Night Commute

Tomorrow evening I will be sitting, I hope, in an aeroplane bound for London. In two weeks I will be back once again walking Rusty whom I shall miss very much, riding my scooter to work and glad no doubt to be back in the bosom of my family. I will try to post here as my phone and the blog app allow, and if my pictures are of interest my Instagram account:  michaelconchscooter will get regular updates. I will be in Scotland a few days with one sister and in Italy for a few more days to see my other two sisters. I plan to take lots of pictures.

Meanwhile I have been thinking quite a lot about how much I enjoy commuting with my Burgman 200, my first ever Japanese scooter.   It gets 70- 80 miles per gallon and has a top speed of 75 mph with another 5 possible in neutral conditions. The winds lately have been blowing hard but I have no trouble passing distracted drivers on Highway One. I liked this Australian billboard found on the web:

My commute starts about 50 minutes before I have to start work. For a 6pm shift I try to be ready by 10 minutes after five, loaded with my man purse and my lunchbox I say good bye to Rusty who sits at the top of the stairs looking pathetic as I put my bags under the seat of the Suzuki and put on my helmet and gloves.

I roll out onto Spanish Main the main artery that connects my neighborhood to US One. It's a subdivision filled with pirate names for some reason, a bored bureaucrat or one with a  peculiar taste in imaginative street naming. My house is almost a mile from the Overseas Highway and along the way normally one will see a human or two walking their dogs in the same places in the same way every day. In winter they crowd the street from their trailers in the neighboring Venture Out trailer park.

Riding to work between five and six in the evening I get to see the sunset in its various stages before and after time changes, different times of year, under vast cloud anvils and through wispy cirrus and sometimes in all shades of pink and orange and red. In December I find myself in a race with darkness to get to work before the sun drops out of sight. Those are the times I remind myself why I have worked nightshift for 14 years and, after I was sent to nights as punishment for insubordination (I was rude to the boss's daughter) I never wanted to go back to days. These days I'm the senior dispatcher and I work the shift I want.

The other reason to work nights is the lack of traffic.In winter there seems to be traffic everywhere all the time and all of it driving very slowly and distracted. However eight months of the year I drive the wrong way against the commuters and my ride to and from Key West can often be a pleasure, an empty road, the highway to myself. The hardest thing is to find an opening to pass if I do get stuck behind a solitary wool gatherer behind the wheel of a car.

When I arrive at work there is normally my choice of parking spots as all the administrative staff, all the day shift have gone and there are open spaces all round the police station. Plus my scooter doesn't have to sit out in the sun fading the paint and wrecking the seat. I am a vampire: by the time the sun does come back up I am most of the way, if not all the way home.

I love riding the empty highway especially after a short overtime shift which often sees me on the road around two in the morning:

I can ride the 14 miles home without seeing another vehicle after I leave Big Coppitt. That's the place the last of the cars from Key West usually peel off and go home. It takes dedication to live at Mile Marker 23 out beyond the outer darkness that closes in on the highway after Big Coppitt.

When there's a decent sized moon the waters either side of the highway glisten silver, while the mangrove islands crouch impenetrably black alongside the road. Sometimes I stop in the middle of one of the innumerable straight stretches and I sit astride the Burgman scooter and listen to the darkness.

The lights of Cudjoe Key mark the Sheriff's substation at Mile Marker 22 followed shortly thereafter by the Kickin' Back convenience store. I paused for a picture to take advantage of the lights though this isn't a twenty four hour store and it was long since closed for the night:

Then it's another mile of highway and the final mile of Spanish Main back to my side street. Rusty awaits usually and expects a quick neighborhood walk before I repair to the deck and sip rum and look at the night.

All this riding requires occasional maintenance and though I usually turn to JK Motorsports on Stock Island for my wrenching, I will do a quick oil change as needed. Pretty soon Jiri will have to order a tire for me as the rear is wearing down. I've put more than three thousand miles on the Burgman since March 17th. Not bad. I like this scooter, handy in town and powerful enough to pass cars on the highway even if they decide to try to prevent me.

Why people spend so much time worrying about other people passing them I'll never understand. If you want to go fast be my guest, but if you don't please don't get mad if I want to ride faster than you want to drive. Because my Burgman 200 won't hold you up if I do pass you. I've ridden this road enough to know every nuance, believe me.

Vespa Commute

One thing about being forced to ride slowly is that I leave home earlier than usual, just so I don't have to push my scooter out of it's breaking in comfort zone...That in turn leads me to pull over from time to time when cars catch up to me in the faster sections. So here I am being polite all pulled over on the ample shoulder of Highway One and there springs to view a photograph. This is Saddlebunch Bridge  Number One, at Mile Marker 17:

 Luckily the views tend to justify the pictures, especially with a few alterations to the exposure levels. I am quite surprised how well I keep up with traffic in the 45 mph sections of the highway. Usually I pass the slow pokes even by just a few miles an hour, but now rolling along in line with them the little Vespa with all its limitations imposed by the running in period does a decent job of keeping up. 

Stopping for pictures also gives the engine a breather, here on the section of the highway around Mile Marker 10, Rockland Key where the road becomes four lanes and even the most timid can find it ion their hearts to pass the Hobbitt on his moped.

I am really enjoying the ease of use of the Vespa, which weighs in around 230 pounds and feels as light as a bicycle when rolling off the stand.

Riding through town where the top speed limit is 35 and usually is less than that, the P200 already has enough oomph to keep up with traffic. The biggest liability is the front drum brake which is, to put it politely, rather wooden, ie: it doesn't work worth a damn. The hardest thing for me is to remember that rather sobering fact and keep my distance. The rear brake, operated by a foot pedal will lock up the rear wheel by contrast. 1970s  brakes! A disc brake conversion for the front is available but the parts alone cost $800, though it is something I think about every time I squeeze the front brake lever.

For my first twelve hour shift after my vacation I decided Cuban coffee was in order so I stopped by Sandy's Cafe after my ride through downtown, practicing shifting in traffic. I ordered a colada, described thusly in Wikipedia;

Colada, is 4-6 shots of Cuban style espresso served in a Styrofoam cup along with small, plastic demitasses. It is a takeaway form, meant to be shared. This is customary of workplace breaks in Cuban communities.

My colleagues wanted no coffee when I got to work so I ended up drinking one whole cup of espresso, all to myself. 

I handled it like a man, I hope.

Cross Winds And A Vespa

I did  tell my wife, by way of reassurance that I planned to take the car in to work last night, but there again I told her that the night before when I took the Bonneville...and had a rollicking good time despite a little (a lot actually) of cold wet rain on the ride home at four in the morning. Cheyenne was waiting for me as I stripped off my waterproofs and then demanded a 90 minute walk in freezing North winds. After the fun of my ride I felt unable to refuse her so I got to bed at 6:30 quite chilled and cheerful.

I studied the entrails offered by the National Weather Service and it looked to me like rain might be in the offing but only on the way home which is not much of a problem. Getting soaked and cold on my way to a twelve hour shift in an artificially chilled office is more of an issue. The communications center is kept quite cold year round not for our benefit but to keep the radio telephony stacks at comfortable operating temperatures...which is quite important as tax payers like 911 to work all the time. So getting wet feet and hands and shirt collars and sitting in damp clothes on a 63 degree ride is not indicated. But all looked good enough to risk. Bugger the car! I'm riding!

The next thing to think about was whether to take the Bonneville or the Vespa. The Bonneville has 60 horsepower, enough to fight headwinds easily, and a big windshield to keep my torso warm and relatively dry if the rain's not too heavy or continuous. However the Vespa has floorboards to keep my feet dry if there is any residual rainwater on the road. And the small screen helps to push air over my head though I think it is really more of psychological support in nasty weather. A lot of people think ten inch wheels are a liability at speed or in cross winds but I have never found them to be so. My technique in strong winds, and the weather service reported gusts to 35 miles per hour, is to hold the handlebars lightly and let the machine take care of itself and it works really well. I never get blown across the road and I have been out in stronger winds. You need to keep an eye on passing slab sided vehicles and hedges or buildings that may shield you from the wind because sudden changes in wind pressure can cause a motorbike to lurch but  a light touch on the handlebars is all it takes, I find. 

The Vespa performed flawlessly and I had a nice ride into town easily keeping up with traffic even in the 55mph zone. I had another reason for wanting to test the Vespa in these conditions: next week I am scheduled to drive to Allentown Pennsylvania to get my 1979 P200 back from Gene at Scooters Originali. I can hardly believe the 18 month restoration is just about over. Tuesday morning I plan to show up with my trailer, in what I hope will be 55 degree weather, and tow it south as fast as I can for a Thanksgiving with friends in Georgia, at Jekyll Island. Anyway I am hoping the P200 will perform in similar fashion to my wife's more modern 150cc which I have found ideal for my flatland commute. 

The problem with the Bonneville is that it's too powerful some days for this road. It's an easy bike to ride and seventy miles per hour is entirely comfortable but that just gets me in line for a ticket. My theory is that a Vespa commute will keep the pace slower and leave me less tempted to pass everyone all the time. Why I prefer the old two stroke over a modern Vespa is a story for another day. First I need to make sure my theory about the 1979 nostalgia trip works in real life. That I rode one from New York to San Francisco, via Guadalajara, in 1981 is not a guarantee that this P200 will be the ideal daily rider I think it should be. Certainly my wife's 2004 four stroke automatic handles the job really well at a high cost in tires belts and variators. I am hoping the P200 will use almost no consumables with its gear box needing oil changes and split rim wheels making tire changes easy even at home.

I got to work in plenty of time and in fact there was evidence of rain in the parking lot at work, but I was dry and ready to sit up all night in comfort. My half hour ride is quite a  privilege this time of year when snow and ice is the order of the day most places in the northern hemisphere. I found this rather evocative picture on the Web from a long defunct Italian blog. They seemed to be enjoying snow, something I find hard to imagine frankly.

To each their own and mine is sun, tropical primary colors and heat thanks.

Scenic Appreciation

It was a fabulous morning yesterday as I drove Cheyenne into town. The stillness of the water, the difficulty of identifying the horizon, it's how you know it was a gorgeous windless summer day.


I was able to snap the picture with some ease as we were traveling in a funeral cortège along Highway One. The speed limit may have been 55 but we were having trouble holding 45, and the reason was the red truck at the head of a very long line of anxious commuters. The Pennsylvania tagged truck was beyond my over-taking ability as there was too much traffic headed our way. Besides I wasn't driving to work and I was in my car not riding the Bonneville.


The truck driven by a shirtless man reveled in driving ten miles an hour below the limit though the bumper stickers told another story. Self hatred? You'd think so considering the other sticker read "Yes, I'm a bitch. So fucking what?" which explains why s/he never did find the heart to pull over a to let the worker bees get to their destinations.


It went on like this from Summerland Key (MM25) to Key Plaza (MM3) where the truck went to a construction site, begging the question why s/he hadn't updated to a Florida tag...some laws are just meant to be broken. Not in this instance speed limits, ironically enough. I tucked in behind to see how slow s/he could go and I clocked 22 on North Roosevelt's 35 in rush hour! Fucking bitch indeed!


I respect people's right to drive fast, I pull over when people come up behind me but I am alone in doing that. I drive for myself and what others want to do is their business. Tickets for all! But on then other hand these islands are connected by one road only and everyone has to use it. Worker bees, idle snowbirds, visitors struck senseless by the beauty, speeders, loafers and capable drivers and drunk drivers and incapable drivers too, even when sober. We can't take the freeway when we wake up late, or the scenic route as an alternative to the regular commute. We all have to mix it up on the Overseas Highway, which makes me even happier I work nights!


Then I saw a woman commuting on Flagler Avenue on a scooter and she put the fucking bitch to shame. Flowing smoothly with traffic, blocking no one with her 50cc buzz bomb, reminding us that indeed mean people suck.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Keys Commuting

It's five past five o'clock post meridian, a cow has licked my hair, I got a clean polo shirt off the hangar and my Kevlar lined pants aren't too terribly wrinkled to serve as work dress pants for the night. I am ready to say goodbye to my dog.

She pretends to ignore me as I turn the hall light on and put out her dinner bowl which she won't touch until either my wife gets home or hunger over takes Cheyenne. When I tell her to stay Cheyenne knows not to follow me downstairs but she makes a point of ignoring me as I abandon her for the night.

The Bonneville is always ready to go at the touch of the starter button. I generally run the engine for a minute or two while I put on my mesh jacket helmet and gloves. A squeeze on the Loobman chain oiler and off we go out into the world. It should be around five ten pm when we roll out from under the house.

To have but one road to ride may seem like a limitation but in my experience people are such creatures of habit that when they commute rarely do they take a different route to and from work even when options are available. I used to try to explore the back roads between Santa Cruz and San Jose but found that the time spent away from my dogs was an imposition. So I ended up using Highway 17 most of the time. Here I have no choice.

It's lucky the views are so pleasant. Most of them at any rate.I vary my commute by varying my approach to the ride. Some evenings I take it really slowly, pulling over to let faster vehicles by. Of course when I catch up to other vehicles on nights I am riding faster, they never pull over for me.

I know the passing spots and if I am thinking about passing I know where and when to position myself to take best advantage of the limited passing opportunities. Sometimes people speed up as I pull out but even a 60 horsepower air cooled twin like the Bonneville has plenty of oomph to get past the drivers who drop their phones and start to speed up to avoid being passed. Why it bothers them I couldn't say- I ride my own ride.Passing isn't always worth while even when it's possible. This time of year snowbirds clog the Highway. For some reason they don't have the wit to avoid rush hour so they manage to clog the road quite a lot when traffic is at it's heaviest morning and evening. In summer even heavy traffic bowls along nicely at least close to the limit, but in winter one will find oneself in an endless line of cars chugging along at 30 miles per hour.Sunrise and sunset vary throughout the year of course and summer time will change the dynamic once again in a few short weeks. Currently it gets dark around six thirty in the evening and it gets light around the same time in the morning. This is the typical view across the Saddlebunch Keys looking toward Big Coppitt.I have been commuting along this road for the six years I have owned my house on Ramrod Key and some days I will ride it twice. Yet it rarely tires me, for all that it is largely flat and mostly straight. Perhaps it is because I have a large store of memories of riding more challenging roads, a lifetime of them in fact. Perhaps it is because I appreciate so much not feeling too terribly cold, not hypothermic at any rate, even on the coldest days. Perhaps the wild summer weather and the blistering winter cold fronts help to provide variety. Perhaps it is just because I am content in advanced middle age.The hump in the four lane stretch between Big Coppitt and Stock island is produced by the exit ramp to Boca Chica Naval Air Station which is bury training pilots this time of year (who spend lots of money in the local economy). The road here is peppered with signs reading "Slower Traffic Keep Right." But do they? Do they hell! The slowpokes line up in the left lane and I sweep by in the right. There are a lot of control freaks on the road who like to worry about what everyone else is doing on the road.Traffic starts to build up by Stock Island, which is where I should be by five forty at the latest to get to work by five fifty. Stopping to take pictures buggered up my schedule on this ride so I snatched my backpack from the top case, dropped helmet and gloves in it's place and ran upstairs to the communications center. I like to relieve day shift by five fifty as it's nice to get a few minutes break at the end of a twelve hour shift. they do the same for us when they relieve us in the morning. That's when I gallop downstairs to warm up the Bonneville and get my jacket helmet and gloves on for the 27 mile ride home.The Boulevard (North Roosevelt Boulevard) looks especially quiet this early on a Sunday.The cluster of cars leaving key West will peel off to various destinations along the way. Some go no further than Stock Island, the hot rodders generally pull off at the Navy base and the last few pull off to jobs on Rockland Key's trucking depots or go home on side streets at Big Coppitt, Mile Marker Ten. The tourists trying to make an early flight in Miami and myself remain on the highway through the early morning darkness of the Saddlebunch Keys. The smart tourists follow me at my pace because I know where it's safe to hold the limit and where it isn't but sometimes they hustle on past me risking a hefty fine on a road that really doesn't resemble the high speed highways they are used to at home.
Eventually I pull in under the house hopefully around six thirty five though some mornings I'll stop at the Shell station at the end of my street to fill up with regular gas- at $3:30 a gallon these days. The Bonneville runs about 134 miles before hitting reserve which holds another forty odd miles. By the time I'm around 120 I start to think about filling up. It's a pain to stop on the way to work and I don't always remember to fill up on my lunch breaks and on top of all that the station at the end of my street is among the cheaper gas stations around. Cheyenne comes running downstairs from her station on the lounge chair on the porch upstairs, her paws rumble on the steps as soon as she hears the motorcycle.My commute isn't yet over as we pile into the Fusion for a ride over to her early morning walking spot, the Pool on the northeast shore of Ramrod Key, five minutes from the house.The pool is a cut in the living rock as part of a development that never materialized and as a result there is a deep hole in the ground filled with tidal saltwater. A perfect place to come and swim or walk your dog as many locals do, at a more civilized hour of the day. Cheyenne prefers to walk here when no one else is around and each morning she likes to sniff and see who came by the day before.I read the paper that I picked up in my driveway, she walks. A couple of weeks ago we came here later in the morning on my day off and an inoffensive Lab mix clamped her face in it's jaws and bit down to howls of protest. She got a couple of small cuts over her right eye and the vet put her on antibiotics for a couple of weeks. I tried to reassure the poor owner of the dog but she was mortified. One can hardly blame Cheyenne for preferring solitary walks.The walk takes perhaps forty five minutes and usually there is no one else around. When I start to yawn uncontrollably, or if a cold north wind is blowing we head home to breakfast for Cheyenne and sleep for me.Cheyenne likes this spot but she is a funny girl, a creature of habit. Some mornings I take her for a walk down our street but I get the feeling this is where she likes to come so we ride over most days.Finally she clambers back in the car and if I'm lucky I'll be home in bed before quarter to eight. If I'm really lucky Cheyenne will climb up alongside me and we'll sleep back to back.Winter or summer, rain or shine, every day is good for a ride in the fabulous Florida Keys.