New Classic Rides

In Key West when a rider pulls into a motorcycle parking spot he finds himself shoving his machine alongside a row of multi colored cheap Chinese scooters such as locals own and use primarily to get from work to a bar. Scooter riding isn't a chic hobby in Key West, its as utilitarian as it can get, and the rides follow their function, appearing on our streets as hordes of primary colors, yellows reds blues and blacks, and with all the character of mass stamped, mass produced plastic toys from that great production line in the East. Snowbird season is the time for surprises, when people from Up North wheel out their abandoned rides from sheds and garages and press them into service as a way to get around a town clogged with cars and nowhere to park. The other day I was in New Town on a mission of some sort and when I came out of the store look what had pulled up alongside me. I snapped a picture, from instinct not really sure why this classic unloved Honda appealed to me. It just did in some subliminal way. And it was only yesterday during my lunch break at Fort Zachary Taylor Park that the answer hit me. This is the Era Of The Classics. I reached for my blog...

When I was hunting for a replacement for my beloved neo-classic scooter, the Vespa GTS 250, I couldn't find a motorcycle that really spoke to me. I don't like crotch rockets, I dislike riding with my feet stuck forward, I can't see riding a pseudo off-road motorcycle in the Keys and giant sport tourers make no sense either. "Supermotards" are the new fashion and to me they are absurd and as useless as high heels or strapless dresses and other fashion fripperies. If I can't commute on my motorcycle I would hardly get to ride at all around here. The Bonneville, an imitation classic of the highest order was the obvious answer to my dilemma, yet I couldn't see it at first, even though its been in production almost a decade.

It's as modern as any motorcycle but its looks are as classic as the square rigger masts or the 19th century Fort walls in the background. As I whiled away my hour outside the dispatch center I put down my book and refreshed myself flipping through the pages of a youthful motorcycling magazine. Cycle World isn't really my cup of tea, it's devoted to the pursuit of horsepower and racing statistics and quarter mile tenths-of-a-second stuff which just seems puerile to me, BUT there were a couple of pictures in its pages that reminded me of the corroded old Honda in the second picture.

This Honda 1100 is supposed to recreate the classic image of the original range of Honda four cylinders that revolutionized motorcycling in the 1970's. Readers of the magazine were raving about it hoping that the Japanese will actually put it into production. The motorcycle that stole my heart is a proposed reproduction of the machine I have always wanted and never owned:

Cycle was dismissive of this 750cc recreation of the classic Italian sportbike of 40 years ago thanks to its "modest" 750cc capacity which proves they know how to completely miss the point. But I doubt I will ever buy a Moto Guzzi in the US thanks to their lackadaisical "network" of dealers which is a terrible shame. But this is motorcycling as I remember it, and I'm glad Triumph is led by a motorcycle loving businessman who knows how to stay solvent.

It feels weird to be part of an international cabal of elderly men who all want to find their youth in fake bikes from long ago, that by objective standards weren't that mechanically great but whose designs speak to us wherever we live and ride. They just twang the heartstrings, in a reminder that being human is irrational at best. Its a thin line separating the stupid from the merely nostalgic.

Santo Domingo

Its been a long weekend at work, and as this is my fourth day in a row of taking phone calls from the distressed I feel like a photo tour of last weekend's walk around the capital of the Dominican Republic. Christopher Columbus founded the capital city of the country he called Hispaniola, which island he so named because he thought that its verdant coastal plains looked like the homeland of his sponsors in Spain. He called the city Santo Domingo, and domingo means Sunday in Spanish. In Columbus' native Italian domenica also means Sunday, so for whatever reason this Dominican Republic is tied into one particular day of the week. I had thought it was related to Easter Sunday, but Columbus landed here in December. We took our self-guided tour on a Saturday, because that was when we were there. Here's Columbus hailing a taxi while a pigeon rests on his head:
This picture of people, live ones, enjoying the 85 degree day in Columbus Park, fulfills the stereotype industrious northeners like to make of more relaxed residents of the tropics. I say, at least they weren't locked up indoors oogling Saturday morning cartoons and other inanities on television.Downtown Santa Domingo is a wild and crazy place as we shall see, but the heart of the city hidden behind medieval walls is a taste of old world charm. Its perched on the corner of the cliff overlooking the mouth of the river pouring out into the Caribbean Sea, a place where the streets are narrow and clogged with cars, lined with tourist knick-knack shops and assorted attractions. There is even a long straight street called "The Count", El Conde, that has been transformed into a splendid pedestrian mall.We used the Lonely Planet guide Of course the further you get from these delights the tougher the scene gets. Suburban Santo Domingo, alongside the four lane highway leaving town looks like this:So, in my opinion one wants to be wealthy in the DR, and live in an apartment somewhere around here, serene at night, lovely without neon, littered with top rate restaurants offering stewed crab which my wife enjoyed, and stewed goat which went down a treat for me with a pile of mashed potatoes, and an ice cold Brahma beer:The guide book also gave us the location of a fine breakfast hole-in-the-wall on El Conde, the Cafetera Colonial which served up omelettes and cafe con leche in the same location that comforted the Socialist refugees from Franco's Spain after he defeated the Republic in 1939. That historic plaque on the wall outside the cafe was a piquant extra on my wife's breakfast omelette. After breakfast we strolled El Conde enjoying the cool morning air and the bustle of Saturday morning in the city. We enjoy bringing home a little something from our trips to stick on our walls and my wife likes bargaining so she checked out the Taino-style art on the street.Our stroll led us past churches and museums, shops selling Amber (yellow) and Larimar (sky blue) jewelery and inevitably to the Square of Hispanic-ness (Plaza de la Hispanidad) above the old city walls overlooking the cruise ship dock on the river.It was being tarted up for the New Year's celebrations to come but it struck me as rather sterile and unappealing. Compared for instance to the hustle and bustle of Avenida Mella where all the action was loud and brash. I have no idea what this dude was offering to his enraptured audience, but everyone could hear him:Street vendors were setting up food to go, including delicious fried chicken, fried slices of spam, remarkable Dominican sausages and the ubiquitous tostones, slices of savory fried plantains:Sidewalk vendors are an inevitable part of life in a country with high rates of unemployment, but we found a simple "No thanks," cleared the way.We made our way to the covered mercado where the guidebook bless its little heart, advised us that bargaining was the order of the day. My wife loves to bargain so I knew we were in for some tough times ahead. The market was absolutely packed with stalls tightly squeezed in, and we had to shuffle down these narrow alleys surrounded by impatient shop keepers. There weren't any other gringos, and not many customers generally at that hour, as far as I could tell, so we were prized bait. My wife bargained valiantly, a practice I find distasteful (much to her scorn), especially in a hard up Third World market. Noblesse oblige, she says and blames my well-to-do upbringing!And if you needed to spruce up your home there were aerosols aplenty with all the necessary variations. The pink one caught my eye as it's supposed to be a love potion. I didn't have the nerve to ask how it might be applied. I imagined a bunch of friends coming over for dinner, exhibiting my aerosol and who knew what the results might be? Divorce? Suicide? Another love potion...?To think the ancient art of Santeria has been reduced to an aerosol. Whatever will they think of next? Why, a wooden fighting cock of course.I think Key West and its chickens could use some of these as public art works scattered in the ruined flowerbeds around town.

Its tiring work going shopping and refreshment is always to hand, I think the overflowing white stuff is coleslaw, or possibly white cheese, but I didn't look too closely.. We tried some of the fried chicken shown earlier, I like to eat locally and though baseball and hot dogs are big news in the Dominican Republic local chicken and sausage seems somehow more appropriate.

It was just a curiosity but we flashed past this reminder that the Chinese are everywhere and in some places in large numbers. This was to me, a reminder of San Francisco in a most unexpected place.

After we finished shopping and walking around downtown I was dreaming of our five star room and soft bed at the Hotel Intercontinental on our splendid fifth-floor overlooking the south coast.Instead my indefatigable wife found a bus stop where the gua-guas (minibuses) gathered and we ended up taking a half-dollar (15 peso) ride that lasted about ten minutes in wild traffic across the river to the Faro a Colon, Columbus' Lighthouse.The huge white block on a hill is Columbus's reputed grave site (disputed by Spain and Italy) inside a massive monument built to celebrate 500 years of Europeans in the Americas. Fascinating stuff but that is a story for another day.

Friendly Reassurance

Locals go to Miami Subs for cheap and speedy food. There used to be a place on Caroline Street called PT's, named for Paul Tripp, whose slogan was "where locals go to eat" as though trailing after residents is what visitors should aspire to when considering eating out. If you follow me to Miami Subs you'll eat okay but you probably won't get lucky, unless your date is into stark formica, severe lighting and plastic cutlery.The wife and I met Robert for dinner a couple of nights ago at Miami Subs, on the Boulevard across from Garrison Bight Marina. The founder of the chain was the son of Greek immigrant who settled in Miami, thus the chain offers foods that include the proper ethnic touches- gyro lamb with yoghurt/dill sauce alongside the burgers, fries and ice cream. His business ethic was a bit shady and he ended up gunned down a couple of years ago in splendidly scandalous style in the streets of Miami. His ethnic chain lives on, and in Key West its somewhere I like to park the Bonneville from time to time for a gyro platter or two.

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Robert moved to the Keys in 1976, in time for the bicentennial, and he came as many did (and still do) seeking a nautically based change. He lived on the water and knew many early characters who did the same, and his stories of living in the Keys in the 70's are the stuff of history. His stories have also reinforced my conviction that i was right not to settle in Key West when first I visited in 1981. This was not a genteel resort in transition, it was a dusty, fishing village comatose eight months of the year and raucous for the other four leavened by a heavy military presence and a great many people who could barely function on the level of simple daily living. Boredom writ large in my jaundiced opinion. But the stories make an excellent accompaniment to a meal.Robert himself has lived a few lives, working at lots of jobs, making the life in the Keys one reads of and dreams of to while away a cold Midwest winter. He worked for years as a commercial fisherman, he captained tourist boats, he opposed the creation of the National Marine Sanctuary and then realising his error championed it, and now works full time for NOAA promoting their conservation rules out on the water. "I get paid to be out boating!" he laughs, setting aside the years of scrounging his way to his current eminence, a canal-front trailer, a couple of spare lots and boats on his seawall. A successful self-sufficient life navigated through the treacherous waters of drink drugs and bankruptcy that trip up so many dreamers in the Keys. He was in a reminiscent sort of mood the other night, after packing away his grilled chicken salad and settling in with a bottomless diet Pepsi.

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"I remember Jimmy, when I first got here. He was anchored out in Boca Chica Bay and he lived aboard kind of sparsely. He was living on a Hobie cat." I tried to picture someone living through the current cold snap on the tramp of a beach cat anchored out. Then i thought of summer rain and mosquitoes and windy, sloppy waves, and all my middle class mediocrity rose up in me.

"He lived on a Hobie cat? How?" I asked, and Robert shrugged, his blue eyes twinkling.

"I guess he needed a place and the cat was just where he slept and no one bothered him." And that was the payoff back in those days. No one bothered you, which is a philosophy that one tries to keep alive in a time of encircling condos.

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Those were the days they came up with Fantasy Fest as a response to a major domestic disruption downtown where a business couple took their knock down drag out fight onto Duval in mid October after a particularly empty summer. Sheer boredom convinced Tony Falcone of Fast Buck Freddie's to start a parade. Or so he told me.

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Robert's Key West was a different one, plugged in not to tourist season or hip bars, but to water temperatures and fish spawns and all the rigging and paraphenalia of a waterbourne life. He toured the country, found Key West and determined never to live north of the Seven Mile Bridge. In a town that promotes water activities and teems with residents who never dip their toes into the bowels of a boat, Robert has set his own clock to the time of the tides and the state of the breeze.

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I remember anchoring next to a couple off Rat Key, he I had known since we had met anchored off St Petersburg a few years before, she was his new interest and he set her up with her birds and her dog in an old wooden motor cruiser (sans motor). The Chris Craft's previous owner, a water rat, had thought to preserve the aging hull with an unconventional choice of bottom paint which was actually roofing tar. This gave the home afloat a rather menacing air, a matt black finish lightly disguised with curtains and a parrot cage dangling in the shade of the cockpit. Unfortunately the tar, owing perhaps to a faulty compound that may have made it cheap enough to buy, failed to set and anyone approaching the boat in a nice white dinghy had to fend off madly and was lucky if they came away only with a couple of fists full of oily tar. Dinging the hull left long dark streaks on anything it butted up against. This was her home for a couple of years afloat and perhaps the execrable state of her vessel led the woman to a new and more stimulating life ashore. Salt water will do that.

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Robert and I go back almost twenty years when we met sailing in the Bahamas, we remember the meerting differently but it was somewhere in the Exumas and we kept meeting along the way. We talked about the old sailing days and what a pain it is to get from here to there under sail, the lack of wind, the wrong wind, big seas, crap waves and all the rest. I expressed relief that I don't have to deal with it anymore, or at least until I want to again, if ever.

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"We can grow old ashore," Robert said, " and we can afford to settle down without regrets. We've done lots of things lots of people only ever dream of doing. This is our life," and I was startled by his philosphy spilling out as we tramped across the parking lot, "and its okay." Sometimes I need reasurance thatenjoying falling into the work-commute-weekend trap is acceptable, when much of the first world treats work and routine as four-letter words.

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I guess it is, when someone as Conchy as Robert says it is.

Cold Night Ride

Irony anyone? I rolled out of bed at eleven minutes to five and scampered to check the thermostat in the hall. 62 degrees. This sucks! It was supposed to be warming up. This place is supposed to be the warmest in the Continental US, not as warm as Hawaii or Puerto Rico but warm nonetheless. I hit the "heat" button and the reverse cycle kicked in. This makes two days in a row we've had the heat on. The good news is the house hasn't been smelling like singed cat and that is because I had the presence of mind to get the a/c unit serviced. Usually when the heat hasn't been run in months, or years, dust accumulates on the heater elements in the ceiling and the smell of burning fur fills the house.

We generally keep the water heater on the "warm" setting but this morning it was totally inadequate and the shower felt cold to the touch. Things were just getting better and better. I was reduced to blowing my wife's hair dryer all over to try to restore circulation.

I call my home a treehouse because the downstairs area is open on all sides between the stilts that support my 770 square-foot home above the flood plain (I hope). This morning the lights illuminated a scene of desolation, dead leaves blowing in the wintry north wind, no newspaper in the driveway yet, and the Bonneville shining coldly in the bright white light. "I have to rest myself there?" I thought to myself, eyeing the cold metal fuel tank butting up to the hard frigid vinyl seat...It just got worse. I was swathed in my gray furry jacket, that and a sweat shirt are my only winter clothing, and on top of that my mesh motorcycle jacket with its shiny padded liner. The outlook for my head wasn't so great as my open face helmet was downstairs with the Bonneville and I couldn't be bothered to clamber back upstairs to find my full-face helmet. I dragged my thick elk skin gloves on and clipped the helmet on my head while the air-cooled parallel twin warmed up.

I've become snug on my Triumph over the past 4300 hundred miles. My hands fall naturally to the grips and my feet go straight to the pegs and my eyeballs line up right above the top of the Parabellum windshield. Its a nice piece of plastic, that windshield, and it does a fine job of keeping the wind off me without producing unwanted wobbles in the track of the motorcycle. The trouble today was that the north wind was cutting diagonally across the Highway and the wind, all 25 miles-an-hour of it, was clinging to my beard and my nose and my eyes, making them stream water down my cheeks.

The wind, sliding round the shield pressed up against my chest and sought out the cracks in my clothing, spreading cold tentacles across my chest and around my neck. My feet were warm inside my boots, and my heavy yellow gloves kept the digits snug but my knees out in the breeze were soon blocks of ice. Its been a long time since my teeth chattered but fifteen minutes from home I was in agony. It was actually a beautiful night. The cold winds had long since blown the cloud cover away and the skies were clear. There wasn't much traffic on the road and i was following the cone of white light through a dark canyon between the mangroves. The temperature gauge showed something around 58 degrees ambient temperature and I was feeling every bit of it.

Halfway into my 40 minute commute I was crying uncle. I was cold, my teeth were chattering and I couldn't feel my knees. The ride, even at a steady 55mph seemed endless. Most mornings I wish the commute could last another twenty or more minutes, I'd like to have left the house early to take in a side road or two, but today, under the constant onslaught of cold air I would gladly fold and stop and suck up coffee, hot and lots of it. Instead the long endless black ribbon of Highway One keeps inexorably unrolling in front of me.

"You could always take the car," my wife said last night with the none too subtle inference that I must be mad as a march hare to ride through the Keys equivalent of a blizzard. "People Up North are snowed in," I said in defence of my madness. "A sixty degree morning would be cause for rejoicing across much of the motorcycling land," I insisted. Maybe so, but I was totally frozen and down to 50mph by the time the street lights of Stock Island hove into view across the Boca Chica bridge. Every traffic light was red, but instead of mumbling, this morning I took advantage and pressed the side of my knees into the cylinder heads one at a time to generate warmth though my uniform trousers.I arrived in the parking lot at the police station like a mobile popsicle and Diggy pulled in right behind me on his Honda 750 Aero. He had a tight woolen cap held on his head by a pair of goggles, his jacket was bulky with stuffing and his 25 year-old face with suffused with excitement. "What a great ride!" he said. I couldn't see his breath on the cold night air but he was radiating pleasure in the cold. "Yeah," I grumbled. "You only rode from Bahama Village," which I didn't need to point out was seven minutes away.

There's supposed to be a warming trend floating in over the weekend, while I'm busy working. Highs are predicted to be around 75 degrees. Neither soon enough, nor warm enough, in my jaundiced opinion.

22 Below

Last night, while I slept huddled under blankets, I'm told the temperature was supposed to drop to 48 degrees Fahrenheit, about 9 Celsius, and in Key West that equates to 22 Below Zero, when zero locally is rated at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. It was cold, and I got up to see a sight reserved for higher latitudes and stronger attitudes: 55 degrees in the house...It's been windy cold and nasty for two days and I can only surmise what might be happening Up North. This man at the Big Coppitt Shell was huddled against the cold and he's from Michigan, so I don't feel like such a wuss when I moan about the temperature, and wind chill and all the meteorologic mumbo-jumbo. The wife had a buddy come round to drink chai, talk, eat pizza, talk, watch a video, talk, and hang on the couch with heating pads and blankets to have a nice talk, so I took off for a manly movie involving a manly ride in to the Big City and our mainstream 6 screen multiplex in Searstown.The ride in to Key West was a brutal affair, the temperature gauge on the Bonneville read 58 degrees when I pulled out from under the house and rose to a paltry 62 for a little while in the bleak sunshine that soon vanished behind a mass of black clouds. Great! I thought, all I need is some icy rain to make me feel completely manly out here dodging wind squalls, trailing long lines of cages wandering along at a modest 42 miles per hour. It was a very unmotivated ride, one way and another.

On the other hand I Am Legend was a most enjoyable couple of hours in the big dark room. I had a couple of talkers in front of me during the endless previews but they soon shut up when the Last Man Alive started chasing deer down the endless empty canyons of Manhattan. His only companion was a dog and you know nothing good will come of that. Unhappily the premise of being the only human left alive had its own appeal to a misanthrope like myself, and I delighted in the notion of all the movies and all the books with none of the day-to-day stupidity bumping into me. I imagined myself setting up house in a big steel tug anchored in the very middle of the harbor from which I might whistle at my enemies, but that would make a rotten movie, so cinematic heroes never make their last stands afloat.Human beings do though and I spotted this catamaran snugly anchored behind a clump of mangroves just north of mile marker 18. I knew the boat was inhabited as there was a dinghy flopping around off his stern, and I know all too well the experience of hunkering down during a cold front and waiting inside the freezing fiberglass cocoon for the weather to get back to normal. He had my sympathy.

Mind you I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. The road ahead to my tree house was still cold and gray and the Bonneville, a proper classic motorcycle, doesn't have the ability to bring out the sunshine on command, so I rode home under the crisp unnatural cloud cover, just grateful not to be stuck on the hook cooking flower pots to keep the cabin warm. And privately I had to admit to myself I was kind of grateful to have someone to come home to that wasn't a) a vampire or b) a mannequin.

I am only a legend in my own imagination.

Mud,Mud,Glorious Mud

On a morning when the north wind is howling through the Keys and the temperature, away from the wind chill, has plummeted to 60 degrees, one imagines fondly a life lived far from the tentacles of the cold. Cold is relative, and a 60 degree January day on the Great Plains would be cause enough to do some gardening in one's underwear. In Key West it's a test of character and will to keep functioning normally in such arctic weather.Its at times like these that a middle-aged man's thoughts turn to a recent weekend spent in heat, humidity and mud. It was on a hot humid day in the not-too-distant past (Sunday) that I found myself having a conversation with a man on a mule while standing up to my knees in quite possibly fecally-impacted waters.It was at this point in our drive through the back country from Luperon to Puerto Plata that I felt a burning desire to turn back and take the main road. However the truck was perched at an awkward angle, I could see no way to safely reverse or, God forbid, actually turn so we were committed to what was to come. The man on the mule was not reassuring. "No," he said shaking his head. "It's not much better up ahead. Less water perhaps. More mud." He laughed hollowly when I asked, joking, where the nearest tow truck was. "No hay grua!" he grinned toothlessly. He told me with pride that they had electricity these days, even if the road was a tad old fashioned."Stay on the high side," was his advice as I climbed wordlessly back into the truck with a hollow feeling where my chest used to be. Oh dear, I thought to myself, what have I got myself into?

When we got up before dawn in our splendid five star hotel room in Santa Domingo the idea was to hurry out of the city and head north to Santiago 200 kilometers up the four lane Highway One across the mountains, Then we would visit the sailor's haven of Luperon, cruise through Puerto Plata, visit Scott's refuge of Sosua where he lived 15 years ago, and buzz back to room service and a bottle of wine at the Hotel Intercontinental.

Aside from a little rain, which made the industrial city of Santiago look worse than it did in the sunshine we executed the first part of the plan flawlessly. I knocked off a quick picture of Santiago's only claim to tourist interest, the monument to the nation's heroes, and we turned onto Highway Five, greasy in the rain, towards Puerto Plata on the north coast.At Imbert, in the sunshine beyond the rainy mountains, we turned off towards Luperon 20 miles away, in time for a 9:30am breakfast. Luperon was our morning's goal because it is a sailing cruiser's destination. I have been reading about the delights of Luperon for 20 years, a secure anchorage surrounded by mangroves, a nice little town with easy bus access to the facilities of Puerto Plata, the end of a long bash south through the islands of the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos. Luperon is said to be well adapted to its place along a sailor's migratory path to the Caribbean. As former cruisers my wife and I enjoy the company of maritime travelers.Well, suffice it to say, Luperon was a major disappointment. It did have a nice bay to anchor in, filled with boats and muddy waters entirely unsuitable for swimming, our major recreation while cruising, and the town itself was somewhat run down, to our eyes. Just to prove how small a world it is, on the pier we met Pablo, the owner of a marina in Panama where our cruising friends Ian and Anna keep Gecko, their catamaran. We also found the cruiser hangout, an American-run restaurant now called Capt Steve's offering laundry, internet, food and swimming pool, as the best cruiser haunts do.But the owner, married to a Dominican woman is tired of the life and is looking to sell. Meanwhile he offers a nice $5 (150 peso) breakfast, American style, decent coffee, pork chops and the fixings: The main road into town from the jetty was lined with small shabby businesses and blood ran in the gutter, doubtless from some porker sacrificed for the New year's holiday to come. It was a picture of a small industrious town in a very impoverished economy. Which is fine and dandy, though I couldn't for the life of me imagine spending months here whiling away a tropical winter when there are beaches and islands and incredible reefs not many miles away. I crossed Luperon off my list of places to sail to.On our way out of town we spotted the entrance to a dirt road marked on our map as a brown dotted line headed along the coast towards Puerto Plata, avoiding the main road at Imbert. We took the plunge. I have never been much of an off road driver, most of my land travels I have taken on two wheels, and when I'm driving a vehicle I can't physically push I tend to be conservative in my choice of paved roads. This one got away from me completely.

It started out with a motoconcho that I simply couldn't keep up with. How he rode, with a passenger and parcel so fast I don't know, and I can only attribute his sure-footed speed to experience. Then we forded a couple of streams, a broken bridge or two, some sand, then rocky hills, picked up a couple of field workers looking to get home, and as we slid down a steep incline we came upon a sight froze my blood. Another Isuzu, a Trooper, stuck in the mud surrounded by "helpers." If they are stuck, I said to myself, what's going to happen to me? The good news was that the Trooper was two wheel drive and with some shoving and digging he got out of the mud leaving me a completely messed up hole to plough through in low-ratio 4-wheel drive. "Schumacher," one of the passengers complimented me as my Isuzu reared up out of the mud and came to a stop on hard ground. Its the car, I thought to myself, not the driver. "If we're going to do much more of this," my impeturbable wife said, "I'm sending you to that off-road driving school in California." She settled her arm in its cast on a pillow and our hitch hikers got in the back for the rest of the drive through glorious scenery,and on a continuously mashed up roadway, less on the rocky hilltops and more in the muddy valleys. Further down the road we picked up a couple more hitchhikers, walking out of the fields burdened with packages. They asked us to stop at a roadside collection of huts where they washed off their mud in the stream, ate a coconut, chatted with the neighbors and picked up a pig in a sack for the ride to Puerto Plata in our truck. It made me feel a bit like a plantation owner, driving around with people in the bed of the truck when there were perfectly good seats inside, but when in Rome...On the paved road the woman howled with laughter as the 50 mile-per-hour wind tore her hair from her headscarf, the pig in the sack seemed less amused but calmed down after I dug a hole in the sack for it to breathe through and we traveled without incident, as bizarre a combination of people as any on the roads that Sunday morning in Puerto Plata. Little did passers-by know where we had been to church. Like they say, God protects drunks and idiots, and we made it through without a scratch, and I was definitely not drunk.