Vespa Tea Break

I am developing the habit of taking a meandering ride in the afternoon, the scooter equivalent of a tea break from doing too much other stuff, a break from dumb bells, dogs, desktop computing, all of it. And deep on the south shore of Sugarloaf Key my Verizon signal fails pretty rapidly leaving me out of touch.

My phone may not work as a communication tool or as a hot spot but the camera keeps clicking away allowing me to play with the Vespa in heat that would stifle my dog, back home sleeping in the air conditioning. Sometimes I feel like the proverbial housewife with a need for some alone time, away from 911, podcast interviews, business letters, schedules and laundry baskets. The Vespa forces me to slow down, to baby the new piston, as this old style engine requires a gentle prolonged break in period.

I am forced to slow down and look at the cracks in the pavement, to think about how hot the sun is on a March afternoon, not yet Spring. It feels like summer in a sensible part of the world, but here because there is no humidity and a cool undercurrent of air it must be Winter. Setting the Vespa on its stand and standing on the foot boards I am a child again, seeking a new perspective, looking down from a great height.

Compared to the serious, frowning skater I feel like I am breaking the sound barrier as I putt-putt past at 40 kilometers an hour (24 mph). The speedometer on my Canadian model P200 is in Canadian miles per hour, rebuilt in California and by my GPS extremely accurate if you can translate kilometers to miles. I can as I grew up in both currencies and metric holds no secrets.

The skater slipped into my rear view mirrors and my misspent youth came back to me, the smell of the rubber floor mat the distinctive puttering of the two stroke motor and the clunk of the gear shifts; I was doing this in the summer of 1970 on the little orange Vespa 50 my mother bought me. She loved motorcycles and wanted me to grow into a rider. She let me ride all over the back roads near our home even though I was two years too young to be legal on the roads. I look back at that mad period in light of the modern obsession with being afraid and I am grateful that shortly before she died she showed me the way. And while I was being grateful I checked out the charming disregard for No Parking signs shown by the winter visitors. Were they to get a ticket I would expect a very indignant call at work from some annoyed tourist busy telling me they spend too much money in the Keys to be bothered following the rules. One thing I have learned is if you flout the conventions take your punishment like an adult.

Riding in shirt sleeves is a pleasure reserved for the foolish in our modern circumscribed safety world. Sometime you have to allow yourself to feel the sun on your skin, the wind ruffling your life just a little, immerse yourself in the moment. An old slow Vespa is a way to do that. 35 years of puttering hidden under that sheet metal frame. I wonder sometimes what is in its past, the way I look at Cheyenne and wonder what was in her past before the abandonment at the SPCA pound on Stock Island. The watery flats of Sugarloaf Key:

On the Overseas Highway I have no particular place to be other than at home to meet the wife back from work so I can stop and admire the view from time to time, get out of the traffic flow that finds my 50 miles per hour (80 kilometers) too slow in a 45 mph (70 kilometer) zone because I have surrendered my man card and elected to take to the road on a motorized shopping cart. So I pull over to admire the water and take a picture:

Time to get home and break out the teapot.

Posted with Blogsy

Finally: The Podcasts

Over the seven years I have been posting on this page I have been told many many times to take this page to market and I have never wanted to change the nature and character of my stored memories of life at the end of the road, as I live it. Even now when I have taken on a whole new full time project this page has been my refuge, a quiet hour each day on the porch or on the couch playing with pictures and words, not thinking about 911 or all the myriad home chores that lurk in daily life. I thought for a while, I feared, that Key West Diary might have to take a back seat. So far so good I have put up a new essay almost every day, and I hope that on those few rare occasions when I have resorted to "re-runs" I have not offended. I have to figure not everyone has read (and remembers) all 3800 photoessays logged here since June 2007. And some days I have simply run out of energy to put words to screen, or have no photos to use so I have reprinted old favorites.

When I was approached to do podcasts I was leery as I am entrenched in the school of radio where I lived and worked for a decade. I got out of radio news because journalism was a nut I had cracked and when I have mastered a skill I get bored. Also news was becoming less hard core which I did not like, and I did not want to participate in the dumbing down process I saw underway in broadcasting. I still enjoy listening to the radio and I bought a life membership in Sirius when satellite radio appeared. Thus podcasts I approached with some wariness. However it seems this is the way people like to listen nowadays.

As with all stuff online the podcast market is creating niches and followings and this is where I need your help, and I trust you can come through for me. iTunes is supposed to have the first four podcasts ready on Monday morning. Jack Riepe kindly agreed to share some stories with me and if you have read his best seller Conversations With A Motorcycle then you know why his stories are worth hearing.

Scooter riders know Orin O'Neill from his widely read and respected webpage Scootin' Old Skool and he too has agreed to be interviewed for which I am very grateful.

And that's just the start.To get the space on iTunes these interviews deserve I need something back from my loyal readers. My producer sent me these instructions to post here to help get the word out Monday morning and to create a space for the podcast. Over the years this page, thanks to you, has received nearly 1.5 million hits and put my diary in the top million webpages worldwide which frankly astonishes me. I have as you know no marketing skills of any kind and the concept of search engine optimization is about as alien to me as small talk at a party. And as I have previously confessed I have no small talk ability whatsoever. So I am confident if after all these years I ask you will respond and I thank you in advance.

Here is how you do it...Monday morning, if Apple posts it promptly!

1) Go to travelandsafety.com/itunes

2) Click on "View In iTunes"

3) Click "Get" in the "Price" Column (far right) next to the episode you want to check out

4) Whenever you’re ready, click "Ratings and Reviews" (directly under the title in iTunes)

5) Click "Write a Review" and enter yours in the Window that comes up. Give it some 5 Stars too.

I am doing the interviews because I enjoy the informal give and take of these conversations, but also because I have my own history of traveling and apparently managing to stay safe. The picture above is the wife and I with dogs sailing Central America studying the instructions that came with our portable hand laundry machine. We later graduated to a bucket and plunger when the hand wringer, built in the First World, broke. Simplicity became our watchword.

My more recent travels I have logged on this page of course but I have in the past ridden motorcycles all over the place, including Africa, crossed the Panama Canal (bits of it actually with the motor off and sails up).

I also took the Great Siberian Railway across the Soviet Union as as a young man.

I have been stopped in an embarrassing number of countries for speeding. Adventures all, but none looming quite as large as this one right now. Wish me well and I hope to see you on the...podcast!

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Podcasts Update #2

I have practiced my interview materials, I have spoken with the engineer and set up the equipment and I hope to get the interviews done sooner rather than later, by mid-February with any luck. Our website is up though not ready for prime time yet and this next week we are supposed to get our e-mails out to our prospective interview subjects. They will be audio interviews using that miracle of modern technology- Skype.

It amazes me with my background in radio how simple and compact a modern interview "studio" can be, a pair of ear buds a microphone and a laptop replaces all the machinery of a few decades ago. Editing and production will be carried out by the engineer who I have not yet met in person, and may not for a while. Digital recordings render great sound quality and editing is by pixels and no longer with razor blades.  Fortunately I will not be doing the editing which will require keeping each weekly podcast down to about half an hour.

The project I have been asked to work on involves interviews on the subject of travel and staying safe while away from home with interviews with people who live part of their lives on the road, or away from home and how they cope with modern technology and the demands of a sometimes nomadic life.

The podcasts should start airing we hope by the beginning of March, maybe sooner but I hope absolutely not later. I look forward very much to your feedback, indeed we will rely on it.

2015 Key West And A New Project

There came a time last year when I realised I needed to do more, to seek new boundaries, to cross old thresholds. I thought long and hard about ending the blog but I find that it actually feeds the part of me I want to expand, and I like using my camera to see the world through my own particular lense. To go out, take a picture to express a thought is something I have grown so used to doing it would seem odd not to be able to do that. My phone is my camera; it just happens to make phone calls as well. I come home and download my pictures to Picasa and the thought encapsulated in the photo is still there, in the pixels, like a prehistoric insect trapped forever in amber. I download the picture to Blogsy, my favorite app, and the words flow, inspired by the thought originally captured in my telephone. The amber melts and the words suggested by the picture are left on the electronic page.

It wasn't always so - once upon a time I was a youngster with a Vespa and my camera was a microphone. I was divorced and alone in California and in my early 20s. I heard the local radio station was seeking volunteers so in between learning to sail (great stuff) and trying hang gliding (awful) and scuba diving (too complicated) I added writing the news to the list of activities I took up to keep loneliness at bay. It clicked. But it was a career choice in decline. Everyone fancies themselves a reporter so wages were low especially  since  broadcasting was just then deregulated and news gathering became an expensive option usually dropped by newly freed station mangers. The public airwaves no longer required federally mandated news readers. My low wages were made easier to bear by living on a boat and riding the Vespa, the same scooter I rode across the country in 1981. I got to talk to all sorts of people about everything and I got a reputation for fairness which allowed me to hunt down and meet the rare conservative public figures in coastal California in the 80s. They called it the People's Republic of Santa Cruz in imitation of Berkeley in whose far vaster shadow we languished. I talked to anyone about anything no matter their politics, and the radio station was filled with politics.

So now, three decades on the wheel turns full circle. The world is now electronic, reel-to-reel editing with a razor blade is a lost art (I had a very good ear for it and could edit interviews faster than most) and radio itself is being transformed into podcasts. So it is that this producer in Brooklyn wants me to interview people for a series of podcasts, an idea he had to sell to me as podcasts are an alien concept to me. The subject, for which I am apparently uniquely qualified thanks to my history and my present job, is travel and safety. The project is underway, interviewees have been contacted and the modern equivalent of reel-to-reel tape will be turning soon. Podcasts are just another form of communication, in the end. So here goes...

Here's the thing: I hope you will listen when the podcasts start in a matter of weeks and give valuable feedback for us, which the producer says is invaluable for growth. I hope that after seven years of following along you will be encouraged to take a hand in directing my future path. It is a brave new world out there and I plan to take it by the balls, even without a razor blade and a reel-to-reel tape deck. Thank you in advance.

Here's to 2015: Fresh challenges!

Posted with Blogsy

A New Year And Nothing Changes

Thank you for following my blog for these past seven and a half years. I am looking forward to the same again.

Gas is not as cheap as it is in the rest of Dixie. Regular at $2.75 a gallon gets our attention in the Lower Keys.

The ET4 takes premium. Grr.

Cruising the south shore of the island made me want to pay a return visit to the East Martello Museum next to the airport.

In an effort to sneak some riding time between overtime shifts I have been playing scooter tag on  ADV Rider. This one got squeezed out by a quicker post: "Your Scooter by a TV location." I was going to use the MTV House on Key Haven:

I wasn't doing so well then I also missed the scooter by a gym picture...but I got out a bit and rode anyway. By the time I had the picture someone else had already posted.

Happy New Year Everyone!

If you are in Key West could you please not hit anyone, vomit in anyone's front yard, not fall down drunk on the sidewalk (it frightens the visitors), not drive drunk (I will take my car to work as a precaution) and try and remember you aren't as funny as you think you are when you are drunk. Much appreciated.

Posted with Blogsy