Friday night in Surf City, USA.

Really, the town is called Surf City. It's in North Carolina--on the beach.

Today we rode from Carolina Beach to Wilmington before 11:30am. It was sort of drizzling, but the roads were flat, the shoulders were wide, and, did I mention that it was drizzling? We rode as fast as we could. What was going to be a short stop at a bike shop in Wilmington, turned out to be most of the morning and into the afternoon. By the time we got ourselves back on the road, it was 2:00pm.

At least it had stopped raining/drizzling.

Either we had finally caught the elusive tailwind, or there was something extra in the hush-puppies we had for lunch. I saw my cyclo-computer hit 20mph--a speed I don't usually see unless I'm going downhill. We flew along the router for over an hour, and finally stopped at a convenience store on the route.

That's where two amazing things happened. One: I learned that my husband of 18 years and I share a passion for Frosted Flakes. The conversation came up when we saw a sippy-cup "Drink and Crunch" package of the stuff. Just add milk, so they say. Of course we got 2 of them. The packaging doesn't really work as planned, but we had spoons.

Two: As we were sitting in the c-store, sipping iced frappacino's and discussing other cereal likes and dislikes--3 young women cycle into the parking lot! One of them, Lanier, had a B.O.B. trailer like our yellow one. The others, Marin and Elka, had panniers. They had stopped to check their map, looking for a way to get off of 17/210. They were headed for Surf City, also our destination, and more importantly for them, the beach.

They had just finished up their Master's at Duke, and had decided to cycle out to the beach to celebrate.

The five of us formed a crazy sort of multi-wheeled conga line as we set out for the last 10 miles to the beach. We rode in a straight line until the road ended at the beach.