I don't want to spend too much of your time reiterating the history of this famous road that started as a privately funded project called the Over-The-Sea Railroad and after 23 years of no profitability was wrecked by a storm which prompted the State of Florida in a moment of uncharacteristic socialism to take over the railbe. The State turned it into a road opened in 1938, a great period for public works in our collective history. In 1982 the travel time to the mainland was halved by the new broad road allowing for a less than three hour journey in relative safety and ease, though speaking as one who has been evacuated by air ambulance from US 1 I feel confident in stating not every driver knows what they are doing.
There are sections of four lane highway through the Keys, there are passing zones and the speed limits vary between 45 and 55 miles per hour with some 50 miles per hour and Key Deer nighttime protections at 35 mph. Those are the best as you can find yourself trying to get home behind some oblivious nipnunk who can't tell day from night. Better that than the anxious tourists passing on double yellow lines and closing the highway for hours as their victims bleed to death ( or get saved a sI did by the helicopter). Nine years ago they were wrapping up a major improvement to the Overseas Highway, a $3330 million dollar construction job that was an effort to make approaching the Keys easier and more efficient. The 18 mile stretch (known henceforth as "The Stretch") joins Florida City to Key Largo across the bottom stip of Everglades marsh and it used to be a deathtrap with two lanes, no median and wild passing efforts. The idea was to separate the two directions of traffic with a cement barrier and keep traffic flowing without head on collisions. Job done. However the major design flaw has led to some hairy driving on the stretch...
It's a 45 mile per hour speed limit as you drive through Florida City, an amorphous collection of chain restaurants and gas stations but as the center divider appears, painted an imaginative turquoise color at the suggestion of a Keys resident, the speed limit goes up to 55 mph but the unwary have no idea the two lanes will rapidly shrink to one. That's when the fun begins.
The Stretch was built as a single lane highway with two short passing places to allow traffic build ups to disperse. This creates all the road rage and impatience you can imagine. On the face of it why not create a four lane highway as the land is obviously available, and environmental reservations notwithstanding traffic is heavy as this is the main road in and out of the island chain.
Despite the fact the road passes through empty marshland there are a few turn outs, a state jail, some marinas, maintenance facilities and cell towers create the need for turning lanes which in the helter skelter requirements of the impatient become illegal and dangerous passing lanes. The dark gray car below is pulling out behind the light gray car to get ahead of the slow moving boat in the picture below (thanks to my wife the passenger for these photos):
The reason for this is political. It was determined that creating a four lane highway would open up evacuation times in the case of say, a hurricane. The state safety regulations mandate everyone be able to evacuate the Keys within a certain time limit and this bottleneck has been used to slow and stall development in the Keys. Creating a smooth fast four lane highway would have been the path to allowing more construction in the islands. So we get passing in turning lanes, crowding and weird crashes as the drivers push to get to Paradise - terrestrial if they are lucky and celestial if they are less so..
The upshot is that during busy times I take an extra ten minutes or so and ride the other entrance to the Keys along Card Sound Road, a 55 mph road with passing places, light traffic usually and the superb conch fritters at Alabama Jack's. The other highway in the title is called Krome Avenue and that is a totally different story.
Krome Avenue, also known as Highway 997 in Florida's confusing multi-named highway system runs from Homestead to Highway 27 (Okeechobee Road) through farm country with roadside fruit and vegetable stands and nurseries growing palms for instant landscaping in new developments. It's all rather appropriate as the man it is named for William Julius Krome is famous as the engineer who built the railroad to Key West but is not known for the botanist and agriculturalist he was, before he died unnaturally young. It's also where dogs just like Rusty get dumped by people who tire of their animals. As you can see road widening is well underway. This used to be a narrow scenic farm road with two lanes, no barriers and lots of crashes and near misses as farm tractors mixed it up with 18 wheelers and boy racers. I never used to drive Krome to avoid freeway crowds on the Turnpike a few miles east of here. These days most of Krome Avenue is an easy drive:
Four lanes, turning lanes, barricades, street lighting with surprisingly modest speed limits, 45-55 miles per hour depending on the urban build up alongside the road. A road sign at the Highway 27 end of Krome announced zero fatalities so far in 2020. And why would there be? Slower traffic keep right and all is well with the world in a slow moving van. The best part is that once the highway is reconfigured to get through Homestead without killing anyone it will be an easy relaxing ride north around the madness that is the Turnpike extension which joins the fatally flawed Stretch. Card Sound to Krome Avenue and Sawgrass Expressway could become the easiest escape from the Keys. Not without traffic lights but still.
So every time I drive the modern safe highway that is Krome Avenue I wonder why The Stretch has to be the stock car race track it has turned into. 
As did the man himself. Johnny took up his role as porter, as he usually does when he sees us arrive with all our impedimenta, and our road trip instantly became a visit, which was a pleasant change.
On the road conversation tends to turn rather desultory in our car.
Even though our life experiences are completely different Johnny shares my ability to view life through a slightly skewed lense. We talked about another resident of Kudzu Castle, Don Siegelman was one of those early friends who said at the time he wanted to become governor of Alabama. That he did in 1999, to my wife's astonishment and was later prosecuted for corruption, charges that appear to have been politically motivated as Siegelman was under consideration for Vice President as a running mate for Al Gore. The US Supreme Court recently voted to send his case back to the Appeals Court for a review. I've never met the man but one has to imagine that Johnny and my wife took the more sensible career paths. Who needs Karl Rove gunning for them? So stopping in Birmingham is a very good thing especially for my wife who gets to feed her nostalgia (I get to visit the Barber Motorcycle Museum of which more tomorrow). For Cheyenne too this was a good stop. I think she was craving the familiar after three weeks of constant change.
Why she took it into her head to spend the night in Johnny's closet I couldn't say, but when I woke up the next morning there she was. Perhaps she knew that we had another 900 miles to go and she was sending a signal that she wasn't ready.
We had dinner in a fabulous Greek restaurant in the nearby town of Bessemer whose name reminded me of nothing so much as a a Spanish kiss (besame means "kiss me."). The reality is that Bessemer has apparently gone downhill and we were greeted at the Bright Star restaurant by an armed guard in the lobby. I left my camera at home as I wanted a night off after three weeks and 1400 pictures of absolutely everything so now that i have had plenty of time to regret that choice here is a picture off Bright Star's website of their fabulous 1914 dining room.
We drank wine and ate lemon fish and corn bread sticks and evening had a couple of puddings worthy of photography. The baklava cheese cake was extraordinary, slices from a roll of baklava pastry with a creamy custard inside. Cheyenne napped outside in the car in the cool of the evening guarding the vehicle from all local evil doers. The next day we breakfasted with Johnny and his 88 year old mother Tippy (who I prefer to think of as Zippy given her mobility) and he went to work at the library and we went home to do our bit to keep 21st century America rolling.
Cheyenne would have stayed put, as would we. There was no doubt we were all a bit tired.
Normally we can drive from Birmingham to our house in 16 hours. We left the tree shaded street in front of Johnny's home determined to do just that, one more time.
Almost immediately we faltered along the enticing shoulder of Highway 82, past Eufaula, in the Peach State.
"Turn Back!" my wife ordered in no uncertain terms as the fruit stand flashed by. I pulled a fast U-turn. Usually we indulge in spicy boiled peanuts, but this time my wife had other plans. She had set her sights considerably higher. 
We did try these things but I have to say the bacon flavor was weak and the puffs were rather too puffy. We failed to make a dent in the bag. Considering all those chemicals you'd think they would have had some zing. 
I don't think this translates really well into modern gutter American. My colleague Noel, the most cheerful gay man I know looked startled for a minute then couldn't stop chortling. "They've got that right," was his comment. 
I suspect these fields were peanuts (ground nuts in British/English) though the plants looked vaguely like beans. Cheyenne was not impressed, she didn't even deign to pee on them. 
We dawdled along at 40 mile per hour with bursts to 30mph and had I not been anxious about wrecking my perfect attendance I might have enjoyed the drive a lot more. The Channel Five bridge rising in the back ground made the perfect back drop to these bridge anglers.
It was good to see turquoise waters again. Matecumbe Key.
The deeper into the keys we got, the easier the driving became as traffic thinned out. The home stretch- the familiar Seven Mile Bridge. 
And my garden had been producing while I was gone.How about that?
Lovely to be home.
In a land of 300 million people there are bound to be a handful of lunatics everywhere you go. I thought this guy was doing yoga. My wife said he was applying sunscreen. Either way I hope he enjoyed the ride up the Unfortunate River Canyon.
They either breed these spandex people around here or this is a popular form of vacation diversion. I never saw so many cyclists riding flat out into the jaws of Hell.
Shadows were lengthening by the time we escaped the canyon and arrived in Nyssa ("nicer"?) Oregon and crossed the mighty Snake River into the land of potatoes and wild eyed survivalist militia men and their pioneer families.
There is no need to display more photos of the identical countryside through the continuing plains of Southern Idaho. The scenery varied not one jot as we skirted Boise and pressed on south as the sun set in a spectacular ball of red fire behind us. My wife's iPhone found us a dog friendly La Quinta in Twin Falls (how the other twin stayed erect was not passed down through history) Idaho where we spent the night. I struggled out of bed the next morning to meet a wet nose and a madly wagging tail. It was time for the ever patient Cheyenne's morning constitutional. Some dog owners think walking their dog in a short semi circle on a piece of lawn is an adequate morning stroll. In my family we are made of sterner stuff especially while traveling on the road when she and I walked an hour at least every morning so the dog didn't go nuts on the back seat of the Fusion during the other eleven hours of the driving day. Twin Falls I renamed Sprinkler City. 
This place brought to mind the modern truism that every calorie of modern food requires ten calories of carbon energy to bring it to our tables across America. I found myself walking in a landscape J H Kunstler spends all together too much time warning us about. I don't think this rates as sustainable living. 
Onward and upward! We burned a gallon of dead dinosaurs every 28 miles at a rate of 80 miles per hour along the freeway in our desperate Happy Motoring Tour of the badlands of the West. Until we met our Stimulus dollars hard at work improving our network of oil dependent freeways getting a face lift. This sort of stuff was going on all over America this summer. Shovel ready Works Progress Administration for the 21st century depression.
The heat of the non climate change induced extra hot summer continued unabated. Cheyenne popped out like a prairie dog and popped back to her air conditioned bed.
I am no great fan of Mormonism, or Latter Day Sainthood as they like to be known. It is a religion with too much in common with my childhood torture chamber in the Catholic Church, but give them credit: they have the pink Croc thing down very effectively. One of the weird things about this secretive belief system is that you can't get to heaven unless you wear church made underwear. I have seen pictures of it and if you imagine Mormons walking around in saintly lace you are not on the right path. It is some sort of nightdress arrangement with symbols and planets stitched on it. I didn't want to hear from anyone in Ogden,our lunch stop, about how weird my pink Crocs are. Nor did anyone even seem to notice them.
Up until this past Spring sometime Utah required establishments selling the demon liquor to offer the stuff only to club members. Our server at Andy's Lounge told us, with an embarrassed grin, that the requirement no longer stands, but our lunch appeared very decadent in a windowless room reminiscent of a speakeasy from the bad old days of Al Capone.
The lamb the pita the salad were excellent and our starter of Greek salad with real olives and crumbly feta went down a treat with our diet cokes. I desperately wanted to drink evil beer as a sign of my own determined impurity but alcohol at noon would have passed me out. We ate like pigs instead. It was delicious. 
Cheyenne was asleep in the back of the car, the engine running the air conditioning blasting so Princess could live more comfortably than 90 percent of the humans on the planet and we resumed our madcap dash East were we met more people striving to get close to Nature. That they looked odd to me as they burned no fuel except their own, is a measure of how far we have to come before I accept our reduced energy future.
We arrived in Wyoming, a state that put me in a quandary as I no longer was sure what to call my dog. We took a walk along a river while my wife played electronic scrabble in the car on her blessed iPhone and I tried calling her "State Capital" and "Largest City in Wyoming" but she responded to neither term of endearment, did Cheyenne. 
This woman leading her offspring down river like a mother duck called the waters warm, which was when I realized that come people really do think an ocean at 90 degrees is too warm. 
Set the cruise control at 80mph and try not to fall asleep. 
Living in a trailer in the steppes of Wyoming sounds like bloody hell to me. Perhaps this is my fate after I die?
For that night in Rock Springs we paused in a giant Albertsons supermarket and bought a delightful picnic for home consumption. Our home was a clean comfortable room with nonsense on the television. State Capital had had enough for one day.
The next morning neither of us could face a suburban walk before dawn. She got remarkably excited by the dog walk area and I stood in my Crocs and contemplated the universe overhead.
More roads ahead, more dead dinosaurs to burn.