Black And White and Read All Over

The move progresses. I hope you are taking notes because this stuff is a total pain and it feels never ending and you can learn from my trouble! Yesterday was another slice through the umbilical with the utilities and the Internet scheduled to be cut on November 1st. Next we have to update our driver's licenses with new addresses because I used to work for the police department and anyway I am anal about having my documents up to date.

I spent many formative years as a young adult in Italy, a country where bureaucracy is legendary for its lassitude and fear of decision making. If you think government interference is ruining your life you have no idea how intrusive government is in other countries. In Italy it would be unthinkable for a clerk to ask "Is the address current on your driver license?" If it isn't up to date you are in trouble!

In Italy the driver's licenses have modernized of course (my British license of the era didn't even have a photo and expired on my 70th birthday...) but in the 1980s the license was a piece of folding paper and every year you had to pay a stamp tax by going to the post office to buy a 500 Lira stamp and attaching it to the license to prove you had paid your tax! I cannot imagine the Italian system renewing by mail the way Florida does every eight years!

The result of this indoctrination is that I am absolutely paranoid about having my documents up to date and in apple pie order. I had the greatest trouble selling my utility trailer as I insisted we meet at the DMV to transfer the registration immediately upon sale. That was non negotiable as I had dealt with too many issues at work from people calling the police after getting toll fines and being held responsible for their vehicles as they had never transferred the title. You can imagine in Key West how many towing fees and parking fines pile up in your name if you are slack about transferring the ownership of the vehicle. My advice is to follow my example!

The consequence of all this juvenile hassle is that we are shutting down our utilities transferring our address to our new Florida address and so forth. It is soul sapping making the calls but I am always reminded how easy this stuff is in the US. 

Many years ago I was talking about these kinds of problems with an Italian traveler who told me a story about putting a new diesel engine in his sailboat. Aside form the Technological problems which are universal he had to deal with the Italian bureaucracy. I never knew this, not having had a sailboat in Italy, but putting a new engine in a boat requires the presence of a Treasury police officer to verify the serial number of the engine being removed and also of the engine being installed. Why? I have no idea. I understand the value of a Vehicle (or Boat) identification number but the engine number? I have no clue where it is located on the engine block. Such absurdities are the life blood of bureaucracies that Americans have no idea about.

When we sailed to Belize the Customs there were famous for requiring. list of stores and sure enough when we landed in Punta Gorda we had pages of 19th century lists of the numbers of foodstuffs in cans and bottles and I can't remember what. I write fast even in cursive but we spent an hour sitting on a hard chair in the customs shed filling out reams of nonsense to enter Belize. I hope they have streamlined the process. 

I have only ever heard rumors about the German TuV system of registering vehicles and products.  You can read all about it here TuV Link  They re notoriously tough even for something as simple as  buying a custom muffler for your motorcycle, which has to be TuV and government certified for use. Good idea? You decide but it doesn't stop there and I who have lived in both systems prefer the North American ease of bureaucracy over the European nanny state.

I follow an Italian Fiat Ducato forum, which is the Italian model, the original van model that the Promaster is based upon. Its not really useful in any practical way but I enjoy seeing how Europeans plan and build their vans. One thing O have noticed is that they are all worried about getting their home made vans getting the Government seal of approval. All systems have to be government inspected and certified. Safety first of course but how many US homebuilt vans catch fore spontaneously?

I guess in general the way I have observed it is that in North America you are presumed to be innocent by the system until you prove otherwise. In Europe you are presumed to be evasive until you prove your compliance with reams of papers, notary stamps and stamp taxes.

One other thing I have noticed is the effect on travel of the North American Free Trade agreement. I was never a fan of free trade between such disparate populations and economies and indeed we have seen a dive to the deck of wage stagnation and the endless export of manufacturing jobs. Which is a debate for another time. The good news is that NAFTA works a treat for us, the traveling retirees.

Telephones work on cell systems in each country and we can take our Verizon iPhone 12s to Mexico or Canada where they will work as they do at home. The only small fly in the ointment is that data use is limited in Mexico and Canada unless you join one of the various international programs instituted by the phone companies. $10 a day is a lot to use Google maps in Mexico so we will buy a Mexican SIM card and insert it in our Jetpack to make the van our own WiFi hotspot.

All this cleverness and technology and miniaturization is possible thanks to modern travel aids and political treaties but the fundamentals of travel, the exploration and discovery remain the same. I'm glad its been made easier. 

There is much fearfulness about travel to Mexico but that is an issue in the minds of those that don't want to travel south. For the rest of us the basics of driving in Mexico are simplified beyond belief by the Internet. You can fill out Tourist Visa forms, Vehicle import forms, and vehicle insurance forms on line before you leave home. You stop at the Immigration and Customs offices at the border and get them stamped and off you go. Unbelievable! Thank you Internet!

Beyond that Mexico has created a Hassle Free Zone  (its real name!) where we can drive our US registered vehicles with no paperwork at all. You have to have the Tourist visa for the people but the vehicle needs only Mexican Insurance (Baja Bound is the forums' favorite supplier). The idea is to encourage American snowbirds to visit western Sonora State as well as both states in the Baja California peninsula with the least amount of paperwork possible.

That is all in the future as for now we have to deal with the modest paperwork requirements at home.

And take pictures of places we shan't see for a year while we meander through the open doorways of modern travel. Vaccinated, masked and ready to get Covid tests as needed the biggest hurdle at the Monet are the closed land borders of South America holding up many overland travelers. For once we seem to have our timing right and we have high hopes that by 2023 those closures will be history.

Rusty sleeps through it all, waking up for walks and pets, apparently concerned by the chaos of furniture sales and paperwork blizzards. may your day pass as serenely as his!

Packing

The fact is my life is slightly boring at the moment and I apologize. 

We plan to be on the road in three weeks but until then it's a Phony War, if you know to what period of history I am referring...we are living a life of reduction and there's not much to write about. Forgive me.

My days now start with an early morning neighborhood walk with Rusty. He has been perfect as usual and now I'm not getting up at 4:25 am anymore he lets me sleep in. Around 5:45 or 6 am I hear a dog yawn and nails clicking on the tiles as he politely wakes me from a deep sleep and reminds me it's time to check the neighborhood.

A walk down to Spanish Main and back lasting twenty minutes in the dark of the morning is enough to wake me so after he gets his treat I lay down on the couch and read while Rusty uses his dog door and lets himself out to enjoy the sunrise which comes around 7 am.

When Layne gets up she sets the day's order of service and we drink our tea, mine hot (Yorkshire Gold) hers cold (mango tea in a can which sounds an abomination to me) and after my Weetabix cereal we get to work and start organizing. Yesterday we went down to the van early and put stuff away in the cool of the morning then we repaired to the house upstairs and decided we have to live in orderly spaces so we put boxes away and tidied up the living room and the kitchen and the bedroom. That felt good.

Then Layne sat down and did paperwork and I kept my brain fresh by doing the New York Times crossword ($20 a year subscription). Rusty wandered in from his favorite hole in the front yard to sleep for a while on his bed.

He comes and goes freely with no fences or restraints and he lies down in the sun like a junkyard dog without a bed to his name. He loves gravel even though he can sleep on two beds, two couches or even our bed. Nope he lies in the dirt and snores while we work.

We stop for lunch and continue our streaming binge. One way we get through the stress of packing up a twenty year life is we pick a TV show and binge mercilessly. Currently its Justified on Hulu and we had forgotten how unmercifully violent the show is. Good lord.

A workout is reserved for those days when we have the energy followed by a swim in the canal followed by a happy dog ready to go for a walk.  He and I get in the car and drive out to the mangroves where I carry a camera and Rusty carries his energy from his day long sleep. This is Summerland Key at dusk heading into the sunset. 

The Mobil station is home to Dions fried chicken  in the convenience store. I know we are going to binge at least one more time. I may be too greasy after that to type a blog entry.

Kemp Channel Bridge connects Summerland to Cudjoe Key. There is not one single trip I make on the highway these days that the traffic  can hold the speed limit or God forbid five over. One thing  I am not going to miss is getting off Highway One which has become a mess over the past few years. There have been several serious accidents recently but every day its dicing with death. A slow driver causes back ups and people tailgate and get impatient and as much as I'd like to pass and escape frequently I'm jammed in the middle of the angry drivers and passing makes no sense so I pull over on the shoulder instead and let them pass by. Frankly I'm over it, people texting and not driving, speeding stupidly, not paying attention and driving erratically so I'm looking forward to taking back roads far from busy commutes and freeways in parts of the country where there is more than one road. I'll show you what I mean when we take to the road and leave the South behind and head for my first random destination: Texas Hill Country. Early December I hope. That will be frigid. This will get interesting.

Meanwhile we're packing and putting stuff in the trash and dropping generous tips to the garbage collectors who hump our overloaded trash cans out of sight. It's really not glamorous but I beg your indulgence, and we really will be traveling very soon. They shut down my work e-mail account yesterday so I really am out. Things are real but I have no regrets. I can't wait. That the first month will see us visiting assorted friends makes for a great start to an open ended road trip.

An End, A Beginning

We thought we were so clever when as youngsters we came across the phrase “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” Wow! Who had ever heard of such wit!? 

Indeed today is just that. I worked my last shift, I am retired, I turned in my ID card, my door key to the Police Station my locker padlock and my headphones yesterday and walked out of work for the last time. 

I was lucky my last day was spent working with two friends who reminded me of the very best of times, those shifts spent in easy camaraderie coping with the job taking time to talk of this and that between calls. The day passed easily. 

The landlord has his notice and we will leave the house come what may by the end of the month and probably sooner. Layne’s dentist is backed up and her last dental check could only be had later in the month so we may be hanging around a little longer than anticipated but that’s okay. Key West is a good place to hang around for a while. 

I have read of the loss of identity that comes with retirement but I confess for me the loss of friends is harder for me than having to say “I used to be…” especially as  my retirement is combined with a total life do over! 

In a life that now suddenly has no deadlines, no imperatives to be or do, to meet expectations, I am totally at home. 

I am free now to say or do what I want, to no longer be a small cog in a vast machine that I represent publicly. I have no great revelations to make, no scandals to lay bare but if I do behave badly in public I now do so in my name, not as an ephemeral and unimportant employee of a public agency. That feels rather pleasant. I am liberated of expectations and responsibilities. 

I am me now, merely the driver of the Golden Van, Rusty’s dad and Layne’s co-conspirator. 

If you have a complaint about leaf blowers don’t call me! I am no longer responsible…I saw a photo of a house on fire and all I could think was - not me. I know nothing. They managed without me.  They always have. They will be fine and so will I. 

Alligator Alert

I have visited the Blue hole on Big Pine Key for twenty years and then on Thursday the well known Blue Hole resident said goodbye in spectacular fashion. Out of the water and along the trail he crunched some thing so loudly I imagined it was my bones.

The Blue Hole is called that because it is a pool of freshwater in a spring of islands that lack freshwater resources. There are no natural lakes or springs or rivers or streams in the Florida Keys. Alligators live in fresh water (crocodiles, the less aggressive dinosaurs, live in salt water) thus there aren't any in the Keys. A puzzle is here!

Since Hurricane Irma. new signboards have gone up to explain the vagaries of the Key Deer refuge whose office is closed to the public (Thank you Covid)  in Big Pine but you can read the public sign boards wherever they are posted. And there are lots of them.

I have no desire to feed Key Deer who congregate around homes where the best vegetation is raised on ornamental gardens. The idea of feeding an alligator is about as appealing to me as having an unnecessary colonoscopy but some people do actually feed them I was told by a resident of one of the houses near the Blue Hole.

I know a long time alligator in the Blue Hole starved to death after ingesting a rubber toy thrown by some imbecile visitors which blocked its intestine and prevented it eating. Which explains the mystery of a fresh water dinosaur in islands surrounded by salt water. The alligators of the Blue Hole are imported.

The story of tarpon in the fresh water was a new one to me, see below:

Hurricane Wilma pulled a number on these islands with massive flooding in every direction. My way home was blocked by an alligator in the roadway apparently washed out of the Blue Hole by the same floodwaters that brought the tarpon. All I saw was a wet black tail swishing angrily as the beast sought refuge in the mangroves. 

I was hoping to spot the alligator in the water somewhere near the viewing platform overlooking the hole which in real life isn't blue at all. Instead as Rusty walked on his leash ahead of me to the left I looked to the right and to my surprise saw the snuggle toothed snout poking up through the undergrowth. Rusty never saw a thing and was probably wondering why I keep him on a leash on the rare occasions we visit this place. Rules are rules and sometimes they serve a visible purpose.

We walked on and wandered the trails round the hole. I kept Rusty close but honestly I wasn't concerned at this point. Alligators inspire terror and they are fearsome beasts but as long as you aren't stupid they will leave you alone. Being stupid is swimming in freshwater canals where they live, especially at dusk or at night. 

I wondered at the algae blooming in the water all round the pond. I can't imagine it bodes well for the residents of the hole and made me wonder if coming out of the water to sit in the shade might be preferable to being surrounded by scum. Maybe alligators aren't so fussy.

By the standards of mainland forests the pines of Big Pine Key, so called for the size of the island not the trees, are pretty small and underdeveloped. A pond like this in most areas of the East Coast would be nothing special, but around here where quarries are the only source of fresh water lakes this place is rare in the Lower Keys.

The construction projects required to develop these islands needed gravel and rock to build homes, rail beds and roads. And they dig these materials out of the ground. Where you find a freshwater pond you find a quarry. This one is particularly pretty thanks to the growth on its shores. 

We walked out the back into the edge of a subdivision of homes that apparently attract flocks of Key Deer. Rusty was much more interested in the smells in the bushes than he was in live animals and just like the alligator he saw nothing around him except what he smelled. I reckoned it was a good walk.

If the hour long drive to Key West doesn't put you off you could do worse than live behind the Blue Hole among the trees and wildlife.

The speed limit on Key Deer Boulevard, the main connection to the Overseas Highway is thirty miles per hour and speeds are checked. Deer are everywhere so texting while driving will end up doing you no good at all around here. 

Driving north from the highway the road is straight and featureless among little pine trees and palm shrubs. Some maniacs ride the full five miles to Port Pine Heights on the bike path in the blazing sun.

The Blue Hole, three miles from the traffic lights in Big Pine.

Normally you stand on the platform and peer down at the water.

The literature explains how fresh water trapped in these places gathers in a pool above the salt water penetration in the rocks below.  They call the fresh water a lens as that is what to looks like I suppose when seen in profile.

I recommend taking a look around before reading the small print based on this last visit.

I put Rusty in the car and went back to see what I could find. I found nothing wandering around and peering. Oh well I thought, he's gone back to the water. Had he hell. A slight rustling sound under the trees and finally I spotted him.  He had long since spotted me and I could see his round black beady eye following my movements which suddenly stopped.

He found something hard and crunchy in the leaves and while I watched her crunched. Alligator jaws are powerful in part because they are fixed. They can't chew, they can only tear or in this case crunch. 

Alligators creep me out more than other predators because they snag their food when they can and put their prey in a hole underwater to rot so they can pull it apart more easily. This means they don't hunt when hungry but when they have the opportunity to grab something.

They can run like mad on land and they swim like fish. Well adapted is what you could call them. I'm told we look large to them on land because we tower over them and that puts them off snagging us. I hold onto that thought. It seems to work, as he turned around, came out of the tree with some trouble with his tail and then rested, watching me. I decided to keep my feet and went home.