St. Augustine, FL, the nation's oldest city, is a twenty-minute ride south on the super-slab from Jacksonville, but where is the fun in that? Instead of the Interstate, I opt to take a more circuitous route. I leave Jacksonville on State Road 13, through Fruit Cove, towards the tiny town of Hastings, forty miles to the south.

It's surprising how much island hopping one can do without booking a cabin on a cruise ship - and in southern Florida that's exactly what I might have had to do if it hadn't been for one wily oil tycoon. Instead, comfortably settled into the low-slung seat of a new Vulcan 900, I can roam the long smooth deck of US 1 and never once lay eyes on a shuffleboard player while heading south to Key West.

It's a long, slow process squaring off a touring motorcycle's tire. As the wheels rotate, asphalt constantly gnaws at the radial's vulnerable contact patch. Like legions of amoebic strip miners, this aggregation of incisors attacks my ebony hoops - digging, grinding, and belching away a microscopic vapor of polymer that settles unseen upon the grasses swayed by the passing Triumph.

In the grand scheme of things, February in North Carolina is not all that bad. We could ride year round, but few of us choose to do so. Our long, hot summers condition us to opt for the extra two wheels once the leaves take leave. Sure, the daytime highs usually crack 40 degrees, but like many, I use those 12 or so weeks of winter to get reacquainted with my truck. I know what you're thinking, and you're right: I am a wimp.

The R rule is one of the seafood basics I remember from my younger days on the Chesapeake Bay. If a month contains the letter R, it's OK to eat oysters. My destination is the Florida Panhandle, the month is February, and the Apalachicola area of the Panhandle happens to be world renowned for its oysters. I'm certainly no rocket scientist - they're all over at Cape Canaveral - but it appears that somebody's going to be slamming down some bivalves.