Everglades 2009

From the archives, in this case September 2009, a report on a  trip I took on my much loved Triumph Bonneville 865, drowned last September by Hurricane Irma.

Riding The Everglades

This is the southernmost road across Florida, Highway 41, also known as Tamiami Trail.For some people the name inspires romantic visions of some native culture, though actually all it means is Tampa to Miami Trail. Oh well. It remains my favorite way to cross the state and plans to enlarge it have fallen away as the economy imploded. The views are typical of the Everglades either side of the two lane highway:

A wealthy land baron on Florida's west coast, by the inspired name of Barron Gift Collier got busy in 1923 building paved roads in southwest Florida, in the area known today as...Collier county. He also decided to connect Tampa to Miami, a job as you can see in this picture from the Pompano Beach Historical society, that had nothing to recommend it:I think of these poor, nameless sods every time I ride the trail and wonder how they coped in the muck of the middle of Florida. It must have been ghastly even for our ancestors who were, we are told, much tougher than us. It's about 60 miles from the Krome Avenue intersection to Carnestown (a solitary gas station) at the intersection of Highway 29 which heads north towards Lake Okeechobee. And it all looks pretty much like this, wet prairie and clumps of cypress trees:It isn't what Hollywood depicts the Everglades to be: a foggy, Spanish moss infested jungle with huge ferns and crazy old hermits living in huts and eating human flesh. The Everglades is a swamp filled with sunshine and heat and teeming with life. And yes there are alligators though I did not get to see one this trip. I will return to Loop Road to take some pictures of them, I'm sure this winter. Meanwhile I took off north on Highway 29 for twenty miles to the intersection of the other east-west road crossing through the Everglades:There is an intersection here which will get you onto Alligator Alley for free, avoiding the $2.50 toll that is charged upon entry at each end of the cross-Everglades section of the highway. Alligator Alley is part of I-75 from Fort Lauderdale to Naples.
Beyond the Bonneville lies Florida Highway 29 that runs another 20 miles north to Immokalee (pro: im-mock-a-lee with the emphasis on mock), a lilting name for a not particularly scenic town that makes it's living from agriculture and tomatoes in particular.Some people prefer Alligator Alley to Tamiami Trail because it feels less closed in and the views are somewhat more expansive. Still, hill country this is not.

I had decided on this trip that as far as I was able I would ride the back roads and a glance at Google maps for south Florida shows a spider web of very straight lines across miles and miles of open countryside.

I was relieved to get off Highway 29 as I found it to be littered with law enforcement including a rather sneaky Dodge SUV parked on the shoulder with radar. 60 miles an hour suddenly seemed a very reasonable speed on the dead straight road. I ducked off onto these agricultural roads as soon as I decently could.

I have long harbored a fantasy that one day God would dump a huge pile of granite in South Florida, just south of Lake Okeechobee, and humans would build three roads up it and down it. Two narrow winding ones for motorcycles and one wide one through the pine forests for cars filled with car-sick prone families. And then, when I got the urge to leave the Keys for a day I could ride up and down twisting mountains roads to my heart's content. Instead the heat of a burning hot 100 degree (38C) September day produces mirages on the highway which appears to submerge beneath flooding Everglades waters:
I wondered what, if anything, might be left of the Devil's Garden and as far as I can tell it's a creek of some sort.Apparently the Devil's Garden was a slough in the Everglades with lots of hammocks (dry areas of land) of cypress trees that was complicated to navigate and thus seemed devilish to the early explorers. Now it looks like this:And it is to be found at this junction. Which is where two dead straight roads join:
I find these views amazing, perhaps because I have spent too much of my life admiring mountain ranges and open ocean.

This is not a spot where I would like to live even though there are spreading oak trees in the vicinity to break up the monotony of cypress trees and grass:
Devil's Garden is not a flourishing center of commerce or industry as far as I could tell:
So I kept on riding, heading for my target for the day, the Clewiston Inn on the south shore of Lake Okeechobee, where I found a well air conditioned dining room brimming with (unsweetened) ice tea, filled with ice cubes, which I sucked down like a desert traveler deprived of water, while I checked the day's news in the Key West Citizen, published three hundred miles to the south and none the worse for having traveled here in my saddlebag:Pot roast, macaroni and cheese and fried okra set me up for the ride home, across more prairies, more wide open spaces, more silence that closed in whenever I stopped and turned off the engine. I also came across this phenomenon which one doesn't see in the Keys:
And somehow, while I was riding at speeds more than twice as fast as the posted 45 mph (70km/h) limit I spotted a black lump in the road. I stopped and went back to give him a lift to the safety of the grass at the side.He stretched his neck and his feet in an effort to get away from my invasive hand. He didn't seem to much enjoy his first ever flight, which lasted all of ten seconds and ended when I gently landed him in safety twenty feet away. I got back on the Bonneville as a large truck came by, filling the empty space where the tortoise had been, and I promptly hit a pot hole with my front wheel jarring my tongue and compressing my spine for a moment.

The Everglades are special we are told, but for someone riding a motorcycle one needs to have a particular outlook to enjoy these roads. At least, having read this you can't say I didn't warn you.

John Pennekamp State Park 2008

On my 2008 jaunt up the Keys I stopped off at the John Pennekamp State Park on Key Largo. This is probably the most well known state park in the islands, and the fact that it has received awards is duly noted on a signboard at the entrance. This was my first visit to the park since I had sailed there in 1990, ducking out of strong winds while on my way from Key West to Bimini.I recall a rather unpleasant stay on a mooring buoy in the lagoon, bouncing around and bickering as we waited for the weather to ease up and let us go on our way to the Bahamas. Ours was an under equipped expedition in many respects and i don't believe we went ashore as we lacked an outboard to propel us back to the boat from the little beach in the park. Our relationship was doomed by these inadequacies and my inexperience to lead us to foreign shores. She still loathes me to this day, and i don't think therapy has helped her either for which I am sorry. I got it right later and the woman who spent a couple of years sailing with me through Central America is still married to me, and calls me daily from Turkey making sure I am eating right and getting enough sleep. We live and learn.Reminicences aside the Pennekamp park is best visited not in September, I believe, because it is hot:

Up North I read people are already observing the shortening of the days, changing of leaves and colling of temperatures. Down here September is the cruelest month, not least because a person raised in a temperate clime in the northern hemisphere has a right to expect the weather to start cooling off. Not a bit of it.Rain clouds built up overhead but yielded nothing in the way of cooling raindrops. Nevertheless, here I was two hours from home and determined to enjoy this park, whether I got heat stroke or not. It was ninety five degrees (37c) with humidity to match but there was a mangrove trail to be explored, so by God, off I went, down the boardwalk.It's not like I haven't seen a mangrove swamp before but I find the light and shadow of these forests to be particular and in some way always varied. In California I used to like walking through redwood forests and their similarities to cathedrals were too obvious for them not to be pointed out by anyone and everyone. I find mangroves, with all their subdued activity, and silence to have a similar effect on me and I tend to get contemplative:And of course I was denied the chance to climb the observation deck and look out across the greenery. The path was gated, presumably to allow rangers the time to repair damage to the boardwalk, which was a disappointment:But from ground level, or as close to ground level as one can get in a forest of trees growing out of saltwater I did get to see a boat chugging by, or at least I got to see part of it:African Queen ain't in it...Back at the visitor center and aquarium they had a little window dedicated to life an death in the mangroves which in some ways looked more active than real life:

This end of the Keys is where several of the 500 or so remaining American crocodiles reside, and I peered about looking for them but they didn't show. I don't suppose park people would encourage them to show up in the middle of the human madness of the park. A couple of witless young females nearly wet themselves and deafened me with their screams when they stumbled across a small squirrel minding his own business outside the gift shop. I dread to think what a Crocodile would do to their tender gray matter. Of course I forgot to photograph the squirrel, a mammal not yet found in Key West, happily but I did get some other wildlife:

That last was actually a group of humans at the beach evading the sun. The Keys I never hesitate to point out are not endowed with sandy beaches, which some ill informed tourists expect to find when they arrive. Thus it is people who long for sand take it where they find it on their days off. and haul grandpa down to be propped up in the shade of a palm tree:

I am not much of a beach goer and all the paraphenalia of family picnics makes me cringe (tote that bale!) but this small stretch of sand brought pure delight to those using it. I parked the Bonneville in a spot where I hoped I could return from a short walk and not burn my backside through my pants:

The park is a haven for flora and fauna and the park needs to be there to allow things to grow unimpeded by human interference and development:

The rest of Key Largo is along suburban tract, houses, businessesand roads everywhere, and as it's Spanish name implies it is the largest Key in the chain, so it's landmass gives the Pennekamp park room to breathe. It offers small marina with room for some boats to dock and take tourists out to the reef, which is actually what the park is famous for. The Bonneville is a great ride, but it doesn't ride at all well on water. Luckily there is an aquarium at the park:I continue to insist I enjoy the heat and solitude of summers in the Keys, but that is not to say I don't like the cool refreshing blast of air conditioning too, and the visitor center did a good job of cooling me down while the Bonneville rested in the shade:I don't go to zoos, I don't like to see animals locked up, but aquariums generally don't seem so bad, perhaps because I can't empathise with fish. I did wonder about the little nurse shark though, hiding his nose as though to make the world invisible. A small boy nearby was learning all about the fishes and stuff, and I suppose this was really his classroom, not mine:One last stop to tank up with a bottle of refreshing water and I would be on my way. I wanted to be cunning and dropped two dollars in the machine outside (I was still refrigerated from the aquarium visit) in order to avoid the lines inside. The machine ate my money and just to prove I am a slow learner I had the same damned experience in Marathon when I stopped for gas and the soda machine failed to cough up a bottle of water for my money.The shoppe had stuff to sell and one interested window shopper caught my eye. My thighs are nothing to write home about but I do keep mine covered in public and don't go shopping in my underwear. He should follow my example:

So we close with a little thank you to Mr Pennekamp, a Miami newspaperman and outdoor enthusiast who pushed and pulled his strings to get the park created. He was successful in 1957 and there is a photo of him happily casting, on the wall of the visitor center. I think he would be pleased to see the park still there. I am.

A Motorcycle Ride

Middle Florida 2008

I had owned my Triumph Bonneville 865 about eight months when I was sent to a training class near Clearwater in May 2008. Now that my Bonneville has been drowned by Hurricane Irma and with my dog young and energetic and eager for road trips I see no point in replacing it with a Street Twin or a Moto Guzzi 750, my preferred options, I wanted to look back at how much fun I had with over a decade and a hundred thousand miles. I miss it, the best motorcycle I owned, easy to ride, reliable and good looking. 

It was a fine trip up to Palm Bay, an anonymous strip of chain stores located north of Clearwater and west of Tampa. It's 430 miles north of Key West and I took 11 hours to make the ride, wandering wildly on my "road ready" Bonneville:

South Florida is mostly sugarcane fields south of Lake Okeechobee, miles and miles of straight roads and waving green leaves. In the distance one can see factory cities, sugar cane plants that process the raw cane:They belch smoke when they are processing and provide big black smudges of sky to alleviate the open beauty of the fields. Sugar cane is an appalling crop, it sucks the nutrients out of the soil requiring huge amounts of fertilizer to be poured into the soil annually. The harvesting of the cane is such hazardous and horrendous work the companies import labor from the Caribbean (Jamaica principally) to wear armor in the hundred degree heat and slash at the cane with machetes. All this and the industry gets huge subsidises to make it viable. And the fertilizer runs off into Florida Bay and the coral reefs of the Keys. The fields are picturesque though...

Lake Okeechobee is the second largest freshwater lake in the nation, second only to Lake Superior. However prolonged drought combined with an excessively precautionary draining of the lake before hurricane season has left the place almost dry. I looked over the top of the levee and could see no water, just miles of reeds. Riding round the lake all one can see is a high berm of grass:

The weather for my trip was about perfect. It was about 80 degrees but south Florida was swept by cooling breezes all day long and at times I was almost (almost!) chilled, by the un-summer like breeze. The Triumph ran strongly, humming along at 70 mph along the dead straight roads. I kept stopping off to take pictures and ease my butt, because the seat, though authentic for a 1960's looking motorcycle is a bit hard.

Central Florida is a very rural, very different from coastal Florida and this area is home to trucks and tractors:Moore Haven, county seat of Glades County was ravaged by the great hurricane of 1935, the one that trashed the railroad in Matecumbe Key, and the town itself appears never to have recovered completely. They have built a rather attractive waterfront walkway with trees and benches in a park like atmosphere:And the waterway itself is a cross-Florida stopping place much favored by traveling boaters. Though most land oriented tourists rarely bother to come inland to see these places...

Further north the state becomes less tropical, no longer frost free and filled with rolling hills and orange groves. Indeed Florida is bisected by a limestone spine that rises dozens, dozens I tell you, of feet above sea level. So much so they have turned Highway 17, a roadway that criss-crosses Highway 27 into a scenic route. It is scenic too. Check this out, a view across a valley!

Hillcrest Heights indeed, and I keep insisting Florida isn't flat. This is the land of rolling hills, open parkland masquerading as cow pastures and gorgeous pine forests. I was in the middle of orange grove country which is where your winter Florida fruit comes from, these funky little trees:And when they crush the fruit as they load it into trucks, fruit laboriously handpicked by emigrant pickers, the air is redolent with the smell of fresh squeezed orange:

Central Florida is also the home of retirees, less wealthy perhaps or less attuned to urban life. they come to towns called Winter Haven and Frostproof to spend their winters in tiny cottages or immobile homes, the retirement they always dreamed of. And they may be far, relatively from tidal waters, but they build their own beaches and docks around the many fresh water lakes that dot central Florida:

Friday was a great day in the saddle for me, swooping hills, winding roads, empty of traffic and mine to enjoy in perfect weather.