I awoke two mornings ago with one hand incautiously lying outside the covers and it felt like a block of ice. If this goes on much longer we will fire up the reverse cycle air conditioning, which we ran for four months last winter, which was intolerable. Frankly I don't think it is at all suitable to get into the car to take the dog for a walk and see 56 degrees (13 C) at this hour of the mid morning.
Cheyenne loves this weather as one might imagine. Arriving home yesterday morning after a long night of not doing much I just wanted to crawl into bed after stripping off my freezing cold motorcycle gear. Yes indeed, I rode to work Wednesday night knowing full well it was going to be cold. Cheyenne greeted me by prancing around and the standing hopefully by the car door. With as much grace as I could muster I stuffed her in and drove five minutes across the island to the Ramrod Pool, an open space surrounded by sturdy bushes where she can wander at will at 6:30 in the morning and I can hope to discern a few headlines in the paper as daylight arrives in all it's glory.
Yesterday morning it was COLD. All right I know that in Minnesota or Finland a chill winter morning is some degree of frost beyond anything I can imagine but the temperatures here are laced with water vapor and even hardened skiers and stuff from Up North admit a 60 degree (15C) day in Key West can give a seasoned person goosebumps.Besides its all in what you are used to. I remember once I was driving across North Dakota with my fiancee and her family and we stopped for gas outside Bismark. It was a sunny day, bright and fresh after a snowstorm had blown through filling the countryside with drifts of frozen water. My leather jacket clung to me like a sheet of frozen cardboard, my woollen hat sat on my head allowing shafts of piercing cold to drill through the holes in the weave and drive into my skull like ice picks. I tottered out of the Toyota van (a four wheel drive contraption that could plough through any amount of foul weather) and offered to fill up the gas tank. My fellow North Dakotans were standing around in minus 20 degree weather (-29 C) in t-shirts as though it was summer. I could barely operate the fuel pump and my breath felt like razor blades slicing my chest from the inside.
Thursday evening I didn't bother to ride the Triumph to work. Rain had fallen while I was sleeping and even though the skies were filled with thick billowy gray clouds their celestial insulation did not help to raise the temperature. I took Cheyenne for a walk on Big Pine and after about 55 minutes the skies opened and rain started spattering through the pine trees. We aimed for the car and started walking fast.
I don't usually mind the rain but rain and frigid cold is over the top. It sucks. It's unnatural. It makes me ask myself why I am not living in Charlotte Amalie or Frederiksted, or someplace close by, in the true Caribbean, the true tropics, America's true Paradise Islands- the US Virgins. Probably I'm not a USVI resident because I like road trips, I like a lower crime rate and I enjoy the weather in the Keys 49 weeks out of the year. Well, at least probably 45 weeks. More than 40 weeks out of the year for sure. Especially if you don't count unbearably hot weeks in August and September. It's not clear in this next photograph but my Labrador was looking at me in adoration yesterday morning and her tail was wagging nineteen to the dozen. Her thirty minutes at the pool had made her a happy girl.
From Richard Machida's Blog in Fairbanks Alaska (opinions expressed are certainly not those of an institution as august as the University of Alaska and anybody who suggests otherwise is an idiot) I read about the trials and tribulations, minimal really, of refurbishing an elderly BMW motorcycle. I have a vague unformed hankering for an R100RS the first factory faired sport touring motorcycle ever built and I find his blog encouraging. http://blog.machida.us/ However there was a throw away line at the end that gave me palpitations. It seems it's a good time to strip the bike because:
There is another blog, http://www.behindbarsmotorcycle.com/ which in his latest essay presents as clearly as anyone ever has the muddled attitude someone like me has to the whole notion of outdoor winter sports.My wife is one of those, raised in Northern California who has never appreciated the cold. She was armed for bear when I crossed her path at the gas station at the end of our street. I was coming home from the pool, she was on her way to work, to teach the little dears wrapped in wool with Ugg boots on her feet.
Her language was not at all ladylike as she pumped regular gas at $3.11/gallon into her car. Her Sebring has heated seats and this time of year they are on all the time. If temperatures drop below 80 degrees (27 C) and she wants the roof down, on comes the heated seat. That's her tolerance level for cold. She has announced at last that the heat is coming on at the homestead, and we are among the lucky ones who actually have central heat through reverse cycle a/c at our house. Lots of people don't.
I remember last year we arrived in Asheville, North Carolina about this time of year to visit her sister's family in the mountains. It was cold, and they always tell us, "It's not normally this cold in Asheville." Or "It hardly ever snows here." And every time we show up the weather turns to shit. Just as it did last year, because when we showed up it was twelve degrees (-11 C) and we were seriously frozen. We staggered into the house where the family was gathered to greet us and instantly they treated us like mental deficients. Of course it's cold, where's your cold weather clothing? Of course we had on every stitch of cold weather clothing we had and when they understood our plight out came the puffy jackets and wool accessories and the sympathy. That's right, we don't actually possess cold weather clothing around here. Last winter people were getting cold and lamenting they had no socks, never mind parkas, in Key West.
There is a saying which I have heard attributed to Norwegians which goes something like this: "There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing." And there is a great deal of truth in that. However in the Keys one doesn't plan one's life around periods of exceptional cold. If last winter's long freeze is emulated this winter we may have to reconsider as climate change or whatever alters our patterns of local weather. Tourists come to the Keys to lounge by the pool, to throw of their clothes and their cares in varying degrees. They don't come to huddle and to try to ignore roiling gray clouds and piercing cold wind. The Keys are sold on the (false) premise that these islands are tropical and that they are a Caribbean Paradise. Much of the time they live up to billing but for a few weeks in the year they don't. And it sucks all round. Partly perhaps because when the weather doesn't suck around here it is absolutely perfect, summer or winter. But when it does suck I shall make a point of whining about it. If you choose to live where there are seasons and there is snow and you do it by choice my hat's off to you. When the weather, the great attribute of my home town, lets me down, I might as well be shovelling snow or wearing electric motorcycle gear. And that's not something I'd do by choice. Not without a lot of whining.
I had plans this early morning (8 o'clock is early for a lot of people) and they involved walking as far as we could in ninety minutes before I had to drive in to Key West to meet my wife. The old road was torn up by Hurricane Wilma in 2005 but prior to that this stretch of asphalt was open to cars and it was much wider than the narrow strip still open to bikes and walkers. The ocean is unchanging if a little melodramatic this fine morning.
I had remembered to apply copious layers of insect repellent so I'm not sure if precautions were effective or if the threat of cool weather was enough to keep mosquitoes at bay.
Boca Chica is a strip of public land backed by the Boca Chica Naval Air Station which regularly flies jets off the runway here. They fly low and loud simulating aircraft carrier exercises, but the beach itself is open to public use, this side of the green hurricane fence. The power poles along here mark the old state road bed (not Highway One as some believe. The Old Overseas Highway used to pass through Boca Chica Base itself and a portion of it is still used as a second entrance gate). 
There is no doubt however that people fling their clothes off with gay abandon around here, whether such activities are state sanctioned or not. Not, most likely, as Florida has a government that enjoys very much interfering with people's private passions. In the name of freedom, naturally.
This Cuban chug used to be further down the beach closer to the tide line but it has apparently been pushed up further onto dry land. It was quite a sophisticated home built escape vehicle, with a hull made of sheet metal bolted together sheathed in fiberglass to make it water tight. It has engine mounts inside and seemed to have canvas flotation rings around the top of the hull. It is also filling up with trash after long exposure to lazy passers by. The US Coastguard OK is supposed to indicate the boat has been inspected and accounted for as much as possible by the Coasties. Cubans are always floating over, or dying in the attempt, when the ocean is calm and the breezes die down.
Speaking of time on your hands there is a stone hut construction also on this beach and very elaborate it is too.
It has chambers and paths and decorations and everything. Crusoe would be at home here.
Further down the beach the way is obstructed by water, a pond spilling out into the ocean. Across the salt pond the eagle eyed guardian of Boca Chica Naval Air Station.
Hurricane storm surge has made a mess of the coastline here. It's what Nature tends to do, tearing up the dirt and making human access more complex. Someone has strung up a set of polyethylene rope between the trees to enable people to totter dry foot using rocks as stepping stones. Cheyenne and I, properly clad fear no water- my Crocs and Cheyenne's paws are amphibious.
And, technically speaking, not completely alone:
We stood on the bridge for a while watching the water flow under the road and then it was time to turn back toward the car. We walked briskly along in companionable silence cutting the return journey in half, and in less than thirty minutes we were back at the car. 
I forget who, jcba or Combustible Turnip or someone wanted pictures of Craig Key. Here they are, though I have no idea what it is all about. 
We are told this human built island was named for Roland Craig who bought the land from the Overseas Railway in the 1930s and made a fishing camp out of it. The claim to fame is that President Hoover came down to sail his yacht out of here presumably while failing to come to grips with the first Great Depression. There's a thought as we sail merrily through the Second Great Depression.
Craig Key lies at the southern boundary of Islamorada, a town that rejoices in the nickname of "Village of Islands." The unincorporated nature of Craig Key doesn't mean it lacks amenity. There is a splendid new bike path covering the splendid new sewer system. And there are two homes on the island.
The western-most home is much more visible enjoying as it does a thin screen of coconut trees which expose it's half finished state to anyone driving by.
While I find the location spectacular enough and the isolation for one of my disposition is highly desirable the noise from the highway would be incessant, particularly as the wind usually blows from the southeast, which puts these homes downwind of traffic... 
I know I am a fussy sod but one of my pleasures living three quarters of a mile south of the highway is the quiet, most of the year when snowbirds aren't walking and shouting in the street in the early morning. Around here there's lots of traffic.
