Chasing Tags On A Vespa

It's turned hot again. So there's only one thing for it, if you are a hairy Labrador; push your forehead up against something and pass out while waiting for winter to return.

I headed out  to Big Pine Key to get some milk and to pick up a scooter tag for the ADVrider forum.I was heading to No Name Pub when I saw a vintage Yamaha parked by the baseball diamond on Key Deer Boulevard. Oooh I thought, an XS500, very rare. Trevor liked it enough he pounced on a neighbor to sell it and eventually the neighbor yielded the bike to the young enthusiast.

The motorcycle is  perfect, a little rusty slightly faded paint but original, unused and ride-able.  The early models were  a bit cranky and go a reputation for not being reliable so they ended up not selling well but they were quite advanced for their time. This is an extraordinary survivor lacking a little bit of oil before Trevor could get back on the road. His buddy was heading over to refill the oil tank for him.

I showed Trevor over the Vespa, the spare wheel, the hand gear shift, the split rims, the flat  forced air cooled cylinder, then I took off to grab my next tag, a building with the word "pub" in it: 

Suburbia on Big Pine: big homes, lawns, canals, a sense of order and middle class sobriety which make up this Tropical Bay Estate. 

 In my studies to make this Vespa reliable at high speeds I have been contemplating the mixture of air versus fuel that is in the combustion chamber as the Vespa gets hotter and faster at speeds approaching 60 miles per hour. It is a dark art but I need to get familiar with it if I don't want to burn a piston up every time I hold the scooter at full speed, a supposed 62  mph (100 km/h). So what one does is a "spark plug chop," a nerve wracking thing. You hold the scooter at full speed for  half a minute then shut off the ignition, coast to a stop and pull out the burning hot spark plug. Yum!

So I went out to Middle Torch Key and took off at full tilt. I timed my run to stop the scooter in the shade of the only tall tree where I played "shade tree mechanic" and took the spark plug out. As I started a couple of Harley riders came by, ignoring me in my apparent distress. That's funny I said to myself as I burned my fingers, I'll bet they wave like crazy to their fellow Hogs on the highway...but do they know enough about riding to think to stop alongside a stopped motorbike (or Vespa)?

The plug was looking good, chocolate brown and a little bit oily. The mixture looks good. I tried it again on my way to work holding 62 mph for a bit. The plug was still brown but a little less oily so I increased the amount of fuel in hopes of keeping the piston cool at speed.

The Harley came back as I contemplated the result of my plug chop. No stopping this time either. He only looks like an old school bike rider.

 Time to ride for pleasure. At times like these variety would be the spice of life. I ride where I can and enjoy the wilderness as I can. A mountain would be nice but this is what I have:

Play with the Vespa, mess with the camera and time to go home, take  a nap and prepare to commute to work.

 The next tag required your scooter at a sports field with the scoreboard visible. Looked good:

And so it goes, ride a little work a lot. Enjoy the warm night air.

Cheyenne On No Name Key

I  want to explore the backwoods of No Name Key but this is clearly not the right time of year as it's just too hot. That Cheyenne was willing to brave a 95 degree afternoon in the open air is testament to her determination to enjoy herself while she had me alone and compliant with her every whim. I took her to the end of No Name to explore the shady coastline. Not the Unknown No Name I desired to revisit. 

It has been so far a classic summer of oppressive heat which i rather enjoy, with respites in air conditioning and a cool dark bedroom to sleep in, punctuated by dramatic and sometimes violent thunderstorms with wind and rain and darkness in the middle of the day. The views over the waters have been flat and shiny, mirror-like all the way to the almost imperceptible horizon.

Not perhaps as breezy as she might have hoped...

Even the puddles and mud were no relief for her.

These shorelines are no great sandy enticement for most people but I like the gnarled mangrove roots, the sculptures of trees that could not survive, shiny and gray and reaching into the blue sky.

It's primal chaos.

But if I get too busy with my camera and herself gets bored she has a tendency to come and round me up.

Time for one more quick one, mangrove and dead seaweed.

There are large, ankle breaking holes everywhere, inhabited by the hardest creatures to photograph: extremely shy land crabs that wave their claws at your puny lense and with perfect timing scuttle out of sight before the shutter does it's thing. Nice hole though.

Not a long walk, no great action, alone until a car came barreling to the end of the road, pulled a u-turn, as you do in the Keys inevitably, and drove back up the road presumably looking for Key deer wandering in the heat of the day. This is where you come if you want to see Key deer, though we saw none this time.

You would think electrification has come to No Name Key. Actually not yet as far as I know are the lines buzzing with electrons as the process seems to have got held up in the courts. Certainly it hasn't been in the headlines lately. The debate goes on.

There are new Wildlife Refuge signs  reminding people not to feed the key deer, but aside from the power poles not much has changed here, at least visibly. No Name Key was the place where Cubans trained for the Bay of Pigs attack, but the other claim to fame is the pub which is actually on Big Pine Key.

I did not stop here this time but went home to a salad or something equally easy and uninteresting.

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No Name Pub

Shannon asked me Saturday night where did I suggest she might want to go with her parents when they visit next week. I thought about it and because she wanted to take them on a road trip, which is to say drive them well outside the city limits of Key West, I started by suggesting Sparky's Landing in Key Colony Beach, well out of range for people who think 50 miles is beyond the pale...No Name Pub? Been there... Square Grouper? Done that...Kiki's Sandbar? Huh? Well I said it's new so its clean, as her mother is germ-phobic, but it has a nice Keys atmosphere and pleasant water views...Whatever she decides I wish her luck.  I hate giving advice so I wish her well on her trip. 

As it happened we had a lunch date Sunday at No Name Pub where we haven't been for a while, but it isn't far  from our house so it was a short drive with the roof open on the wife's Fiat 500 convertible. This is the first convertible I really like so the drive at 10 minutes was rather too short and as I had to work that evening I couldn't order Yuengling draft to wile away the time we had in hand waiting for our key West friends who got hammered by the gruesome winter traffic on Highway One. I drank a lot of iced tea instead.

I guess it really has been a while since we visited No Name Pub as I had never previously seen the outdoor seating, and very nice it was too. We got the last table open when we walked in; the place was packed as usual. Stacey and Steve made it in good order, complaining as my wife and I frequently do that traffic on the Overseas Highway all too often just crawls along. 

 It was a perfect day for an outdoor lunch, sunny bright but not too hot and with plenty of shade both human made and from the many trees. I always wondered why eating here was not allowed. That era has ended, I guess.

Three of us got fish and chips which  included the dollar fries, round slices of potato instead of the usual French fried contraptions while Stacey got a calzone that appealed to her native New York nature. A lifetime spent in Syracuse was rewarded by a giant football of pastry filled with molten cheese. 

This sort of life is why people move to the Keys and Steve has retired after a life of teaching law at the university in Syracuse, a life he enjoyed but whose famously harsh winters tired him. However they are neither of them willing or able to leave New York behind completely. This summer they will return back north leaving those of us that live here to enjoy the tranquility of low season.

We dawdled over lunch for a couple of hours I think and eventually we dragged ourselves away from the wreckage, fifteen dollars apiece with drinks and tax etc...and made our way back through the inner sanctum of the venerable pub. In summer when its not packed on hot humid weekdays the dark cool interior will be welcome but Sunday was not the day to be packed indoors like a sardine. 

 A pleasant change for us to come here, even as we read of continuous never ending snow and storms Up North.

 No Name Pub is not high class eating or innovative food or spectacular beer lists. Its just a nice place to hang out and enjoy the weather and the relative peace of distant Big Pine Key. Its really not that hard to find. 

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No Name Pub

I don't often go to No Name Pub on Watson Drive on Big Pine Key, but I ride by now and again on my way to the walks on No Name Key itself, which is a bridge away from the pub. The pub prides itself on being hard to locate which piece of marketing is given the lie by the huge inevitable crowds to be found there every day of winter, and frequently during the summer.

I chose to take out of town guests to No Name on an extremely wet winter's day earlier this week, a day when it was pouring down like a sumer thunderstorm, which made exterior pictures difficult to take. as usual the crowd was tremendous and we were packed into the waiting room in the back which opens out onto a fenced yard at the time rapidly becoming submerged under the incessant rain.

If the food and drink isn't enough they have a range of merchandise featuring the panama hatted dude, parrots and their slogan about the difficulty of locating them. Just to prove you have been there, as it were.There is of course a television hanging off the wall which I dislike intensely. I can't stand TV as background, and the idea of having a TV blaring while I am supposed to be being sociable (something that's hard for me to do anyway) is very off putting. We didn't have to wait very long for a table but the choice of seating was nil so I found myself facing the hated screen. Oh well.Despite being packed the service is pretty fast and that would be helped by the kind of food offered here. The pizza is claimed to be the best in the Lower Keys though I dispute that. If you like heavy pizza dough weighed down by too many ingredients this is the pizza for you. I prefer the more intensely flavored and interesting pizza flavors sold at Slice of Paradise in Summerland Key. However that is a pizza parlor, No Name Pub sells beer and you get to eat the pizza at their tables if you like. A great many people do like.
The menu is mostly fried and so it is I have one dish, old reliable, that I stick with in the "keep it simple" department. I go for the fried grouper basket and it does the job.

The bar is as noisy as you might expect, dark and atmospheric I suppose. The furniture is rough hewn wood heavily varnished and the decor is,as you can see, all dollar bills stapled everywhere.The baskets come with salad and bread sticks (as if the meal lacked carbs!) and lots of silver dollar fries. They are round slices of real potato fried and covered in salt to keep you thirsty. They are quite delicious.I am not enamored of the beer selection, and I passed on Yuengling draft and went for a No Name amber in a small plastic cup for $2.75. Or you can go bottled if you prefer. The dollar bills are the pub's claim to fame and no one really knows how many there are:

Any guesstimate up to a round 100,000 will do. More if you prefer. Or less.Defacing the currency is part of the fun. I hope Jerry and Linda are still hearting each other (yech!). Jerry gets around:

In light of the intensely heavy rain still falling I ran for the car but on a normal day outdoor benches are available out front:And at night the place looks quite charming: When the place was built in the 30's as a convenience store this was the main road to Key West. The Ferry landed at the end of No Name Key, a journey of 40 miles over four hours from Lower Matecumbe Key, where the road from Miami ended. And from here one drove a series of wooden bridges and a narrow road 35 miles to Key West. Now it is a backwater and destination unto itself.