I was determined to make the ride to Pure Triumph 170 miles north, a fun trip, a relaxing excursion instead of a road pounding punishment. Which meant a stop at Denny's Latin Cafe next to Starbucks on Key Largo.
Chorizo and eggs and loud Latin music while I read my daily Citizen. I confess I lingered over the con leche and only eventually got out to bask in the sun's warmth which basking led me to remove the liner from my mesh armored jacket. The roads are straight but South Florida in January is hard to beat. Even though I left Denny's at 9am I still chose to ride Card Sound Road to Homestead. It's the alternative route that avoids the 18-mile direct route known as "The Stretch." Card Sound adds seven miles and a dollar toll, but its a great ride.
This backroad, photographed in October shortly after I got the Bonneville, winds through tall greenery with sweeping bends, the surface is smooth and police presence is rare so 70 or 75 in a 55 is entirely doable. A refreshing interlude before the hum drum 50 miles of turnpike to Fort Lauderdale, which I took mostly at 80 or 90 miles an hour with one notable burst just clipping 100 on the optimistic speedo. At those speeds the Triumph was perfect, smooth stable and still very responsive. It may be designed as a head-turning tourer but this retro rides the freeway very comfortably.
I actually had a good time at Pure Triumph- they took the Bonneville I sat around for a couple of very relaxing hours sprawled on a leather couch reading English motorcycle magazines (Bike isn't too impressed by the Bonneville in hard riding twisties, but they are hooligans anyway) until it was time to fork over $317 and get going again.
My return trip did not go so well. I had wanted to locate Heinz and Frenchie's swing bridge just for fun but neither Google nor Google maps was giving up the secret in my brief search so I got on 595, the freeway spur to get out west and hit Highway 27 south. That was a nasty nightmare thanks to construction with exits closed and traffic backed up in every direction for miles. I hate lane splitting in a state filled with angry armed drivers but it was hot on the engine so I did a little. The Bonneville was running beautifully, I could feel the work they had done. The chain was tighter than I tensioned it 2500 miles ago and that's noted for future reference, plus Jason balanced the carburettors and the motorcycle was much more smooth as a result.
All bad things eventually come to an end and the four lanes of Highway 27 soon opened up to me, straight of course, across the edge of the Everglades where development hasn't yet quite reached and sugar cane remains to the north. Highway 27 eventually branches onto Krome Avenue:
And the theme of lonely marshy highway continues south:
Then we had the second chaotic moment of the day, inbetween the nurseries and market farms and isolated homesteads and gas stations, a wreck. 
I was stuck at a light thinking about how people around here grow palm trees for sale and what do they do with them when they get this big, and this many, when I realised we were being diverted around a problem up ahead. 
The diversion led us to the edge of the known world and after we were back on Krome Avenue I stopped to wipe some of the dust off my freshly cleaned Bonneville. 
The Rescue guy was telling Univision two pick ups hit head on at 1:30pm probably driving too fast. 
Yeah, no kidding, from my amateurish standpoint I'd say speed was a factor in this vehicle compression. The whole interview scene made me glad my days as a reporter are long over. Talk about trivialization. I mean this is the day Raul Castro outpolled his brother in Santiago de Cuba, and I'm guessing this story came first in Miami's local news. Another reason I don't have TV at home.
There is for me something fascinating about the agriculture along Krome Avenue. The state is threatening to widen the highway and if people insist on disassembling their cars like this I suppose the state will have no choice but to do it. I like Krome as it is, a straight shot through the lives of the Mexican and Central American fieldworkers, a place of abundance- of vegetables if not wages, all on display, impossible to avoid unless you stick to the freeways and turnpikes.
Also one might miss a hand written sign offering Central American lunches, and this stop was just what I needed to push back the thought of wrecks, fieldwork and a hot sticky helmet.
A pupusa or two, a Salvadoran lunch of a thick tortilla filled with cheese or meat grilled till molten and eaten with a mayonnaise-free coleslaw.
Salvadorans eat them by stuffing the slaw inside the pupusa, but me, I'm a "gormet" and I like my flavors separate on the fork...a plate for $5 and all the shade I could use. Enough to make a tired motorcyclist feel like a capitalist exploiter of the toiling masses.
Onward ever onward and a couple more irritating traffic lights and I'm on the main drag through Homestead, a pretty little town with churches, doctor's offices and restaurants, looking like a palm filled Midwestern burg. I shall have to come up and spend a day here with my camera. Meanwhile its back to Card Sound Road and the Florida Keys. Back where I started, sunup to sundown.
I survived, I thrived, on another trip to the crazy mainland.
My wife and I frequently bring guests to this area to check out the Key deer which lurk around here in relatively large numbers. They like to cross the main road, weirdly enough, at the "Deer Crossing" sign on the street. When we brought Bruce and Celia to this area the deer stayed away so we took a walk instead down this path I had never previously visited. 
It was most pleasant strolling in the sun, mosquito-free and ambling while talking and peering into the undergrowth checking desultorily for elusive deer. After a while my wife cried uncle, her arm in its brace was giving her fits and that left Bruce and I to trudge on like the intrepid explorers we would like to be. As it was Bruce yielded next, anxious to return to the women resting in the car, so we turned back before the trail was done.
There were signs of life- human life at least, as marked in the mud. When the four of us were walking we saw some tread marks in the muddy spots, which appeared to be bicycle treads but I was pretty sure there some fresh marks and they looked like those left by an all terrain vehicle, and they hadn't been there when we had walked en masse.
I might have expected to hear the sound of a motor, or voices or smelled exhaust but the day was unsullied and untrammeled by human intervention- except mine! I walked and I walked, turning corners and forgetting to check how long I'd been gone, but I guesstimated a mile and half walk to the end which came upon me suddenly in the form of a wide open space bathed in sunlight:
There was remarkably little trash along the trail anywhere, which one would like to think indicated a high level of consciousness among hikers on No Name Key, but rather I think, speaks to the low volume of traffic around here.
On my way out of this entanglement of mud, dead twigs and copious cobwebs I found the elusive Key deer. Actually she found me, and started back into the bushes with a most un-deer like thundering crack of breaking tree limbs. Then she paused to take in some refreshment and I nailed her:
Returning to the theme of human intervention this area was where Alpha 66 trained for the Bay of Pigs and I wondered if they might have been doing their military shenanigans right here. It had always struck me as preposterous to think that the counter revolutionaries could train in these flat lands for an invasion of a mountainous island like Cuba, but funnily enough I was reminded of a spot on the north coast of that island where my wife and I were blown in my sailboat by a storm on a trip from Mexico to Key West. The dogs didn't much enjoy it but I took them for "walks" through the mangroves in areas that looked just like this:
Those prickly nematodes sticking up out of the mud were just like those of the black mangroves in the offshore islands of Cuba. Well, its a tenuous connection but it seemed significant while I was there, in the middle of nowhere in No Name Key. 
As I started the Bonneville up and warmed the engine I pondered my choices. The school district was getting a yes for sure from me, while Amendment One was getting a certain no. I put my book bag in the top case and locked it down. My only real choice was which presidential candidate to vote for. And even that is pretty minimal owing to the whole early primary foasco that seems likely to knock Florida's democratic votes out of contention, at the convention. 
Camelot? I doubt it, God knows Kennedy was a philandering Hamlet it turns out in retrospect, but everyone loves the image. Perhaps I'll learn to love Obama's touchy-feely image, perhaps he will reconcile the irreconcilable. Perhaps I'm just growing old, but I feel that my probably uncounted vote has slipped me out of my all-important generation, the one that always made its voice count, and passed my own personal, Baby Boom baton to the next lot. Good luck to them.
People love to make fun of Florida when elections come around but its an amusing little joke that needs updating.The fiasco of 2000 that led to the greater fiasco of eight years of truly bizarre national governance has been remedied. Florida now requires a paper trail for all ballots and we have a governor who has taken on the issue of excluding felons from the voting rolls. Florida is quite the modern state under Governor Charlie Crist, a suspiciously single man, thoughtful on the issue of global warming, active in favor of decent education and a Republican to boot. I think he even may believe in evolution. Florida: land of contrasts.
The National Democratic Party organized a circular firing squad earlier this year when it decided to kick Florida (and Michigan) out of the national Presidential Preference Primary, in our case because the Republican controlled State legislature moved the primary date up further than the National Democratic coneheads thought was appropriate. Now the party is making noises suggesting our votes might be included at the National Convention and all we registered Democrats get to vote in hopes that we might count. The good part about this dunderheaded idiocy is that we have not been inundated with advertising, even though the teacher's union sent my teacher wife a last minute flyer backing Clinton's candidacy. My wife voted early and we both are endorsing John Edwards in the primary, so boo sucks to the Kennedy clan! My wife and I go our own way...
Amendment One is, I am happy to say getting negative attention, even though unhappily Governor Crist supports this nauseating proposal. Its the first time I've disagreed with him and he needs spanking, bad boy. The idea is to give everyone in the state, including non residents, a Homestead "Exemption" on property taxes thus completely ruining the state's sole tax base while encouraging development that we don't particularly need right now. Its a bad idea and threatens to trash the exemptions of those of us who legitimately claim them by actually living in this state. We await the tally with bated breath.
When Bruce and Celia came back to the Keys for a weekend visit they were most keen to sink their fangs into a cheese toast once again at the Five Brothers Deli on Ramrod Key. I was attempting to record the immortal moment on my Nikon and got a pretty poor shot of Celia. Bruce started laughing, pointing out how she looked like someone caught on a security camera; with that thought in mind I present the image here, as unflattering as it may be hoping earnestly Bruce gets into trouble:
Bruce and Celia are easy guests and fell comfortably under the spell my wife's latest incarnation, that of tour guide. So off we went at breakneck speed revisiting Bruce and Celia's old haunts from when they lived on their sailboat in Key West. First the Arts and Crafts Fair on Whitehead Street:
Which was where my wife snagged a couple of earrings and a picture frame and Celia bartered her life for a watch band. As Celia wandered from booth to booth it was Bruce's turn to look gormless.
We tromped across town and tried the new Indian place on Duval, lacking in ambiance perhaps but the food met our standards. We skipped across the street from India Cafe and laid into the almost thirty flavors offered by Flamingo Crossing. Celia looks a good deal less gormless when she's lapping up a chocolate laden cone, than she does when impersonating someone caught on a security camera.
Then with sunset rapidly approaching we took off for the southernmost point-the one at Fort Zachary is as good as any other point:
Our little tour of the Fort inspired me to wander off and take a few pictures for a future diary entry.
The entourage apparently didn't miss me: 
Then we dragged B and C to Seven Fish which dinner went across a treat and from there to the Waterfront Playhouse for a drop of play acting by pros of a Saturday night. Tuesdays with Morrie was the offering and I found myself a tad disturbed to realise I had most of Morrie's life lesson already worked out on my own. It was an affecting performance.
Then we repaired to Stock Island for lunch at Hog fish where we took a drive and admired the state of deshabille of this island nearest Key West. Bruce depressed me as he checked out the impending development: he decided immediately the City of Key West will be annexing Stock Island and I suppose he's right, only I fear annexation as it would make my job harder. It's all about me, face it.
From there we lined up in a howling north wind to partake of a fundraiser for the Monroe Association of Retarded Citizens, known as the Marc House. The event was held at the Pier House in lovely waterfront sunshine chilled by the blisteringly cold wind:
A dozen chefs cooked like crazy for us and we ate and voted and ate some more. Robert, occasionally mentioned in this blog was among those standing around in the cold. "Oh Robert," Celia said as I introduced him. "You really do exist!" And so, here he is stuffing his face on a chocolate burrito from Finnegan's Wake:
I quizzed our guests and we got enough votes to bring the tour to a close with an unplanned trip to the Tropic Cinema:
Where we were met by a warming cup of Zabar's coffee in the lobby (Bruce is the one with the hat, shading him from...the indoor sun?) followed by a showing of Atonement, a film Celia fondly expected to be a nice heart warming chick flick.
Not exactly; this was a British take on love and misery and death, a suitable follow up to the saccharine story of Tuesdays with Morrie. From there home to bed, cowering under the blankets as the persistent north wind howled and temperatures plunged to around 64 degrees.
Its weird to me, to want to retire to a place that freezes regularly, that is colder than hell and that exists around 7,000 feet above sea level. "Its dry" Bruce says mouthing off all the time about how humidity is bad for him. It must be true even if he is full of crap, they seem to be thriving on a diet of New Mexico. Which is all very well, but it's Key West that has chickens in the streets, not snow: 
and Celia is so sweet and innocent she actually clucks at the chickens and finds them charming. She should have taken a couple home with her, they'd probably be smarter company than Bruce who forgot his shoes on my porch.
How do you take off for a day of travel across country without your shoes? Only God and Bruce know the answer to that. I'm sure he'll make up some totally unbelievable crap about why they got left behind probably because its not cold enough in Santa Fe to require footwear. He really does believe his own crap where I refuse to no matter how funny it may be.
I took a ride downtown during my lunch break with a detour by the beach. The conditions were very weird for someone who, like me, spent years in the West. The weather reminded me of nothing quite so much as the sort of marine inversion type of low cloud "fog" that builds up along that coast in the warm months. In California the low lying clouds are formed every summer day by hot desert air meeting cold ocean air, unlike here in Key West where a lump of cold air from Up North had temporarily mixed with the warm air of the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf Stream to the south. The air was still and the sailboat races that were called off on Monday due to hairy conditions were becalmed on the horizon south of Key West yesterday by the sudden absence of breezes: 
I don't miss the cold and damp of coastal California and today was an unexpected reminder of what I lived through for 20 otherwise happy summers. I've always told my California friends a nice winter day in Key West is like a perfect summer day in Santa Cruz. Yesterday it was mimicking California a little too perfectly for my taste.
Then there is the ride south (or west depending on your perspective) towards Key West:
With a stop at Mile Marker 25 to lament the passing of Fishcutters, my wife's favorite place to buy fish raw for the grill or in a sandwich for an easy dinner:
From there, following the rough path I commute each workday I ended up in 20 minutes or so on Stock Island, Mile Marker 5 which is also undergoing transformation from a place to house workers in trailers to a place to develop and make pretty. There's a long row to hoe on Shrimp Road judging by the trash currently in place:
I used to bring my own sailboat down here for haul outs (what landlubbers call "dry docking") and I wondered where we would do it if everything got built up. There are still a couple of places, insalubrious yet evocative for a former dock rat:
Some people mark their turf with dead cars and rusty appliances. Others make their Stock Island pieces of the American Dream beautiful with paint, plants and paraphernalia and just for contrast dangle banal, pointless No Trespassing signs that spoil the cared for, homey, effect. Anyone plan on trespassing this fence?
North Stock Island, technically incorporated into the City of Key West currently houses the delightful garbage transfer station next to Mount Trashmore, home to a stranded whale:
One day I'm going to spend some time documenting Stock island before it all disappears but yesterday I had a date with myself at the Tropic to revisit the movie Juno so I had to ride on down the road. I paused for refreshment at the Inn on North Roosevelt where Merril's Cafe offers an excellent blackened snapper sandwich for eleven bucks and lots of iced tea from wait staff with a sense of humor. I like the foliage too, and the shade and the peace and quiet of no TVs or canned music.
Enough words, time to ride down to Mile Marker 2 and Garrison Bight where I chatted briefly with a former boat captain colleague who reminisced happily about the fun we had sailing tourists around the harbor. He had to go to catch up to an angry wife, he said, shrugging at some domestic dispute. I kept taking pictures: 
Then I headed downtown with a plan to photograph at least one tourist attraction, something I don't often do, as there are lots of Internet pictures of all the attractions that draw people to Key West. This one's pretty obvious on Olivia Street, and I don't mean the Bonneville:
Then down to Fort Street for a picture of a less well known "attraction." They are actually on the Navy Base and were used to store ammunition. Some say they were missile silos, but whatever they were, nowadays they keep goats on them to crop the abundant grasses that grow all over:
Then its time to park in my favorite spot downtown, on Eaton Street just up from the Tropic Cinema:
After a good laugh at the movies I set off for the south side of the island pausing at Casa Marina to read a few chapters from my book at the new-ish pocket park on the water: 
Then to Higgs beach by the West Martello Tower, Napoleonic home to the garden club:
And finally out of town by way of South Roosevelt Boulevard where I pause east of the airport, past the relatively tight bend called Deadman's Curve for a last picture looking north towards the triangle where Key West ends and Stock Island begins:
And so home, and pretty soon to bed like Peter Rabbit, with my supper, to get properly refreshed for two consecutive days at work. 
The paper reports another no hope candidate running for Sheriff, as the incumbent is retiring after 40 years with the department. Some other wackos of a different stripe have killed and beheaded key deer, and all I can think is that I'm grateful they did the deed outside the jurisdiction of the Key West Police.
Settling back into my snug armchair with the Citizen I see Paul Krugman of the New York Times, is busy debunking the myth of Reaganomics, which is a pleasure as ever. Common sense always trumps political posturing in his columns, and he is the only economic pundit I pay attention to, not least because he is ridiculed far too often. Despite the fact that everyone knows our leaders have no idea how to lead, people who criticize them still get it in the neck from people with agendas that have no basis in reality as we live it. I heard at school yesterday stories of impending economic destruction on several and various islands as balloon payments come due and interest rates reach catastrophic heights, even as the Fed makes panic rate cuts, and evictions are on the horizon of too many peoples' marginal lives. Even though we have a fixed mortgage and "secure" government jobs I wonder where this recession will leave us. And still the state legislature yaks on about Reaganomic tax cuts as though destroying Florida's flimsy social fabric will make things better. We have to "hunker down" not just for meteorological storms around here.
In the meantime, night is retreating pretty rapidly and gray skies are yielding to blue and by golly we have the prospect of a sunny day today. I may have to force myself to go for a ride, an aimless meander made aimed by the need to take some pictures to document my pleasure and remind myself that so far, life in the Keys remains good, wars evictions and global warming aside.
Like the Diving Museum mentioned earlier, Key West's own Haitian Art Company is a gallery founded by a person who was driven all his life by the subject on display. I'm moved to write about the Gallery at Frances and Southard especially because of its likely imminent demise.
The building that houses it has been for sale for some time and one hopes the owner is greedy and asks too much and thus allows his gallery to continue for a while, at least until real estate reasserts itself and we get back on an even keel selling our property wildly to the nearest speculator and developer with deep, soulless pockets. Besides all that, the economy is floundering, tourists are in short supply this year and the owner of this place is old and getting older and one can't assign blame for his wanting to end the business.
I guess I do have to blame Graham Greene for feeding my fascination with Haiti, he wrote about the world of Papa Doc in The Comedians, the mixture of true exoticism, terror and tropical nuttiness of the island. The fascination that was born in me when I read about Toussaint L'Ouverture and his rebellion and Sans Souci, the palace in the mountains and all the rest of the stuff that is Haiti, Baron Samedi and secret ceremonies, which comes to our country in the form of janitors, and street vendors and, as it happens, Art.
The top picture on my wall is Haitian, purchased in Key West and I see the colors and the form and I wish I was there, on the docks.
I was photographing homes on Frances Street last week and I saw this other picture in the window of the gallery and I wanted it, and I showed it to my wife and she nodded and maybe we will and maybe we won't, and if we don't the colors will remain in my mind half muted like in this photo, totally unlike the painting itself, that leaps out at you as you stroll past, and sucks you in:
The gallery is just a heap of Art, stuff I love and stuff I don't and stuff that gives me the creeps and stuff that makes me laugh out loud.
And when you look at it sideways through the plate glass you see Southard Street in all its 21st century glory overlaid on the charms of a bygone era:
I want to go to Haiti, I've wanted to sail there since God knows when. I've figured a way I could take a road trip on my motorcycle there. I've studied the maps and charts, and I've dithered and traveled elsewhere instead.
It seems my brief stretch working days, temporarily leading the Alpha Day Shift in Police Communications is to end soon and I have been informed that on the night of the 28th of this month I shall return to Bravo Nights, which is fine by me. Whatever happens the pleasure of my rides to and from work will continue, bridge hopping, come rain, cold, sun or high water. 
Then of course there is that fact that I have been able to sign up again for two more courses at Florida Keys Community College, leaving me just two more after these, to complete my Associate Degree in Marine Engineering. The college has some hang out spaces but they have security guards and I'm too old to be caught trespassing after dark. I clutch my tattered shreds of dignity about my person.
The classes are Tuesday and Thursday and they end an hour or two before work. So, if I ride into town early to study or complete a chore I may need somewhere to hang out for a while before reporting for work. Luckily I have a few other favorite hang outs.
The bench under the big old Banyan tree at the County Courthouse is still there, just yards from Jeana's, so if I feel less like people watching and more like reading this is a good spot, on Whitehead Street, to drink a coffee. In inclement weather, be it too hot or too cold I go to Starbucks on Duval which is a pleasant place to watch tourists straggling by on their endless quest for shopping. Five Brothers on Southard has excellent coffee but poor people watching in a quiet part of town.
Some of them dawdle away the entire day in the garden next door but the benches are uncomfortable for sleeping so I can usually find a place to sit and meditate. Not anymore apparently at Little Hamaca City Park, next to the airport, where my picnic table of preference has been removed. 
The city went to all the trouble of building the cement pad where there was dirt before, but they took away the bench. An effort, I can only suppose to discourage undesirable loafers. Perhaps they took them to clean them beacuse the benches are now back at Bayview Park. Even park benches are mysterious entities in the Southernmost City, they live their own lives and travel apparently at will.
Its an excellent place to watch the ocean by day or at night when the moon is full but it's a spot that tends to attract other kinds of undesirables, at least in my book. Lonely men used to wander up as I sat on the table at one o'clock in the morning admiring Nature's handiwork and the lights twinkling on the White Street Pier, and I found their advances quite irritating and intrusive which in Key West could be construed as me being unreasonable. It's not my fault, I wanted to say, I work nights. Can't I have a lunch break in peace? Golly gee willikins, I feel quite straight sometimes. 
Boondocks is an excellent location for the band, informal Tiki architecture, intimate seating for lots of people and a decent restaurant serving a solid serviceable menu. The seats for those not eating filled up well before the start of the concert and the T-shirt and CD stands were doing good business.
I like the music (what's not to like? A group that includes an actual trumpet and tin drums is searching for, and finding, it's true Caribbean roots), and the band sings about rum and hurricanes and tropical breezes and even if you didn't know any of them you'd know the lads sang of that which they know. They aren't pirates or millionaires (yet) they are just a bunch of dudes having fun and inviting the listeners in to enjoy their jam session. It's very effective. 
All this abundance of joy followed by an unfortunately short ride home on the ever delightful Bonneville. My wife finally admitted that commuting in a convertible makes her look forward to the daily drive.
We got to talking about the commute while chatting up the wife of one of the band members. We used to live in the marina she runs in Key West and now that her husband is becoming a full time musician she too has a commute from the area of...Mile Marker 24 to the marina. As a convert to the keys commuting lifestyle she told us how much she likes living in the Lower Keys outside the city.
We feel like its a secret not shared by the inmates of Key West who put up with narrow spaces, loud noises of all kinds and crazy neighbors. I enjoyed living on our Gemini catamaran while traveling but it was a tiresome in the Key West marina we called home for a couple of years. Marina living is "affordable" and for too many people its just cheap rent, say $800 a month, not a sailing lifestyle and our living aboard became a burden to us and our Labrador. Not half the burden it is on a marina manager dealing with all the petty bullshit of a bunch of malcontent liveaboards so I am pretty sure our friend will be glad to get away and become a road manager for the touring band. 
So I took off with the helmet and gloves in the top case and enjoyed a perfectly glorious summer afternoon in January. 85 low-humidity degrees, bright sunshine reflecting off the water and traffic that didn't bother me a bit as I was perfectly content to pootle along at forty miles per hour.
The road beckoned. And I had choices- east or west? I went north instead, an oldie but goodie. In keeping with the laid back theme of the day I just blipped the throttle when some dork tried to cut into my lane before the traffic light; I assumed lack of attention, not homicidal tendencies and kept going.
I crept towards No Name Key on the back roads, clipping the dirt short cuts in first gear and missing the holes as best I could. The Bonneville, even in its modern incarnation is renowned for its torque, that is its ability to get up and go from low revs in high gear. What isn't so well known is that it has a very tall first gear which makes ambling at walking pace a little more tricky. I like to think I could pick my way through a dirt road or two in a more hilly part of the country but I think it might be quite an exercise in feathering the clutch or going hell for leather, which would, in either case, be unnerving. Dirt on Big Pine is mild and not so bracing.
So much so I stopped and played with my Nikon Coolpix point and shoot camera, fiddling with focus and light and wondering how I managed before the advent of digital when you took your pictures, took laborious notes and got it all muddled up when you finally got the pictures home. I could see my crappy ones immediately, by the side of the road. 
It wasn't anywhere near that dark, but I liked the definition I got on the cloud, which got a summery, thundery air. No Name Key has but one road leading to a dead end, actually the place where the old pre-Overseas Highway ferry arrived from Knights Key in Marathon. Nowadays the boulevard just stops at water's edge and the few people who live on No Name do so on typical side streets on canals. 
This was also the place where the Cuban counter revolutionary nutters practiced for the Bay of Pigs invasion in dreadful secrecy because it was all terribly illegal. Nowadays its a wilderness area, electricity-free and the bridge from Big Pine offers splendid fishing apparently. For me the end of the road was a place to play with the camera.
No motorcycle. Then add one motorcycle.
Then add a motorcycle part and let the exposure show the real state of the day.
I tried to take a trip down a dirt side road but soon enough the gruesome ubiquitous "No Trespassing" sign popped up with a locked chain dangling across the dirt. I positioned the Bonneville to hide the chain and highlight the motorcycle.
Then I figured the Bonneville's 865cc power plant deserved a mention and a thank you for giving me 5,000 splendid miles.
And on my way off the island I passed by this wonderment that caught my eye. I'll bet you can't get the decrepit structure at the end of this lane for less than say, 750,000 US dollars. Consider there is no electrical service on No Name Key so you'll need to learn to maintain the generator, replace the batteries from time to time, and drive 20 minutes just to get to the Overseas Highway, which still leaves you an hour from the fleshpots of Key West. You'd think with all these inducements to keep looking the owners would perhaps clean up one's first impression? Hell no baby! 
We don't need no stinkin' curb appeal. Nor vertical mail boxes apparently. Its all part of the charm and if you don't understand it, no one can enlighten you. And you probably shouldn't think of buying either if you think an expensive home for sale deserves the best possible presentation. This is as good as home sales get in the fabulous Florida Keys, when a crappy home looks like a million bucks on a sunny day in January.
Help! The sailors are coming to town! It's January and the amateur boat owners and their professional crews of the Southern Ocean Racing Conference are littering our streets with their boats and trailers and massive trucks. They've taken over the Outer Mole and Truman Annex parking area and are exposing themselves en masse to our weak January rays. Unlike the inappropriate tourists paddling in the freezing 77 degree sunlit waters, these sailors are busy maneuvering trailers: 
maintaining the hulls:
and hoisting themselves aloft to reeve halyards and secure tangs:
Busy, busy stuff, which is all very well and good but it has impacts, you know, all this busyness. I don't want to sound whiny or anything but our town is now filled with burly sailors and while that may make many a gay heart flutter, as it did years ago apparently, when the Navy loosed hundreds of lonely sailors on the city nightly, for those us us trying to live well regulated lives these sailors are a damned nuisance.
City residents more often gripe about Bike Week and loud motorcycle mufflers, or Lezzie Week when the city fills with women holding hands, but personally Race Week troubles me. Not least because, as a former cruising sailor, everyone expects me to be interested in the antics of a bunch of pituitary cases loose on the water, but also because too many islanders don't know the first thing about sailing and they expect me to know about racing. Aside from the fact that I couldn't care less about racing, I couldn't care more about the long slow lines on the roads and streets as boats come and go with all their protrusions and extrusions laid unnaturally horizontal.
Which, when they are left vertical even I have to admit they have somewhat slightly poetic lines, as they soar above the ugly, slab-like raceboats.
But also because this is the week my wife has her birthday and finally after years of pretending to ignore the problem we have to come out of the closet and admit it. No matter how much money the city at large earns from Race Week we absolutely hate the fact we can't go out for a quiet tete-a-tete and have dinner together somewhere nice, because every bloody eatery is packed with loud obnoxious sailors using bread and wine bottles to illustrates the day's idiocy (tactics they call them) carried out on our beautiful winter turquoise waters.
Really, couldn't they just move race Week to say, early February and let us celebrate the passing of the years together with a nice, quiet meal out?
Am I a fuddy-duddy or what?
Layton is just a long straight stretch on the highway, a speed limit of 45 mph, with, from time to time a Sheriff's deputy on patrol keeping an eye on those passing through. However there is always one patrol car lurking near the Post Office and you know when you are tailing a visitor because the brake lights come on in a hurry.
I never speed through Layton because after the tyro has slowed and sped up again realising its only a decommissioned patrol car, there can often be found a second, occupied, car at the last remaining grocery store in the little town. 
Or possibly a patrol car on the verge further south near the entrance to Long Key State Park, just before the limit goes back up to 55mph. 
The suburban canals behind the homes give access to some pleasant natural mangrove waterways, decent enough fishing spots of course,
but also they lead to the real prize,the open waters of fish-infested Hawk Channel behind the reef, and to the north there are the endless shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Sailors know of Long Key because of the bight at the east end which offers a shallow anchorage and the Channel V bridge which provides the last seventy-foot tall bridge before Marathon.
Though you can't buy gas because the gas pumps and associated grocery store/bait shop closed a while back. 
Layton has two claims to fame. One was that the author Zane Grey spent winters living and fishing here between writing Westerns and second I bought my first and only skiff from some dude who lived on a canal behind the grocery store and marina.
It was a 14-foot Dusky for with all the trimmings including a duff 30 horse outboard that died soon after, but the hull is excellent and with a new Yamaha its a great addition to my motor pool. I think about that slick bugger every time I ride through town.
My wife and I ate at Little Italy one night on our way out of the Keys; it was old fashioned checkered table cloth Italian food, decent enough I suppose when you are waiting for a traffic accident to be cleared, but rather funky old fashioned. There was a plan to develop the restaurant out of existence and replace it with a resort, but for now what with bursting bubbles and all, its still there. This waterfront thing is next door to the restaurant and aside from not knowing what its about exactly, it highlights the fact that as usual curb appeal is totally lacking in the Keys. God Bless Funky.
But they don't depopulate Key West for Layton, because there are only a thousand hardy souls who can stand real-life Mayberry blandness, and my helmet's off to them every time I rumble through- at a sedate and legal 49 miles-per-hour.
I think diving is a very eccentric activity, its eccentricity alleviated, I'll admit reluctantly, if you choose to dive in waters as clear and warm as those of the Florida Keys in summer. I qualified as a diver 20-odd years ago in the cold dark waters off Monastery Beach near Carmel, and though it was summer in California the green dark waters of the Pacific Ocean pressed in on me as though I was locked in a freezer. I floated down through the green pea soup and eighty feet down landed gently on an endless rippled beach which disappeared into the murk on all sides. Red rocks showed brown in color, green kelp looked black. I found diving sucked the life out of life itself. I quit after several attempts to enjoy getting cold in deep darkness.
Sailing in warm tropical waters I found a snorkel, mask and fins to be all the equipment I needed to enjoy bright sunlit colors and all the fish, corals and other sea life I needed to keep my little brain amused. Snorkeling the pristine waters of Central America was the cruisers way of "going to the movies." Some boaters liked to haul diving gear and air compressors around but I was content floating near the surface. It turns out humans throughout history have not been content and their curiosity gave rise to a long history of humans submerging themselves. Sufficient indeed to allow a migrant to the Florida keys to build his own History of Diving Museum. 
Its at Mile Marker 83 in the Upper Keys and its hard to miss, unless you are determined not to check out the north side of the Overseas Highway as you roll past Tavernier on your way south. I had never given it much thought but the history of diving is actually a history focused on diving helmets. You can't breathe, much less see, or work underwater unless you have a proper helmet. Halley, of comet fame pondered the problem and came up with this design, reproduced in the museum a few hundred years after the fact:
Personally I think this thing looks creepy and would probably have a heart attack were I to encounter it in a dark alley at night. The museum itself is fascinating, created inside an extended building with a self guided tour in a U-shape through various chambers that trace the evolution of diving (helmets).
The rooms are crowded with equipment, mannequins, displays and audio visual explanations and it is totally absorbing, even for someone like me who has little interest in suiting up and jumping in.
The museum has an absolutely staggering collection of helmets including one from each country that has ever produced a diving helmet and that alone, apparently is a claim to fame. They were all neatly aligned in a lighted audio-visual display. Next door there were literally piles of helmets of all shapes and sizes in abundance, all over the place:
That display looked pretty much alike to me, the fundamental commercial design is what it is, but the amateurish first efforts to create helmets ended up looking like a crazy quilt to my untutored eye:
From those early beginnings divers have learned to dress themselves in the underwater equivalents of armor plate which allows divers to work hundreds of feet down at surface pressures. This suit was made in Italy after World War Two:
The pride and joy of the display seemed to be the US Navy Mark V helmet, so unusual an item that they even displayed a fake copy of this Rolls-Royce of diving helmets, familiar to some of us from the movies. They showed four examples of the real thing on a rotating display:
And now I know more than I ever expected to know about the history of diving (helmets). 
Southard Street, on Sunday in Key West, the road is empty fading into Duval Street in the end... and it looks just endless doesn't it? I swear this town plays tricks with one's perceptions. Many residents hate getting off The Rock, as they call it and dread making a car trip even ten miles North. That far? they say...Fully one third of the 25,000 residents don't have cars and rely on their feet bicycles and scooters to get around. Try planning their evacuation in a hurricane threat! The City rounds up lots of buses...
The yellow spot on his head is a live parakeet ( I don't know why) and those are his bare feet, not flesh colored motorcycle boots. Aside from the determined efforts of some to be weird, Key West enjoys a layout designed by accident in the 1820's and maintained by the general lack of room to sprawl. Much of the architecture that is prized today would have been torn down in the 1960's had there been the money but by the time gay men infiltrated Key West (a busy Navy port) and started spending money, the old wooden houses were ripe for saving. And here they are, formerly Florida's wealthiest city, then a gay mecca, and now a resort town transforming itself into an enclave of wealth.
This is an eyebrow house so called because the upstairs windows are tucked under the extended eaves. The design failed to allow for hot air rising and the windows trapped the heat instead of dispersing it. Eyebrows are cute but not useful ( thank heavens for air conditioning!). Eyebrows are an archtectural curiosity nd well represented on our streets, preserved by an accident of time. 
This house shades its occupants with Bahama shutters that open outwards from the bottom. They are traditional but don't let in much light. Here's the ever popular bungalow style, one I am familiar with from my many years living in Santa Cruz, California where sitting on the porch would get you pneumonia in the fog and damp:
Key West's green and leafy streets are littered with alleys and lanes with sorts of eccentric names, Gruntbone, Free School, Love, Nassau and this one which isn't at all eccentric but Canfield was the name of the wealthiest family in Santa Cruz (Larry "Charles" Canfield owns the Boardwalk, a national landmark) and here is that same name recorded for posterity 3300 miles away in Key West. I smile when I pass by, a private joke; me thinking of santa cruz and enjoying my fog-free life in Key West.
The city's cemetery is right in the middle of town, to avoid bodies washing up on the beaches as they used to after hurricanes, when they were planted on the south side of the island. In the 19th century the cemetery was on the edges of town and the rest of the island was dedicated to farming. And very beautiful the cemetery is too, especially because it's hard to dig into rock so people get above ground resting places and as the living will have it, they get fancy plots to "live" in:
Of course the dead are neatly segregated as was the way, Jews here, Catholics there, here Cubans, there others, and the rich get mausoleums but the poor, who we are told shall be first in the next life, get boxes. And alongside the cemetery another flowery street this one named for Angela (whoever she was) and a local using the favored form of locomotion. He looks a bit wobbly but public drunkeness is a state of mind, he was actually walking uncharacteristically fast, as though on a mission.
Vegetation is an important part of Key West living no doubt because it grows so abundantly in a frost free environment:
Porch living is important in that frost free environment for people too and Key Westers like to enjoy indoor-outdoor living in a town that encourages walking and cycling and chatting with one's neighbors:
Not the sort of behavior encouraged in Boca Raton or other malled cities of Florida. Some porches are deliberately more weird than others. Some residents like to commune with gumball machines, and please don't ask why. "Why?" is not a polite question in Key West.
It is enough that it is, and it, Key West, is flourishing between hurricanes that tend to strip the plants of their foliage and the city of its greenery. Between stormy summers plants grow and we forget the nudity of summers stripped in the hurricanes of 2004 and 2005:
And there are still a few houses built of Dade pine which was the insect resistant, weather resistant wood used to build and re-build Miami until the tree was virtually wiped out. Nowadays if you want to see Dade pine you have to travel to the Florida panhandle. Dade pine is prized because the wood is as maintenance-free as vinyl siding and the ugly weathered look is "Florida traditional" so you should enjoy it when you get a chance to see it.
There are eyebrows and porches everywhere in town, Dade pine and beautiful gardens and none of them are on display for tourists necessarily. I took these pictures in the space of half an hour around White and Grinnell Streets between Olivia and Southard, off the tourist track and far from monuments and attractions and its all quite pretty.
Even on the corner of Truman and White across from the Chevron gas station on the way in to Old Town on the main drag there is this utilitarian building housing businesses and a yoga studio, yet it shows style and physical charm and sports a widow's walk on the roof harking back to the city's nautical heritage even though one is as far from the water as one can be on this small island:
So there it is far from the mauls of America and all their instant convenience, far from the Southernmost Point which is illustrated everywhere on the web, and the Hemingway Home and Audubon and all the rest of it that is so popular and draws anxious camera toting crowds. This Florida is different and no matter how much locals whinge that Key West is changing, and so it is, and for the worse (of course), it is still itself and always a joy to walk round. This is not Florida as most people know it. But it works for me.
My wife's teaching assistant and office manager were salivating at the prospect of spending the afternoon at Jack Flats on Duval with their men while watching The Game, however for me an afternoon off means a meander through Old Town on my (wife's) Vespa taking pictures for future blogs ending up at the Old Pile seen above, St Paul's at the corner of Duval and Eaton, where the Philadelphia Brass Quintet was giving the first in this season's series of "Impromptu Concerts." 
On the steps of the church I met a couple of friends who invited me to sit with them and I did. The quintet did their bit in a concert I rated okay,interesting selection of pieces but the execution seemed uneven to me. As a former tuba player I love the instrument to death but it can too easily kill off the melody in a small, relatively small space.
The sun was setting as we streamed out of the church and key West always looks lovely in the light of the dying day, with a purplish tinge on the sky and warm gray tones down below as street lights come on and open doors throw squares of orange light onto the sidewalks. I took the long way out of town along the south coast startling an ambling convertible on my 50mph "moped." The ride home was delightful on the little Vespa.
Not least because it buzzes along merrily at 65mph and even allowed me to pass a dawdling kid in a souped up hatchback and I get silly pleasure from surprising people with my wife's little scooter.
My always thoughtful wife brought me home a copy of another book of Billy Collins' poems, and if you look at the title you'll know why this is a book you have to own. I've enjoyed only a very few 20th century poets, mostly writers out of the trenches of World War One, and I have mostly been drawn to romantic, rhyming, poetry-like poetry from the classical 19th century. Billy Collins has been a breakout for me, and my wife knows this.
So there it is, in black and white, an autographed copy of the book no less, which can join the other one in our loo. I have an autographed copy of a book by Billy Collins and I wasn't even there to get it! 
It isn't exactly finished yet but it was opened to the public last night as a sort of locals preview. I had a date with my wife at the Greek place on Truman for dinner followed by a program of romantic 20th century composers at the Tennessee Williams Theater, but I really wanted to squeeze in a quick visit to Virginia Street. The Old Conch brick building has stood on the block between Grinnell and Packer streets for a century, and lately it has been an empty shell. It occupies a lot of physical space so how it survived is a bit of a mystery but it has and absolutely tons of people showed up making the interior of the museum quite the traffic jam. 
I recognized quite a few faces but I am not a great one for mobs and I wasn't there for the free food or beer (always a Key West guarantee of a crowd) but I said hallo to my buddies the firefighters and they are always nice nice about my dispatching which gives me a boost. He looked at the old equipment and expressed relief he gets to use the tools he does, these days.
Vega has been poking around the building for a while and he unearthed, literally, the old coal pit where the steam-powered firefighters stored their fuel, and in the rear of the block-long property runs a weird looking trough like a very narrow bowling alley. Its was actually the place where the firefighters watered their horses and a good example of these troughs is as rare as hen's teeth, apparently.
Last night it was reverting to its old function but as a watering place for the reclusive men of the crowd.
I wasn't there for long but I'm looking forward to adding it to my list of places worth visiting in Key West, after it gets it's grand opening later. 
I found out this bizarre building was designed by a British architect for the world's fair in London in 1936 and was built in Hispaniola eventually as the centerpiece of the acknowledgement of Columbus' trek to the Bahamas. The faro (lighthouse) does actually illuminate at night but such is the electrical draw it tends to black out the rest of the city, so the illuminations are infrequent but I did sneak a photo of a postcard illustrating the effect, a Christian cross in the night sky, near enough:
Indeed the day we took a gua-gua (minibus) out to the monument it was gray and overcast and threatening rain. We need a light to show us the way.
The navy guard at Columbus's tomb stands at the apex of the church-like building with corridors running down each side of the open air central "nave."
The lower floors had open windows and the impending storm blew scads of cool air through the exhibits. 
The various rooms are devoted each to a different American country or colony. French Islands have their room as do the Dutch Antilles, alongside Venezuela, Cuba, Canada and everywhere else from Argentina to Italy ( Columbus was Italian of course). There was also a curious exhibit from Taiwan, Republic of China, asserting the very same thesis posited in the book 1421, that the Chinese passed this way long before Columbus. 
The US room had the obligatory letters of congratulation along with photos:
The US exhibit contained excerpts from the book "A Day In the Life" with an odd cross section of daily, multi-cultural activities around these United States. I don't suppose there was much else to write as Columbus never actually stepped on the US in his forced march to beat da Gama to the fabulous Indies.
Outside the Faro the weather was looking like crap so we bought some postcards from a vendor and made him happy, snapped a picture of an attempt at a cityscape under the glowering skies and scampered back to our five star hotel room far from the crumbling decay of tropical Santo Domingo.
The faro struck me as a grandiloquent gesture trying to embrace all the nations subsequently populated and exploited by Europe, and pointing them inward at the tiny country hosting this massive palace; but it seemed to be trying too hard. And whatever that English architect was thinking I can only imagine that he, like Samuel Coleridge, was high on heroin when he penciled his masterpiece. This is one unusual human monument I wouldn't want to miss, and now I can die knowing I haven't.
To be a homeless citizen in Key West offers opportunities for waterfront living, and though I would find it horribly dull to sit and stare with nothing to do all day our hcs revel in the void. They gather at Higgs Beach at the tables and talk and drink and fight and live out their little dramas like street performances that scare off families and cause people to...call the police.
They piss someone off, a parent perhaps taking their kids to play at Astro City playground across the street, and we respond and move the hcs to another location. Lovely Simonton Beach sounds like a nice spot. 
Which only looks like a park, an ideal spot to hang out and chill during a lunch break. Its actually these hotel charlie's living room:
The city of Key West and Monroe county provide free shelter in air conditioned tent-dormitories on Stock island conveniently located next to the Sheriff's office. There the working poor of the island can shower, use the lockers and the phone, collect mail, do laundry and show up for work each day as well groomed as a housed worker. The people who litter our streets and beaches aren't working poor, they are seasonal derelicts many of whom travel down in the winter and some of whom leave in the spring. There is no plan to deal with the problem except the rather draconian idea of removing park benches so people can't sleep on them. 
Like at Bayview Park, across the street from the police station. 
Welcome to Key West, and our signs are more suggestions than actual requirements, apparently.
Subtlety isn't a priority of homeless citizens, they like to hang it all out and give our parks a special flavor. 
Like a refugee camp.At night it is illegal to park on the streets and sleep so the campers park at Publix, a private parking lot, or at Albertsons, both in New Town and spend the night there before returning to White Street at Higgs Beach for some sea-side fun at the AIDS Memorial by White Street Pier.
The residentially challenged are here for the winter and they may not have houses but they have homes, all around the four mile long island:
at Higgs Beach,
at Rest Beach,
at Bayview Park.
But to step out of work a few minutes before six in the evening and still be riding out of the parking lot in daylight, why that's the first sign of summer around here. In Key West the seasons aren't entirely measured by ambient temperature. Its true we do get cold fronts and temperatures drop as the clouds cover the skies and the winds pick up.
But, the big deal really is the level of the humidity. Summer time is warm day and night and the moisture in the air is like a muslin cloth over one's face. In winter the cloth is whipped away and one's skin dries up and long work pants no longer seem a burden. In between fronts temperatures rise, the sun comes out and the coastal waters glow their usual shades of turquoise, all along Highway One.
For the anxious tourist crossing yet another highway bridge on the way down the yellow brick road to Key West, that green marker shows its just 28 more miles to the corner of Whitehead and Fleming Streets. And if they're lucky they arrive as the cold blows away and the sun comes out.
This is a cloudy gray threatening day along Highway One at Big Coppitt, around Mile Marker 11. Compare that to scenes of devastation and electric mittens in the dismal reports from elsewhere around the US. At least I know how well off I am, its hard to take this place for granted. And no, I still don't miss snow.
I know where I'm going to get my next vehicle. Carmax had us out the door in the Chrysler with a proper tag within an hour of deciding to buy. The price was fixed at $13,000 and due to her extensive research my wife knew that was a decent price for a 2004 with 36,000 miles on it so she was happy. The dealer lets you know ahead of time their fee is $149 so there are no hidden dealer prep fees and all that other rubbish plus they have an in house DMV office so the tag application was processed right there and they stuck it on the car for us. Plus we got our loan online in 5 minutes without having to haggle with a finance specialist and fill out reams of paperwork. At 7.45 percent they were 1.5 points lower than the interest for a new car at Potamkin across the street. The whole transaction was amazingly simple and above board. I had never heard of CarMax before. In my defense I hate buying and selling vehicles and they make it too easy. And they had a rather toothsome white Thunderbird on the lot at $21,000...
On the way home I enjoyed a private treat when a Moto Guzzi V11 Sport in the Coppa Italia red white and green livery worked its way through the traffic jam on the Dolphin Expressway. I got a surprise when he pulled alongside and I discovered a real motorcycle not just another boring crotch rocket. Naturally as I readied the camera he changed lanes and all I got was a quick shot in the Nissan's mirror. That set me to drooling almost as badly as my wife who was grinning madly while driving under the clear blue sky in her own car. The other rearview picture of the day was of my wife enjoying a sunny 75 degree Miami evening as she followed me home.
In fact she came home very happy after three hours cruising with the top down. I knew she'd missed her last convertible, a Camaro we'd had in California,
and it was past time for her to get another. And I wasn't wrong; there's a change.
Snowbird season is the time for surprises, when people from Up North wheel out their abandoned rides from sheds and garages and press them into service as a way to get around a town clogged with cars and nowhere to park. The other day I was in New Town on a mission of some sort and when I came out of the store look what had pulled up alongside me. 
I snapped a picture, from instinct not really sure why this classic unloved Honda appealed to me. It just did in some subliminal way. And it was only yesterday during my lunch break at Fort Zachary Taylor Park that the answer hit me. This is the Era Of The Classics. I reached for my blog...
Cycle was dismissive of this 750cc recreation of the classic Italian sportbike of 40 years ago thanks to its "modest" 750cc capacity which proves they know how to completely miss the point. But I doubt I will ever buy a Moto Guzzi in the US thanks to their lackadaisical "network" of dealers which is a terrible shame. But this is motorcycling as I remember it, and I'm glad Triumph is led by a motorcycle loving businessman who knows how to stay solvent. 
Its been a long weekend at work, and as this is my fourth day in a row of taking phone calls from the distressed I feel like a photo tour of last weekend's walk around the capital of the Dominican Republic. Christopher Columbus founded the capital city of the country he called Hispaniola, which island he so named because he thought that its verdant coastal plains looked like the homeland of his sponsors in Spain. He called the city Santo Domingo, and domingo means Sunday in Spanish. In Columbus' native Italian domenica also means Sunday, so for whatever reason this Dominican Republic is tied into one particular day of the week. I had thought it was related to Easter Sunday, but Columbus landed here in December. We took our self-guided tour on a Saturday, because that was when we were there. Here's Columbus hailing a taxi while a pigeon rests on his head:
Downtown Santa Domingo is a wild and crazy place as we shall see, but the heart of the city hidden behind medieval walls is a taste of old world charm. Its perched on the corner of the cliff overlooking the mouth of the river pouring out into the Caribbean Sea, a place where the streets are narrow and clogged with cars, lined with tourist knick-knack shops and assorted attractions. There is even a long straight street called "The Count", El Conde, that has been transformed into a splendid pedestrian mall.
We used the Lonely Planet guide Of course the further you get from these delights the tougher the scene gets. Suburban Santo Domingo, alongside the four lane highway leaving town looks like this:
So, in my opinion one wants to be wealthy in the DR, and live in an apartment somewhere around here, serene at night, lovely without neon, littered with top rate restaurants offering stewed crab which my wife enjoyed, and stewed goat which went down a treat for me with a pile of mashed potatoes, and an ice cold Brahma beer:
The guide book also gave us the location of a fine breakfast hole-in-the-wall on El Conde, the Cafetera Colonial which served up omelettes and cafe con leche in the same location that comforted the Socialist refugees from Franco's Spain after he defeated the Republic in 1939. That historic plaque on the wall outside the cafe was a piquant extra on my wife's breakfast omelette.
After breakfast we strolled El Conde enjoying the cool morning air and the bustle of Saturday morning in the city. We enjoy bringing home a little something from our trips to stick on our walls and my wife likes bargaining so she checked out the Taino-style art on the street.
Our stroll led us past churches and museums, shops selling Amber (yellow) and Larimar (sky blue) jewelery and inevitably to the Square of Hispanic-ness (Plaza de la Hispanidad) above the old city walls overlooking the cruise ship dock on the river.
It was being tarted up for the New Year's celebrations to come but it struck me as rather sterile and unappealing. Compared for instance to the hustle and bustle of Avenida Mella where all the action was loud and brash. I have no idea what this dude was offering to his enraptured audience, but everyone could hear him:
Street vendors were setting up food to go, including delicious fried chicken, fried slices of spam, remarkable Dominican sausages and the ubiquitous tostones, slices of savory fried plantains:
Sidewalk vendors are an inevitable part of life in a country with high rates of unemployment, but we found a simple "No thanks," cleared the way.
We made our way to the covered mercado where the guidebook bless its little heart, advised us that bargaining was the order of the day. My wife loves to bargain so I knew we were in for some tough times ahead. The market was absolutely packed with stalls tightly squeezed in, and we had to shuffle down these narrow alleys surrounded by impatient shop keepers.
There weren't any other gringos, and not many customers generally at that hour, as far as I could tell, so we were prized bait. My wife bargained valiantly, a practice I find distasteful (much to her scorn), especially in a hard up Third World market. Noblesse oblige, she says and blames my well-to-do upbringing!
And if you needed to spruce up your home there were aerosols aplenty with all the necessary variations. The pink one caught my eye as it's supposed to be a love potion. I didn't have the nerve to ask how it might be applied. I imagined a bunch of friends coming over for dinner, exhibiting my aerosol and who knew what the results might be? Divorce? Suicide? Another love potion...?
To think the ancient art of Santeria has been reduced to an aerosol. Whatever will they think of next? Why, a wooden fighting cock of course.
I think Key West and its chickens could use some of these as public art works scattered in the ruined flowerbeds around town. 
We tried some of the fried chicken shown earlier, I like to eat locally and though baseball and hot dogs are big news in the Dominican Republic local chicken and sausage seems somehow more appropriate. 
Instead my indefatigable wife found a bus stop where the gua-guas (minibuses) gathered and we ended up taking a half-dollar (15 peso) ride that lasted about ten minutes in wild traffic across the river to the Faro a Colon, Columbus' Lighthouse.
The huge white block on a hill is Columbus's reputed grave site (disputed by Spain and Italy) inside a massive monument built to celebrate 500 years of Europeans in the Americas. Fascinating stuff but that is a story for another day.
The wife and I met Robert for dinner a couple of nights ago at Miami Subs, on the Boulevard across from Garrison Bight Marina. The founder of the chain was the son of Greek immigrant who settled in Miami, thus the chain offers foods that include the proper ethnic touches- gyro lamb with yoghurt/dill sauce alongside the burgers, fries and ice cream. His business ethic was a bit shady and he ended up gunned down a couple of years ago in splendidly scandalous style in the streets of Miami. His ethnic chain lives on, and in Key West its somewhere I like to park the Bonneville from time to time for a gyro platter or two.
Robert himself has lived a few lives, working at lots of jobs, making the life in the Keys one reads of and dreams of to while away a cold Midwest winter. He worked for years as a commercial fisherman, he captained tourist boats, he opposed the creation of the National Marine Sanctuary and then realising his error championed it, and now works full time for NOAA promoting their conservation rules out on the water. "I get paid to be out boating!" he laughs, setting aside the years of scrounging his way to his current eminence, a canal-front trailer, a couple of spare lots and boats on his seawall. A successful self-sufficient life navigated through the treacherous waters of drink drugs and bankruptcy that trip up so many dreamers in the Keys. He was in a reminiscent sort of mood the other night, after packing away his grilled chicken salad and settling in with a bottomless diet Pepsi.
It just got worse. I was swathed in my gray furry jacket, that and a sweat shirt are my only winter clothing, and on top of that my mesh motorcycle jacket with its shiny padded liner. The outlook for my head wasn't so great as my open face helmet was downstairs with the Bonneville and I couldn't be bothered to clamber back upstairs to find my full-face helmet. I dragged my thick elk skin gloves on and clipped the helmet on my head while the air-cooled parallel twin warmed up.
I arrived in the parking lot at the police station like a mobile popsicle and Diggy pulled in right behind me on his Honda 750 Aero. He had a tight woolen cap held on his head by a pair of goggles, his jacket was bulky with stuffing and his 25 year-old face with suffused with excitement. "What a great ride!" he said. I couldn't see his breath on the cold night air but he was radiating pleasure in the cold. "Yeah," I grumbled. "You only rode from Bahama Village," which I didn't need to point out was seven minutes away.
Last night, while I slept huddled under blankets, I'm told the temperature was supposed to drop to 48 degrees Fahrenheit, about 9 Celsius, and in Key West that equates to 22 Below Zero, when zero locally is rated at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. It was cold, and I got up to see a sight reserved for higher latitudes and stronger attitudes: 55 degrees in the house...
It's been windy cold and nasty for two days and I can only surmise what might be happening Up North. 
This man at the Big Coppitt Shell was huddled against the cold and he's from Michigan, so I don't feel like such a wuss when I moan about the temperature, and wind chill and all the meteorologic mumbo-jumbo. 
The wife had a buddy come round to drink chai, talk, eat pizza, talk, watch a video, talk, and hang on the couch with heating pads and blankets to have a nice talk, so I took off for a manly movie involving a manly ride in to the Big City and our mainstream 6 screen multiplex in Searstown.
The ride in to Key West was a brutal affair, the temperature gauge on the Bonneville read 58 degrees when I pulled out from under the house and rose to a paltry 62 for a little while in the bleak sunshine that soon vanished behind a mass of black clouds. 
Great! I thought, all I need is some icy rain to make me feel completely manly out here dodging wind squalls, trailing long lines of cages wandering along at a modest 42 miles per hour. It was a very unmotivated ride, one way and another.
Human beings do though and I spotted this catamaran snugly anchored behind a clump of mangroves just north of mile marker 18. I knew the boat was inhabited as there was a dinghy flopping around off his stern, and I know all too well the experience of hunkering down during a cold front and waiting inside the freezing fiberglass cocoon for the weather to get back to normal. He had my sympathy.
Its at times like these that a middle-aged man's thoughts turn to a recent weekend spent in heat, humidity and mud. It was on a hot humid day in the not-too-distant past (Sunday) that I found myself having a conversation with a man on a mule while standing up to my knees in quite possibly fecally-impacted waters.
It was at this point in our drive through the back country from Luperon to Puerto Plata that I felt a burning desire to turn back and take the main road. However the truck was perched at an awkward angle, I could see no way to safely reverse or, God forbid, actually turn so we were committed to what was to come. The man on the mule was not reassuring. "No," he said shaking his head. "It's not much better up ahead. Less water perhaps. More mud." He laughed hollowly when I asked, joking, where the nearest tow truck was. "No hay grua!" he grinned toothlessly. He told me with pride that they had electricity these days, even if the road was a tad old fashioned."Stay on the high side," was his advice as I climbed wordlessly back into the truck with a hollow feeling where my chest used to be. Oh dear, I thought to myself, what have I got myself into?
I knocked off a quick picture of Santiago's only claim to tourist interest, the monument to the nation's heroes, and we turned onto Highway Five, greasy in the rain, towards Puerto Plata on the north coast.
At Imbert, in the sunshine beyond the rainy mountains, we turned off towards Luperon 20 miles away, in time for a 9:30am breakfast. Luperon was our morning's goal because it is a sailing cruiser's destination. I have been reading about the delights of Luperon for 20 years, a secure anchorage surrounded by mangroves, a nice little town with easy bus access to the facilities of Puerto Plata, the end of a long bash south through the islands of the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos. Luperon is said to be well adapted to its place along a sailor's migratory path to the Caribbean. As former cruisers my wife and I enjoy the company of maritime travelers.
Well, suffice it to say, Luperon was a major disappointment. It did have a nice bay to anchor in, filled with boats and muddy waters entirely unsuitable for swimming, our major recreation while cruising, and the town itself was somewhat run down, to our eyes. Just to prove how small a world it is, on the pier we met Pablo, the owner of a marina in Panama where our cruising friends Ian and Anna keep Gecko, their catamaran. We also found the cruiser hangout, an American-run restaurant now called Capt Steve's offering laundry, internet, food and swimming pool, as the best cruiser haunts do.
But the owner, married to a Dominican woman is tired of the life and is looking to sell. Meanwhile he offers a nice $5 (150 peso) breakfast, American style, decent coffee, pork chops and the fixings:
The main road into town from the jetty was lined with small shabby businesses and blood ran in the gutter, doubtless from some porker sacrificed for the New year's holiday to come. 
It was a picture of a small industrious town in a very impoverished economy. Which is fine and dandy, though I couldn't for the life of me imagine spending months here whiling away a tropical winter when there are beaches and islands and incredible reefs not many miles away. I crossed Luperon off my list of places to sail to.
On our way out of town we spotted the entrance to a dirt road marked on our map as a brown dotted line headed along the coast towards Puerto Plata, avoiding the main road at Imbert. We took the plunge. I have never been much of an off road driver, most of my land travels I have taken on two wheels, and when I'm driving a vehicle I can't physically push I tend to be conservative in my choice of paved roads. This one got away from me completely. 
It started out with a motoconcho that I simply couldn't keep up with. How he rode, with a passenger and parcel so fast I don't know, and I can only attribute his sure-footed speed to experience. 
Then we forded a couple of streams, a broken bridge or two, some sand, then rocky hills, picked up a couple of field workers looking to get home, and as we slid down a steep incline we came upon a sight froze my blood. 
Another Isuzu, a Trooper, stuck in the mud surrounded by "helpers." 
If they are stuck, I said to myself, what's going to happen to me? The good news was that the Trooper was two wheel drive and with some shoving and digging he got out of the mud leaving me a completely messed up hole to plough through in low-ratio 4-wheel drive. "Schumacher," one of the passengers complimented me as my Isuzu reared up out of the mud and came to a stop on hard ground. Its the car, I thought to myself, not the driver. "If we're going to do much more of this," my impeturbable wife said, "I'm sending you to that off-road driving school in California." She settled her arm in its cast on a pillow and our hitch hikers got in the back for the rest of the drive through glorious scenery,
and on a continuously mashed up roadway, less on the rocky hilltops and more in the muddy valleys.
Further down the road we picked up a couple more hitchhikers, walking out of the fields burdened with packages. They asked us to stop at a roadside collection of huts where they washed off their mud in the stream, ate a coconut, chatted with the neighbors and picked up a pig in a sack for the ride to Puerto Plata in our truck. It made me feel a bit like a plantation owner, driving around with people in the bed of the truck when there were perfectly good seats inside, but when in Rome...
On the paved road the woman howled with laughter as the 50 mile-per-hour wind tore her hair from her headscarf, the pig in the sack seemed less amused but calmed down after I dug a hole in the sack for it to breathe through and we traveled without incident, as bizarre a combination of people as any on the roads that Sunday morning in Puerto Plata. Little did passers-by know where we had been to church. Like they say, God protects drunks and idiots, and we made it through without a scratch, and I was definitely not drunk.
It wasn't the compact we had reserved but it ran, had air conditioning and the diesel engine wasn't too loud, really, and the bench seat wasn't too hard really, and we are adventure travelers after all. So here we were Friday morning, with nowhere to go and nowhere in particular to be. So, do we go to the Five Star Intercontinental and check in, or just... take off?
Sabana de la Mar? Sure, why not?
To me it smacked of Joseph Conrad and Nostromo, one of his lesser novels and, perversely, among my favorites of his, dealing as it does with Central American chaos.
A great deal of time we too found ourselves on the wrong side of the road avoiding potholes just like the locals, and when we missed the holes and didn't avoid them and bumped through them, my wife ground her teeth as her recently operated wrist ground itself inside her cast. She continues to amaze me, she is that tough. This whole trip was her idea: why be in pain at home on the couch when you can be in pain on an adventure?
and where the road was torn all up at random, we just bounced through the jungle.
Aside from her injured arm it was totally wild, totally removed from our cozy South Florida world we had been living in at breakfast time. This was the land of stick houses,
and donkeys and kids begging by the side of the road. Other kids, the lucky ones had transport to get them to and from their work in the fields.
Just two hours from our world, and its a salutary reminder of just how lucky we are to live where we do.
an iced carbonated colored water and a fried rissole of ground meat and yucca:
They are little 100cc and 125cc two stroke motorcycles by Suzuki and Yamaha and Chinese interlopers, ferrying Dominicans about their daily business on the highways. 
And so, home to our five star world of satellite TV and $12 pay-per-view movies just two hours away from a world where it might take a week to earn twelve bucks. My mind was reeling as I cranked the air conditioning and looked out from my fifth floor hotel window at Santo Domingo, Holy Sunday, the teeming capital of this contradictory land.
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