Our instructor at the dispatcher training seminar was excellent, a great facilitator, the first time I have ever seen someone truly facilitating rather than simply teaching and she did it beautifully. The down side was that we never got out before the appointed time... This was not a junket I was on, which is good news for future dispatchers I may be training as they will ultimately get the benefit of the mass of techniques that I learned. All of which is not to say I didn't take the time to enjoy myself on a little after-school solo field trip, which required me to get on the horrid Highway 19 and bug out south:
It rather amazes me to realise that I lived in St Petersburg fully 19 years ago. I left California with my 20 foot sailboat on a friend's trailer and he launched me in the Gulf of Mexico at Port Aransas and from there I made my solo way around to Florida, along the intracoastal waterway, finally sailing into St Petersburg's Vinoy basin where I anchored and got a job at WMNF Radio in Tampa. In those days there were no docks at the Vinoy and one could anchor for as long as one wanted without interference, and on this trip I discovered sailboats are back at the Vinoy:
And according to a couple of photo-shy dudes spiffing up their dinghy (right where I used to land my dinghy!) people hang at anchor for as long as they want.St Petersburg is the beachy half of Tampa Bay. Tampa itself is an agglomeration of brick buildings, modern skyscrapers and miles and miles of suburbs spreading all over the countryside. St Pete is limited to it's peninsula, more or less and the gulf coast is one long beach (overseen by several small municipalities that St Petersburg is lusting after and wanting to annex- lately unincorporated Terra Ceia). The town used to be known for its green benches and huge population of shuffle boarding retirees. These days most of the benches that are left are white and occupied by younger, perhaps less motivated residents:
The approaches to downtown are the usual wide open streets, and a mishmash of local businesses, chain stores and unoccupied buildings. This is Central Avenue heading east:
From a long way away one can see the tall bank building rising up over downtown with it's unmistakable brown roof:
And from the water I remember the big white hockey puck of a stadium roof. These days its paid for by a juice company in the manner of modern stadiums bought and sold to sponsors, but in the bad old days it was a white elephant that leaked, cost the city money and couldn't attract a team to save its life. It doesn't look to me like it improved its neighborhood:
St Pete took advantage of the boom of the 1990's to build attractive downtown lofts and condos and develop a core that tried to attract life to downtown. I visited in around 2000 and it was a much more lively town than when I had lived here on my sailboat. Downtown on this past sunny Sunday evening was still pretty in its own way:
They even masked the municipal parking garage with murals and stuccoed walls to make it look like just another office building. I may have been alone in my admiration for a boring city parking lot, but not for my admiration of the Bonneville in the midst of this urban planning:
Which was the moment when I heard a loud popping noise, that sound only made possible by a two stroke Vespa using a muffler with attitude, and this young tattooed dude showed up to go hang with his buds- in downtown St Petersburg! Definitely not the largest above ground cemetery in the world, as they used to call this city of old aged pensioners.
We talked Vespas for a bit and he confessed he had been thinking of riding to Orlando on his tricked out PX150. Naturally I egged him on, never one to quash someone else's dream. I hope he has the nuts to follow through and take the ride.
The approaches to downtown are the usual wide open streets, and a mishmash of local businesses, chain stores and unoccupied buildings. This is Central Avenue heading east:From a long way away one can see the tall bank building rising up over downtown with it's unmistakable brown roof:And from the water I remember the big white hockey puck of a stadium roof. These days its paid for by a juice company in the manner of modern stadiums bought and sold to sponsors, but in the bad old days it was a white elephant that leaked, cost the city money and couldn't attract a team to save its life. It doesn't look to me like it improved its neighborhood:St Pete took advantage of the boom of the 1990's to build attractive downtown lofts and condos and develop a core that tried to attract life to downtown. I visited in around 2000 and it was a much more lively town than when I had lived here on my sailboat. Downtown on this past sunny Sunday evening was still pretty in its own way: They even masked the municipal parking garage with murals and stuccoed walls to make it look like just another office building. I may have been alone in my admiration for a boring city parking lot, but not for my admiration of the Bonneville in the midst of this urban planning:Which was the moment when I heard a loud popping noise, that sound only made possible by a two stroke Vespa using a muffler with attitude, and this young tattooed dude showed up to go hang with his buds- in downtown St Petersburg! Definitely not the largest above ground cemetery in the world, as they used to call this city of old aged pensioners.We talked Vespas for a bit and he confessed he had been thinking of riding to Orlando on his tricked out PX150. Naturally I egged him on, never one to quash someone else's dream. I hope he has the nuts to follow through and take the ride. Back at the waterfront I wandered for a good long bit checking out my old haunts, the place I called the Martian Embassy, known locally as The Pier:
It's one of those architectural abominations that grow on you the more you live around them, and I was glad to see tons of people out enjoying the unusually mild spring afternoon. The Gulf of Mexico is the place where humidity reaches Amazonian proportions in the summer. There is not a drop of wind, combined with humongous downpours and lightning storms that would scare most people into religious fervor, especially if they live on boats ( lightning and sailboats are a gruesome combination- worse for sailors than pirates wind storms and foreigners combined). I moved my boat into the marina at Demen's Landing when I met a woman:
Peter Demens was one of two men who founded St Petersburg. He and John Williams flipped a coin and the winner got to name the city- the winner was Demens who hailed from Russia. So the other dude, Williams, got to name his other dream, a luxury hotel for the railway terminus after his home town. Which was how the somewhat dilapidated Hotel Detroit came to be in downtown St Pete. And it's Demens Landing, not Demon's Landing, thank you.
They were graduating students from the University of South Florida campus in St Pete Sunday so I managed to disrupt them a bit, and I flashed a picture of this landmark as I rolled by:
To my eternal shame this is where I confess I have never gone to the Dali Museum, though my wife who, paradoxically has, says its fabulous. I am a cretin even on my good days.
It's one of those architectural abominations that grow on you the more you live around them, and I was glad to see tons of people out enjoying the unusually mild spring afternoon. The Gulf of Mexico is the place where humidity reaches Amazonian proportions in the summer. There is not a drop of wind, combined with humongous downpours and lightning storms that would scare most people into religious fervor, especially if they live on boats ( lightning and sailboats are a gruesome combination- worse for sailors than pirates wind storms and foreigners combined). I moved my boat into the marina at Demen's Landing when I met a woman:Peter Demens was one of two men who founded St Petersburg. He and John Williams flipped a coin and the winner got to name the city- the winner was Demens who hailed from Russia. So the other dude, Williams, got to name his other dream, a luxury hotel for the railway terminus after his home town. Which was how the somewhat dilapidated Hotel Detroit came to be in downtown St Pete. And it's Demens Landing, not Demon's Landing, thank you.They were graduating students from the University of South Florida campus in St Pete Sunday so I managed to disrupt them a bit, and I flashed a picture of this landmark as I rolled by:
To my eternal shame this is where I confess I have never gone to the Dali Museum, though my wife who, paradoxically has, says its fabulous. I am a cretin even on my good days.However I have hung around the boatyards of Salt Creek and they are still there thriving without me:
In the unpretentious neighborhoods of south St Pete:
I don't ever wish to go back to those days, as i wasn't particularly happy and fled back to California as fast as I could, but there is a nostalgia in realising how much time has passed and how unlikely it was that I would ever find myself prowling these old dilapidated neighborhoods wondering where the years have gone. Because they have gone and won't come back and all I can think to do is to keep on keeping on making every day count.
In the unpretentious neighborhoods of south St Pete:I don't ever wish to go back to those days, as i wasn't particularly happy and fled back to California as fast as I could, but there is a nostalgia in realising how much time has passed and how unlikely it was that I would ever find myself prowling these old dilapidated neighborhoods wondering where the years have gone. Because they have gone and won't come back and all I can think to do is to keep on keeping on making every day count.Back at the conference center in Lake Tarpon I learned lots of good stuff about training new dispatchers, stuff my superiors at the police department will be happy to ignore, but in any event I doubt I will ever return to the grounds of the very clean, very mowed, very soulless conference center:
Nostalgia for this place? I guess I'll have to bear myself in patience and wait another twenty years.
Nostalgia for this place? I guess I'll have to bear myself in patience and wait another twenty years. 
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.
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:
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. 
...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):
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.