Adventure Cycling Association

You’ll meet the group and your leader in St. Augustine and put the final touches on your gear before a wheel dip in the Atlantic Ocean. We will head toward Palatka — where, it’s rumored, previous Southern Tier riders have tracked down some of the best milkshakes on the entire route. From there we’ll bypass Gainesville riding by Ichetucknee Springs, Florida’s natural lazy river. After riding by the relatively remote Apalachicola National Forest, we will approach the Florida Gulf Coast as we make our way to Mexico Beach.

We’ll shift toward the Mississippi Sound and enter Alabama and eventually Mississippi. As we fight the urge to spend our days exploring seafood restaurants along the route, we’ll head to the Alabama Port, where we’ll roll aboard a ferry for a different sort of ride through Mobile Bay to Dauphin Island, which has flown French, English, and Spanish flags, and the Fort Morgan Historic Site. We’ll take in the amazing sights, sounds, smells, and cuisine of the coast. The road is mostly flat, except for the frequent bridges and causeways over bays, marshes, and rivers. Eventually, we’ll leave the Gulf and head inland, to cross the state and aim for Poplarville, Mississippi where we have the option of taking a layover day and making the trip to New Orleans.

After crossing the Pearl River, we will enter Louisiana; the pine belt of the US. We’ll spend most of our time in Louisiana crossing the pine hills and prairies of the Louisiana Uplands portion of the Gulf Coastal Plain, the geological province where the state lies. The crossing of the Mighty Mississippi will occur soon after leave Jackson, LA before we continue through Simmesport, Mamou (the Cajun capital of Louisiana and the world where we can treat our ears to the rich sounds of zydeco music and our taste buds to some catfish and boiled crawfish) and Oberlin, with any luck we might catch the Bundick Lake Cajun Cook-Off.

Less than 10 miles after leaving our gracious hosts in Merryville, we reach the end of our 4th state and enter Texas; the 2nd largest state in the nation, a place where we will spend the next few weeks and where the hills begin to roll. A place that a popular western swing song refers to as “miles and miles of Texas” — more than a thousand miles, in fact. We’ll glide through the pine woods of southeast Texas and a beautiful stretch of woods within Sam Houston National Forest. In a few days, we end in Austin for a rest day to enjoy arguably the music capital of the US, but of at least Texas. Gone will be the heavily forested areas as we end the week.

Leaving Austin, we cycle through Johnson City and the LBJ Ranch and Fredericksburg (full of food, music and cultural activities and into the beautiful Texas Hill Country. We’ll ride along the meandering Guadalupe River and over the hills in this region which are challenging, but each climb gets us closer to the end. The half-way mileage mark in our journey will happen this week near Kerrville. Next, we’ll press on through Brackettville and Seminole Canyon State Park to Del Rio (site of a legendary UFO crash). We’ll end the week in Sanderson, the Cactus Capital of Texas.

During the last week in Texas, we’ll cruise over sagebrush-covered hills and under the wide-open skies of west Texas passing near Big Bend National Park, named for the sharp turn that the Rio Grande makes on its way to the sea. A trio of unique and charming towns — Marfa, Alpine, and Marathon — punctuate the long road through the open plains. Stop for a visit to an art gallery, a hearty serving of brisket, or a pint from a local brewery. On our last day and more than a thousand miles in Texas, we will pass through El Paso, a boomtown that was so lawless in the late 1800s it earned the moniker “Six Shooter Capital”. Riding along the Rio Grande River we enter the next state, New Mexico, and an overnight in Las Cruces.

Las Cruces is New Mexico’s second-largest city and the home of New Mexico State University. We’ll roll on through Hatch, the self-proclaimed “Chili Capital of the World,” home of the famous chili festival held every September. We’ll press onward toward Silver City, but we must first climb over the Continental Divide at the 8,228-foot Emory Pass, the high point of the Southern Tier Route. The reward will be an awesome scenic descent into the town of Mimbres and a rest day in the fun town of Silver City, a funky hamlet ringed by mountains, which was an old hangout for outlaws like Billy the Kid, but now happily welcomes wandering cyclists. From here you can set out on a hilly but rewarding side trip to the ruins at Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, home of the Mogollon people who populated the region over 700 years ago. Our week finishes with another state crossing, Arizona, we have arrived.

We’ll swoop out of Globe, Arizona to the Tonto National Forest. Our reward will be views of the Theodore Roosevelt Reservoir filled by a 357-foot-high dam of the same name. As we enter a desert climate, trees will be replaced by saguaro sentinels as we continue westward to a much-welcomed day of rest in Mesa, AZ outside of Phoenix. Leaving Mesa we cycle through the agricultural heartland of Arizona, passing rows of date palms and vibrant green fields of cotton, alfalfa, and lettuce, adding color. We enter the final state in our journey, California, after crossing the Colorado River at Ehrenberg, AZ.

On the penultimate day of the tour, we’ll leave the deserts of Southern California as we will begin climbing into the Laguna Mountains. The ocean smells will begin to linger in the air after a few hot and dry days from El Centro to Alpine, CA where it will be all downhill to San Diego, the Pacific Ocean and our traditional dipping of our front tires in the ocean. A job well done, will be highlighted with celebratory congratulations, photos and smiles that stretch across our faces. We will bid each other farewell until the next adventure.