Brandon Gross was rolling north on US1, somewhere near Northeast 116th Street, hands moving as he talked to himself on an e-bike doing close to 60 mph through October afternoon traffic, when a duck walked into his path and jumped clear just in time. That moment, equal parts absurd and weirdly charming, captures something most outsiders never get to see: Miami is not the fever-dream caricature it is made out to be. It is stranger, more layered, and considerably more worth living in than its reputation suggests. Gross, a Miami-based boating creator who traded Pittsburgh winters for Biscayne Bay, set out to prove that point with a 33-mile loop through the city on his Ride1Up Pro 2.0 e-bike, starting at 95 percent battery and, as it turned out, finishing with the indicator blinking red.
A neighbor’s boat, a hot dog stand, and one very bad bridge
The ride began before the ride began, with a tour of his neighbor’s 1989 Ocean Yachts 48 motor yacht parked right next door. Three full staterooms, three heads, a full-width master stateroom with a tub, a walk-in engine room with twin Detroit 671 Ti diesels and a Westerbeke generator all sitting just over 3,000 hours. The neighbor is asking 60 grand. Gross noted one recurring gauge reading nearly 11,000 hours and dismissed it outright: ‘I think that’s wrong since the one engine is 3,000 and so is the generator. I don’t know what happened to that hour meter.’ The flybridge clinched it for him, cushions still in good shape, views unobstructed.
From there, the urban lap began in earnest. Rain arrived almost immediately. Gross ducked into a corner spot called Dogma Grill and waited it out over a chili dog. When the roads dried, Midtown opened up into downtown and the Miami River drawbridge, backed up with traffic and flooded with e-bikes running straight through red lights. A converted airplane fuselage serving as a coffee shop caught his eye near the river. Sky Coffee, which had moved to that location about two months earlier, had its staff dressed as airline captains and a TSA scanner at the entrance. He logged exactly 2,000 miles on the bike at that stop.
The stadium, the skate park, and a walk-in engine room of a city
Crossing toward Virginia Key, Gross detoured into Marine Stadium, an abandoned waterfront structure he had passed dozens of times by boat and never once explored on foot. He picked his way up through algae-covered steps and broken concrete to the top tier, looking out over a bay that, on Saturdays, fills wall to wall with charter boats. He called the inside ‘crazy’ and meant it architecturally. Back on the mainland, he found the Lot 11 skate park sitting underneath I-95, gave it one respectful corner before backing off so as not to bother the skaters.
South Beach closed the loop. On weekends the whole length of Ocean Drive shuts to cars. Gross arrived with 37 percent battery and 33.1 miles on the odometer and, against his own expectations, knocked out a muscle-up at the outdoor gym near the volleyball courts, crediting two months of twice-weekly rock climbing near downtown for bringing that ability back.
The heat debate came up on the ride home. ‘I went home in the middle of summer this year and it was like 95, almost 100 degrees,’ he said about Pittsburgh. ‘It gets over 100 a good bit in Pittsburgh.’ His point was plain: Florida summers are not the outlier people insist they are.
The oldest house nobody told him about
Along the Miami River, Gross stumbled onto the Wagner Homestead, built in the 1850s and recognized as the oldest standing house in Miami-Dade County. A few steps away sat the Fort Dallas long house, built in the 1840s, later used by the US Army, deconstructed, and rebuilt piece by piece on the current site in 1925. He had never heard of either.
The battery hit 18 percent and started limiting top speed on the bridge back north, downtown skyline off to the left, last light fading over the water. Gross had ridden 33 miles and proved, more or less accidentally, that the city’s reputation and its reality are two entirely different addresses.
The one gauge nobody could explain
That single hour meter on the 1989 Ocean Yachts 48 still reads nearly 11,000 hours while every other instrument on the same boat shows just over 3,000.
Gross pulled off his helmet back where he started, immediately got hit by mosquitoes, and called it a night.
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