northwest Indian River County.

After moving back to Florida from Vegas and the West, I appreciate the serene and tranquil beauty of the Florida that you don't see in TV shows and movies.

The Stick Marsh is one of many unheralded natural gems in Indian River County.

Someone with deep pockets will discover the ecotourism gold mine around here and put the county as a ecotourism mecca on the map one day.

It's Time To Bicycle Bash -- At My Place

It's time to Bicycle Bash!

I'm hosting a Bicycle Bash-style celebration at my house in Vero Beach on Sunday November 6 from 10 am to 5 pm. So mark your calendars.

Some of you will recall I used to organize the annual Bicycle Bash festival in Tampa Bay on behalf of a group of bicycle stores and lawyers called SWFBUD.

I thought it would be fun to invite you to a Bicycle Bash party at my house in Vero Beach. It starts with a 10am bike ride to the ocean and back and then a whole afternoon of fun bicycle enjoyment from 12 noon to 5 pm back at my house.

You're welcome to bring bicycles, gear and equipment to swap or sell and any tents to display or tell people about bicycle activities. I have lots of lawn room for everyone.

If you read this bicycle blog, you're certainly invited to come and I also listed this bicycle party as a Facebook event for more information.

The weather is mercifully cooler and the bike rides are so much more enjoyable now in Florida,

Hope to see you there!

 

Raiding The Public Till To Build Adelson Stadium

I have covered stadium subsidy deals across the country and the just-approved $750 million public gift to billionaire Sheldon Adelson and the Oakland Raiders for a $1.9 billion domed stadium off the Strip is one of the biggest rigged fleecing jobs I have seen in my 20 years of reporting on stadium deals.

You have the Las Vegas newspaper owned by Adelson playing cheerleader, so there was no watchdog -- the role the biggest local newspaper should have been playing all along.

(It should be noted that in my first stadium subsidy story at the Las Vegas Review-Journal earlier this year, the new publisher, Craig Moon, who had just been hired by Adelson, would not allow an anti-Adelson quote by a respected sports economist in my RJ story). 

The review process by a state panel created by Gov. Sandoval and then the state legislators was nothing less than a joke -- yes, a farce because the stadium economic numbers served up by the consultants were laughable.

I call bullshit on their assertion that a new domed stadium would host 46 annual events. I call bullshit on the consultant's assertion that the PR value of having the Oakland Raiders in Las Vegas is worth a value of $100 million a year (as if nobody ever heard of Las Vegas). I call bullshit that a third of the seats will be bought by people who don't even live in the Las Vegas market. And I call bullshit that there will be more than half a billion dollars of economic spending a year thanks to the stadium when a big chunk of that money would have simply been spent on other entertainment options in the Vegas market.

The rush job behind increasing the hotel room charge for the $750 million in public dollars was pathetic. There was no subtle style behind it. No finesse. This deal was rammed through without the proper vetting typically seen with these stadium ripoff deals.

Jon Ralston, the political watchdog of Las Vegas, was the only journalist in the market who consistently hammered away at the absurdity of handing over $750 million to one of America's richest men and a team that's part of a sports league that generates $12 billion in revenue every year.

I chipped in with this story for Desert Companion that highlighted some of the points I'm making here.

I'm hardly the only one who has made these observations.

A bicycle friend in Las Vegas, Kevin Turchin, wrote a fantastic comment on Facebook about this stadium ripoff deal and I am posting it here. Kevin works and lives in the Summerlin area of Las Vegas and is one of the most thoughtful people I know. (And he's one helluva of cyclist. They don't call him the "Turchinator" for nothing.)   

Here's Kevin's words:

The problem is the entire process and our prioritization of community and state needs. 

The process has not been transparent and this has been a rush job from the beginning (your first clue that we are about to get screwed).

The Tesla deal and others have been much more thoroughly vetted than our politicians have done in this case.

In cities across the country this happens again and again where the taxpayers are on the hook for a significant portion of the funding and are not told the true cost of the stadium.

Minnesota's new stadium was finally approved after a an electronic gambling funding mechanism was approved.

The problem was the math was so flawed nobody found out until after everything was approved and in motion.

The taxpayers are now on the hook for more than they were promised.

The math on taxpayer subsidized stadiums is always fuzzy at best and has never been proven to be a net profit for the communities they are built in had the stadiums never been built.

I encourage everyone to read the articles written and posted by Alan Snel who written on these things for years.

Also KNPR had a great two part series on the State of Nevada show describing both sides of the argument so you can be the judge.

Also, look at the recent history of these stadiums. Stadiums are looking to build new stadiums about every 20 years, much shorter than the projected taxpayer obligation even under very aggressive tourism growth applied to this case.

Lastly, like I said before, the city of Oakland is offering very little to the Raiders in terms of subsidy and yet we come out of the gate with $750,000,000?

And we get none of the profits from the stadium?

This is lunacy and we need to look beyond how cool it would be to have our very own football team.

There are other unfunded obligations in our city and state that would be better addressed by this new tax and would go much further in creating a more livable and sustainable place to live and work.

Bicycle As Effective Tool To Cover The News

Many people use the bicycle as a health tool.

But I also use my bike as an effective and practical transportation tool to cover the news.

When I was out reporting on the erosion of Indian River County's beaches, I found my bicycle was a great way to slowly see the damage and understand it better if I was racing by in a car.

Re-uniting With The Alps Of Florida

For the first time since I returned to Florida, I had a reunion with my ol' Clermoint pal -- a 41-mile ride carved out of the popular Horrible Hundred ride.

It was 1,900 feet of climbing -- WITH a snapped rear derailleur cable that put me in the shittiest gear to climb. Good thing my Vegas/Nevada mountain climbing past came in handy to muscle up the hills of Buckhill and Sugarloaf Mountain.

Debbie, again, accompanied me for the roller-coaster journey outside Clermont in Lake County, which began with a nice serene jaunt along Lake Minneola.

But after three miles, we began ascending off the pretty lake and began the rolling hills outside Clermont.

I have crafted a wonderful route, that changes every few miles from country roads cutting through old citrus groves, to hilly rollers meandering on the edge of new developments to Florida's classic hill climbs such as Sugarloaf.

At the top of Sugarloaf Mountain Road lives a kind and thoughtful former Air Force man named Harry who I interviewed for past Alps of Florida travel stories who rolls out two orange water coolers to thirsty cyclists.

And there he was today, in action. I have talked to Harry on the phone for interviews but never met the gentleman in person.

Until today.

This area is also known for its triathlete and bike races -- and one was happening today.

One of the steeper roads -- at least it was relatively a short distance -- was Blue Jay Road that leads riders back into the Clermont area.

Biking A Florida Gem -- The Ormond Loop

If you'e a bicyclist from the South Florida or Tampa Bay area, you probably have not heard of one of Florida's bicycle ride gems -- the Ormond Loop about 10 miles north of Daytona Beach.

It's a 25-mile ride through inspiring canopied state forest lands, along the Atlantic Intracoastal and a mere few pedal rotations to the Atlantic and A1A.

There's history along the way, too -- an 1825 sugar and rum factory along the route, and the ruins are there for all to see.

This morning, Debbie and I journeyed up I-95 from Vero Beach, leaving around 5:30 am for the two-hour, 130-mile car trip to Ormond Beach. Around 8 am, we took off from a downtown Ormond Beach city park lot and soaked up the views.

Here's one of my favorite photos from the day.

The lovely feature about the ride is the cycling along the water too.

The route starts on the mainland on the Intracoastal, but then moves to the barrier island side where the Atlantic Ocean is within only a few minutes of riding.

For more information, check out a travel story on the Ormond Loop from 2008.