I cannot help but notice that people Up North are starting to see flowers in bloom and green grass and the moaning about winter appears to have dried up with the snowdrifts. I on the other hand ventured up the Myakka Valley on my way home to Key West and found myself in a life or death struggle with the thermometer.
I think Key West hit a temperature somewhere below 60 degrees (15 Celsius) just one time this past winter, reason enough to commute by car. The low lying Myakka mist produced bone numbing cold, especially considering the wind chill factor as I tried to ride east from Sarasota on Highway 72 just before dawn. I had to stop and warm up alongside the road in the dark, my teeth were chattering so much. I am the poster boy for thin blood.I left the hotel in Tarpon Lake, 20 miles north of St Petersburg just after four in the morning, and got on that gruesome eight lane monstrosity called Highway 19, an endless strip of chain stores and neon that depressed me just looking at it. Every time someone grumbles about change in Key West I will recall to my mind the numbing urban sameness of Highway 19, a wide strip of black through the heart of communities built, in the words of Gertrude Stein (disparaging Oakland) with "no there,there."
Of course when I was out in this particular piece of road it was night time so one has to include an obligatory night time picture. It wouldn't be my blog without an orange shaded photograph from time to time. This not being Key West I stuck to the highway and didn't venture into the recesses of a strange city. I got beaten up once in St Petersburg one dark night long ago when I was delivering pizza to the public housing. I'm too old to fight back...
In my continuing effort to avoid interstates I wound my way along Highway 41 to Sarasota, a continuing moon scape of chain stores with not enough personality to differentiate Bradenton from Lake Tarpon, may blessings heap up on these urban planners, until finally the sun started to come up and illuminate my predicament. Myakka Valley isn't a valley in the conventional sense, as there are no hills, but it is simply a place where water runs through the fields and attracts damp and moisture and COLD air.
I put on my waterproof liner and seriously thought about wearing my waterproof over mitts but the rising sun fooled me on that long straight road through Florida's cowboy country. So I rode with cold hands for far too long:
I couldn't keep up with this dude in his truck towing a box at 75+ miles per hour, with a fully saddled horse and two dogs who showed their appreciation for the Bonneville by yipping wildly every time we were stopped by construction traffic lights:
Once the sun came up and I could feel my fingers again, and my breath stopped fogging my visor (that hasn't happened in ages!) I started to feel more human and the ride became more of what I remembered, gorgeous park-like fields, live oaks, Spanish moss and wide sweeping corners between the straights. And at the end of it all the town of Arcadia, that at first blush looks like a close approximation to an idyll:
But its a cow town that processes citrus as well, and neither crops has done too well for the city. Brief prosperity that came with the housing bubble has evaporated and many of the old main street store fronts are up for lease. I find it utterly frustrating that people prefer to flock to the numbing monotony of mauls and highways like 19 North, and abandon these intrinsically human and richly styled streets:
For a while in the late 1980s Arcadia got into the headlines as the city that denied a haemophiliac child with AIDS the ability to go to school and burned his family out of its home. I had breakfast in the Wheeler's Cafe (sausage and biscuits; what else fits the image of a cowboy town?) and I felt like a martian, surrounded by crabby old men with fingers and backs gnarled by years of field work, ten gallon hats, plaid shirts and jeans. And then they held hands to say grace... it's all in the context I suppose.
But its a cow town that processes citrus as well, and neither crops has done too well for the city. Brief prosperity that came with the housing bubble has evaporated and many of the old main street store fronts are up for lease. I find it utterly frustrating that people prefer to flock to the numbing monotony of mauls and highways like 19 North, and abandon these intrinsically human and richly styled streets:For a while in the late 1980s Arcadia got into the headlines as the city that denied a haemophiliac child with AIDS the ability to go to school and burned his family out of its home. I had breakfast in the Wheeler's Cafe (sausage and biscuits; what else fits the image of a cowboy town?) and I felt like a martian, surrounded by crabby old men with fingers and backs gnarled by years of field work, ten gallon hats, plaid shirts and jeans. And then they held hands to say grace... it's all in the context I suppose. Highway 31 cuts south from Arcadia, straight like an arrow (again!) through more fields and pine forests and cypress stands...
...and more ranches. People don't tend to believe me when I point out that Florida has a long tradition of cowboys in the best Wild West style, as though mountains and deserts are a prerequisite.
There are plains here in the middle of the state. And mixed in with the cows you'll see horses too looking very picturesque.
The orange groves stretch for miles too, alongside the open fields and pine woods, and the trees themselves reflect the sunlight off the waxy dark green leaves. They look like squat bushy Christmas trees lined up along the road, when they are well tended. When not tended they look scruffy and spiky:
This orange grove was almost on the Caloosahatchee River which is a main cross state waterway connecting Fort Myers with Stuart, and the river drains Lake Okeechobee into the Gulf of Mexico. In fact don't be surprised to see ocean going boats parked in the orange groves around here, in the middle of Florida, far from hurricane surge (if not hurricane winds):
...and more ranches. People don't tend to believe me when I point out that Florida has a long tradition of cowboys in the best Wild West style, as though mountains and deserts are a prerequisite. There are plains here in the middle of the state. And mixed in with the cows you'll see horses too looking very picturesque.The orange groves stretch for miles too, alongside the open fields and pine woods, and the trees themselves reflect the sunlight off the waxy dark green leaves. They look like squat bushy Christmas trees lined up along the road, when they are well tended. When not tended they look scruffy and spiky:This orange grove was almost on the Caloosahatchee River which is a main cross state waterway connecting Fort Myers with Stuart, and the river drains Lake Okeechobee into the Gulf of Mexico. In fact don't be surprised to see ocean going boats parked in the orange groves around here, in the middle of Florida, far from hurricane surge (if not hurricane winds):Owl Creek Boatworks is still going strong in the middle of nowhere, an excellent marina for winter boaters to leave their vessels during summer. I enjoy the whole boatyard scene when I don't have a boat of my own out of the water. Especially miles from salt air.
The river itself is quite impressive and its deep too, over 20 feet if I recall correctly from own transits years ago:
For ocean sailors its a treat to travel slowly between the green banks of a gently flowing river, watching cows graze and small towns float slowly by. For the average motorcyclist there are the pastoral moments and places too. Small creeks
Ideal for a picnic if one were so equipped, I wasn't though I did have my repellent on as it was over 80 degrees by now and the recent cooling breezes had dried up around here. The road alongside the river wound its way most enticingly:
And I enjoyed every winding mile. South of these temperate woods lie the Everglades and those fascinating alligators and more straight roads all the way home to Key West.
As an interim while I unpack and reorganize my life at home, I thought I might throw out pictures of a few alligators I encountered on my trip home. All but the last, which I warn in advance is dead and a bit battered, I found sunning themselves along the Loop Road off Tamiami Trail. Its a dirt road that I shall explore more thoroughly in an essay later, and it winds through some cypress swamps for 26 miles. I love it.
I didn't check the mileage but I'm guessing Sweetwater Strand is about 3 miles in from Monroe Station on Highway One. I rode the dirt at about 40 miles per hour, to keep the ride smooth over the washboard and I was pleased to see the Bonneville, loaded, was perfectly smooth and manageable. I passed a gap in the trees, a couple of miles in:
And I thought I saw a gray lump in the grass. Indeed I did, and this was it closer up (using the telephoto feature, not my feet):
Which was indeed an alligator, though not a very cooperative one. It reminded me of my dog when she was mad at me and plunked herself down with her back to me. I rode on down that white dry road. It's the end of rainy season in Florida the road was dry and in many spots the gravel was scraped clean off the roadway. There were quite a few cars too riding up and down throwing up huge plumes of white dust with no slowing down, no mercy for the geek on the motorbike. 
They are amazing creatures these dinosaurs, lying placidly in the water, grinning, and doing almost nothing. The weird part is when you turn around to take another picture, the alligator has slithered away so gracefully and silently you never even noticed. I was glad i was on the road and they weren't. I stopped to tank up on water well away from the gators:
But when one returns to the noise and bustle of civilization there is always the reminder, somewhere, that they have a lot more to fear from us, than we from them. Years ago I got a ticket for speeding on Tamiami Trail. I was driving from Fort Myers to Key West to visit a friend and at four in the morning I figured it was safe to cut through the Seminole Village areas at a steady 60 instead of slowing to the mandated 45 mph. The trooper told me that I needed to slow down in "that little car" (I was driving a Mazda MX6 which I didn't think of as little) because the gators were in mating season and all over the road. Evidence of what a car can do was on the side of the road this afternoon and very gory it was too:
Not nearly so scary after an encounter with a car. However there were bits of automobile grille scattered all down the roadway near by. An excessively close encounter and chalk one up to the humans, who, once again, didn't even stop to eat their prey, in the words of a very funny Far Side comic strip. 
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...
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...
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:
But the theory was that if the state made it two lanes in each direction it would aid and abet development as it would allow more people to evacuate within state guidelines. One way of putting a brake on development in the Keys is by calculating how many people can get to "safety" off the islands within 24 hours. Local officials work the numbers to accommodate developers anyway but the Stretch will remain two lanes wide when all is said and done, creating ample opportunity for road rage and tailgating:
I will continue to favor the Card Sound alternative and its one dollar toll.
Homestead saw a fair bit of prosperity in the 1990's on the coat tails of the wild land speculation of the housing bubble and lots of farmland was gobbled up by little box houses at inflated prices. Nowadays enterprising developers are staving off bankruptcy by turning the tracts into Section 8, federally subsidized rental housing, rendering those formerly $400,000 mansionettes almost worthless, the ones that did sell. Downtown Homestead continues along unperturbed slumbering gently in the 1950s:
Unlike Florida City Homestead has retained a proper downtown, populated by mom and pop (mama y papi) stores and local restaurants.
One of the better known Mexican restaurants is El Toro Taco which despite the odd name serves up pretty decent Mexican grub. Its right on Krome Avenue at Second Street:
I usually head a little further down the street and chow at an unnamed hole in the wall which has a banda jukebox 
and six dollar dishes, which with a Styrofoam cup of rice milk called horchata, keeps the hungry motorcyclist nourished:
Homestead used to have a big air force base here but that got blown away, literally, by Hurricane Andrew and the minuscule reserve base doesn't do much for the local economy. I predict a future of somnolence for Homestead as the economy totters on for a while. Perhaps its charming period flavor has been saved from the wrecking ball:
Nice to visit and pause in if you are on your way home to the Keys, not perhaps as much fun if you are wondering where your next decent paying job is coming from.