The Unknown Florida

On our nightly bicycle rides through Tallahassee, Railroad Square and vicinity became one of our main places to stop and have a beer. As all the bars at the beginning of the pandemic were closed, we typically brought our own beer cans with us. In fact, we still do that even as bars and restaurants reopened. It has this picnic-style (or renegade) feeling if you sit down somewhere and pop open an alcoholic beverage. We know it is illegal in the US but no-one ever stopped us doing that. We had cops coming by and greeting us without ever complaining. Perhaps that is the privilege of being middle-aged white folks on bicycles; not very threatening. It is also a way to feel like a teenager again. As kids in Germany, we regularly took our bicycle for beer-rides through town. To this day, this is still very popular all over Germany. Well, all major cities are very bike-friendly, teenagers typically do not have their own cars (as you need to be 18 to drive) and the legal drinking age is 16. At one point, we calculated how many cans of beer we drank during the pandemic, but I will not report the result here. To our surprise, we never gained any weight during those Covid years. I suspect that the calories expended during those rides several times per week over almost three years, several thousand miles by now, were exactly covered by our beer consumption. Carbs are important if you work out a lot! To my surprise I never took a good photo of us with beer cans. Perhaps I was, so far, to ashamed to document that kind of juvenile or bum-like behavior. However, I have a good photo from a popular watering hole on Gaines Street (and Gaines Street at night) where we also stopped often.