When the original seven mile bridge was under construction at the beginning of the 20th century it was viewed by many as an engineering feat on the same order of amazement as the "Eighth Wonder of the World" which at that time was the construction of the Panama Canal, less beautiful perhaps than the Hanging Gardens of Babylon but decidedly more useful in the Industrial Age. The original bridge seen here from the new bridge, shows off the cement columns built around 1910 and still as solid as ever.
The original was built for the railway of course and posed a head scratcher to the engineers standing on Knight's Key in Marathon wondering how they were going to get the rails over the gap. They did it the Panama Canal way, building waterproof holes in the water with wooden casements and filling them with cement, giving them that characteristic rounded look:
The new bridge was built in 1982 and opened to traffic much to the relief of the claustrophobic drivers of the Lower Keys. The new bridge is little more than a normal two lane highway when you drive on it: 
Of course its a bit wet on either side and the scenery is quite spectacular:
The old bridge was quite narrow as can be seen today as it is still open at each end for pedestrians for use as a fishing bridge. This is the section of old bridge at the southern/western end, towards Big Pine Key and it's has been gussied up with cement barriers and trash cans:
The northern/eastern end of the old bridge, the Marathon end, is still in use as a roadway for the trolley to Pigeon Key. That's an excursion I wrote about elsewhere and i snagged a couple of pictures for this essay.
Imagine driving this road and meeting a truck three miles out. I was told (though I don't remember when I rode the bridge in 1981) that when two trucks met they occasionally had to stop and squirm past each other, folding their mirrors and backing and forthing to get by. Some people really did get freaked out driving this narrow bridge for seven long miles (nowadays it has barriers in the roadway to separate the trolley from pedestrians and cyclists coming from the Marathon end):
When the railroad was converted to a highway by the state of Florida in 1938 (thanks Works Progress Administration!) the state laid metal sheets across the rail bed, asphalted it and welded the rails as barriers, which are still there. Pigeon Key was a half way spot where rail workers were originally housed and is now a private park open to the public:
The new bridge has a 70-foot hump three miles out from Marathon, which allows tall boats to go from the Gulf of Mexico to the Straits of Florida through Moser Channel.
And the hump gives a nice view towards Marathon to the east/north (the road actually goes east but its labelled as "northbound"):
Or west and south towards Big Pine Key, more or less:
The top of the bridge is marked on the south side by the blue apparatus of the Florida Keys Acqueduct Authority ( the main water pipe to Key West runs alongside Highway One):
In the distance you can see the incredible shades of colors created by the shallows surrounding Moser Channel as it spills out into the Straits of Florida.
On the other side of the bridge, the north parapet, is a marker I doubt one in a hundred motorists notices (and why would they?):
On March 2nd 1981 an aqueduct truck carrying a backhoe accidentally hit and detonated the propane bottle that supplied the bridge tender's quarters on the old lift bridge on the old span:
The 39 year old bridge tender died in the explosion and the Lower keys reverted to their island status for a period of several weeks. An old timer I talked to about the incident said it was a difficult time in Key West when everything had to be emergency airlifted or barged into the city. They fixed the bridge to take cars once again but the lifting portion never returned, as the new bridge was opened the next year to much fanfare.
The speed limit is clearly marked though many people, visitors obviously, slow down to take in the views. Its perfectly legal to pass as long as you don't pass where the double yellow lines are solid. I have seen Highway Patrol cars pull a U-turn on the bridge to chase down and stop particularly egregious speeders. And speaking of views, they are quite spectacular, and I try not to get jaded or judgemental when out of state tags are crawling along at 40 miles per hour (The legal minimum for the bridge):
That last picture shows two small islands off the southern end of the bridge, lying on the south side. They are called spoil islands because they were created by Flagler's engineers who heaped up the "spoil" as the dredgings were called. In fact all along the highway you will find deep water up close to the roadway where channels were cut so the dirt could be used to buttress the causeway.
I've gone out to the Money Keys and they aren't much:
Perhaps it was a lack of mosquito repellent, or the hazy nature of the day, but I found the island to be rather gloomy and unappealing. Though the view of the bridges was rather nice:
It's actually much easier and faster to get to the Seven Mile Bridge from my house by Triumph Bonneville than by bouncing 14-foot center console. The islands were the spoil material dug out of the ground by Flagler's workers when they built the foundations for the cement pillars of the original bridge.
In fact I had been considering an essay on the bridge for some time, but to do it the way I wanted to wasn't possible during the winter (I tried a couple of times), but traffic was always just too heavy. This time of year there are fewer cars on the Highway so what I did was I waited at the southern end of the bridge for cars to go by and when I saw no vehicles approaching I chased the back of the line onto the bridge (the black SUV in the pictures above), so that by the time I got to the hump I could stop and take the pictures while stationary. I don't recommend stopping as vehicles barrel down on you surprisingly fast and you have NOWHERE to go. Caveat photographer.
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.
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. 
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.
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.
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.
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.