Our second SunRail adventure! And the first time I’ve taken my camera on the bike.
This is a trip I’ve been wanting to do ever since I learned that this was possible. The first time we used Central Florida’s commuter rail to hit the trails was sometime in late November in 2023. For that first trip, I hadn’t planned it at all- I had a doctor’s appointment earlier in the morning and figured that we could take the train to DeBary and hit the trail. Some things that I didn’t account for: the mid-day schedule for SunRail is not as frequent as the morning/evening schedule, the weather would not cooperate (it rained), and there is no trail from the Sanford station (we got hungry and stopped for lunch at Hollerbach’s in Sanford). But taking all that we learned from the previous trip, we had a much more enjoyable trip to Blue Spring State Park this time around.
The good of the trip:
- We saw lots of manatees!
- Bringing lunch so we didn’t have to stop somewhere was a good idea.
- Gravel bikes are great for cutting through construction zones (not recommended) and jumping curbs when the multi-use paths are blocked by trucks
- Gloves are a nice luxury when the weather is cool
- Hot water in my Zojirushi mug stayed hot enough to heat up our lunch
The bad:
- Spencer got really cold. We were mostly well-prepared, but I should’ve packed a buff in addition to the gloves.
- Didn’t read the route too deeply beforehand so I didn’t know if we had to take the bridge or not (made Spencer lose a lot of momentum – whoops).
- Didn’t bring cash so had to wait at the main entrance to get in – next time we’ll bring money so we can skip that.
- Google Maps led us to a closed road… We could have re-routed, but we ended up just riding through. Felt awkward because there were definitely people working on the site. Oops. We took a different way back.
The neutral:
- Still don’t feel completely comfortable with carrying my camera in the panniers. Want to find a better way to carry it all. Or maybe I just get a point and shoot.
- Missed the 8:32 A.M. train and had to wait for the 9:00 A.M. train. Wasn’t too bad because the weather warmed up and we just ate our Clif bars while we waited for the next train.
Overall it was a pretty fun trip. 10/10 would do again.
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