I am resuming a series of essays from recent trip to Italy that were interrupted by a shortage of Internet in my traveling life. Let me start by stating clearly that I got home Thursday September 19th in the middle of the night and very glad I was to get home after two weeks away. It was an excellent trip but home is home and I needed to get my dog over her irritation at my sudden disappearance.
I am not a fan of flying, as may have become apparent recently. I dislike the loss of control over one's life when airlines dictate one's every move. Cabin crew used to be glamorous people reeking of sex in the sky and hot hotel dates with pilots and rich businessmen far from home. Nowadays they more closely resembled harried hotel staff serving second rate food and minuscule drinks to passengers crammed like sardines. I flew home on American and frankly it was a let down compared to the rather more upscale accommodations previously recorded on the much maligned Air Berlin flight I took the other way. The American Airways flight had manky little video screens in the middle of the cabin, and two movies run at the pilot's convenience, the cabin crew were not as glad to see us as the introductory video seemed to imply and unlike Air Berlin we never got warm towels to wash with nor bottles of water to drink at will, and on and on and on.I just focused on the fact that my tickets were free thanks to my wife's judicious use to the American Airlines credit card, free to Rome and back. Cool.
I was entranced trying to figure how to convince my wife this would be worth trying: http://www.cbesprit.com/ Do you think this cheerful hopeful smile might work?
I managed to pay Jeremy back by letting him read a book off my mini iPad (an electronic device I have come to love more than the full sized iPad!) http://www.amazon.com/Motorcycle-Adventurer-Stearns-Motorcyclist-1912-1913/dp/1450221416 He was into it.
We read for a while and we talked and I let him know about the joys of modern Bonneville, which he has been wavering about buying. I convinced him it is a an easy to live with modern machine that he agrees looks good. 76,000 trouble free miles is quite an endorsement.
Then we got to Chicago and my most interesting travel companion was gone. I hope to keep in touch. Great fun and thus a much better trip than I expected or deserved. And I don't blame hi m for the horrid head cold and cough American Airlines gave me.
Posted with Blogsy
When my colleague took a 9-1-1 call about an accident on Highway One he had to make sure the wreck wasn't within city limits. That's because North Roosevelt Boulevard is technically US Highway One, even though it is a city street. Then he turned to us two in the room with him and asked quizzically: "Baypoint? Where's Baypoint? In the county?"
Bay Point is a peninsula that sticks out south of Highway One just about a mile or so, with a couple of dead ends and a few streets that form two surprisingly distinct communities in this small amount of space.
It's always crowded it seems like, in the winter and a motorcycle just makes sense for these expeditions into the hinterlands of the Florida Keys. Baby's Coffee marks the spot on Highway One where Bay Point sits, and there's a little grocery store next door, the kind of convenience store that people in the Keys can't seem to do without. Its known as the Halfway Store as it's mid point between Big Pine and Key West. Baby's has become the sort of frou frou grocery store that snowbirds seem to thrive in. 
They sell all those super expensive candies and cookies and sauces and pastes that you buy on vacation, fantasizing that the kitchen at home will suddenly become Aladdin's cave... but it doesn't! Unless you're my wife that is, but that's another hot sauce story. Baby's which was founded in downtown Key West still sells an honest cup of Joe for a buck including tax and their selections draw crowds.
Nowadays Baby's roasts its coffee somewhere around Homestead I believe, where labor costs and building rents are more reasonable, but moved its sole retail operation out to Mile Marker 15 after Duval Street rents started to go high enough to favor pornographic t-shirts over coffee sales. Behind the store is a county park, the sort of delicious public extravagance one associates with high property values, public income spent to benefit the local community:
I was sitting in the shade at a picnic table checking out Classic Bike while my coffee cooled a little. A local passed walking her dogs and got a greeting from a Baby's employee taking a smoke break behind the store:
Then my peaceful reading was interrupted by some cretinous customer who decided to take a leak in the bushes also behind the store next to the employee who was not blind. Emphatically not. She was a very loud female barista and she got a muted apology from the idiot. "And we don't just reserve the restroom for customers," she allowed to the dogwalker, a woman spared the sight of an elderly man attempting to pee into a tree. "What is wrong with people?" Which was way too philosophical a question for such a sunny President's Day. The most philosophy I could deal with was why did someone take on this boat project in the first place:
And I know for a fact that this country is absolutely bulging with backyard projects gone bad. When I see one here in the Keys it strikes me harder somehow. I imagine the happy boatbuilder reaching the end of the road and implementing a plan to cast off on the High Seas. Which naturally comes to naught, a bad habit, a woman, a family, obligations, los of nerve, Life; who knows what happens and the boat ends up high and dry. Catch Me indeed, I'm thinking fish are safe from this one. Back on land some people prefer to buy their projects intact and stick a manufactured home up on stilts; very popular and very neat:
Some people start their homes like boat plans and plant the framework for some stilts overlooking a dreamy scenic view:
There are the snowbirds who forget to come down for a winter or two and their plants blossom while their hurricane shutters stay tight shut:
I like to see the shutters open especially when they are these old 1950's style hurricane-bahama shutter style, popular on mobile homes of yesteryear with those old louvered windows underneath. Rotten for air conditioning great for nostalgia:
The eastern arm of Bay Point has the pricier homes on this island, with more on the way:
And I thought that was all there was to Bay Point, because I knew what this place was about.
It happened that a few years ago I was a tour boat captain and my boss bought himself a home on a canal at Bay Point. It was under $400,000 as I recall and he was over the moon at the bargain. The house was a concrete block structure, CBS, not on stilts and in terrible shape. It would have to be at that knock down bargain price... We captains went to work helping to install the wood paneled flooring which was quite a challenge as we all lived on boats and floors on a boat are something completely different. It took hours to figure out the jigsaw and get the corners to match up with the boss's anxious wife hovering and their new kid squalling and us captains scratching our collective heads at how to get the floor to go round corners and fit through doorways. It was a very late pizza and beer night for us at Bay Point.
The boss's house did look a deal better than this sorry shack for sale on the western arm of Bay Point, but cross a little bridge and you are in a world of trailers of all immaginable shapes, years and conditions:
The views remain spectacular no matter where you are when you look out on the water:
And back on the edge of Highway One there is a business for sale for an enterprising restaurateur. I never understood what was special about Knuckleheads, somebody's dream business which just translated into yet another sports bar restaurant selling television games and wings, and fried fish and beer, like any number of other, better established locales along the Highway. And there its, complete with handicapped parking and an airborne generator, ready for new owners to try their luck:
And look out at yet another spectacular view while they do:
For me it was time to roll home and meet the wife who had been off with a friend yard sale-ing and checking out a flea market. For some reason she found no junque worth bringing home so it was a splendid day all round.
Still sunny, still hot with a southwest breeze presaging another cold front to lower the 83 degree temperatures just a little bit, for a little while.