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. 
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.