Someone with a very large back hoe or a plentiful supply of dynamite came to the north shore of Boca Chica Key, at Mile Marker Eight and blew the bejeezus out of the limestone rock. They call these cuts in the rock the Submarine Pens. Thus one could reasonably assume that they were created to dock submarines in... However when you visit these very expensive holes in the water it becomes obvious the most you could do with them is...swim in them!
I don't know who dug them and I don't know when they were created but there are fully seven rectangular holes in the limestone, and to me as a veteran of the Canal they look wider and are definitely longer than the thousand-foot locks of Panama's Eighth Wonder of the World. They also appear to be a great deal less useful, even though they do look quite pretty in a pastoral, unmilitary sort of way: 
These holes in the water could be Key West's Stonehenge or perhaps, viewed from the air, they could be the island's crop circles or cousins to the enormous figures drawn in the deserts of South America. Submarines? I don't think so. I've poked around online and the only mention I can find of submarines and Key West are the official docks at Truman Annex, where the Navy was based for a long time. On the north side of Boca Chica Key the long arm of military militariness is still felt at the inner end of the road past the last pens:
The gate has a shiny new lock to protect the radar installation for the nearby Naval Air Station airfield where Navy jets take practice flights:
Other than the radar dome there is no visible purpose for the road anymore. The Navy owns the land and the mangroves on the other side but the street itself is deteriorating visibly and the bushes are growing out of control:
The thing about the "submarine pens" is that there are no structures alongside them, there are no docks, no cement no signs of any of the shoreside support systems that ships need when they come into port. So the conclusion one draws is that someone somewhere decided to hew out of the living rock a proposal to dock submarines 8 miles east of Key West Harbor across waters too thin to float a sub and instead of completing the channel first, they decided to carve out the pens? If true these things are the most expensive toilet seats the Navy ever sat on. But they do make a pleasant recreational area for Keys civilians, I must say. 
And clearly some locals have taken advantage of these unused giant swimming pools. I found a camp site complete with fire ring, tables and chairs and pool "facilities."
This place has been floating around in my consciousness forever, because I have heard people talk about the pens, but I have never previously bothered to come out here. Why? I don't know really despite my self anointed tag as an explorer. Now that I have come out here I feel like a kid discovering a huge new playground, and I'm guessing that weekdays in summer I shall find a corner or two within this "park" I can enjoy by myself on a hot sticky afternoon.
And clearly some locals have taken advantage of these unused giant swimming pools. I found a camp site complete with fire ring, tables and chairs and pool "facilities."This place has been floating around in my consciousness forever, because I have heard people talk about the pens, but I have never previously bothered to come out here. Why? I don't know really despite my self anointed tag as an explorer. Now that I have come out here I feel like a kid discovering a huge new playground, and I'm guessing that weekdays in summer I shall find a corner or two within this "park" I can enjoy by myself on a hot sticky afternoon. 
I mentioned to my colleague Diggy that I was planning a trip to explore the submarine pens and he looked at me quizzically, declining to ride his Honda 750 "all the way out" to Mile Marker 8 only to get stopped by a Navy Guard. "Those places are on the Navy base aren't they?" said this Conch graduate of Key West High School. That misconception stayed with me as I swung off Highway One at the Navy Base entrance.
The Navy owns most of the land on Boca Chica ("small mouth" in Spanish) Key, with an active Naval Air Station south of Highway One which bisects the island. On the north side of the island, accessed from the ramped Boca Chica exit from Highway one, lies the mystery of the submarine pens. 
The access road runs parallel to Highway One and then passes through some broken gates. As I rode the Bonneville through the gates I wondered, in a rather paranoiac state of mind, if armed Navy guards were going to leap out of the casuarina trees, armed to the teeth with camouflage sprouting from their helmets. No such thing came to pass, as I rumbled down the tatty old access road. In the distance, beyond Highway One, I could see the hangars at Boca Chica glowing in the evening sun:
And alongside the access road the old outlines of cement bunkers, probably ammunition magazines rose out of the mangroves like large immobile turtles: 
I first rode to the end of the road, snapping pictures as I went, still half wondering if I was in fact trespassing, but after I got to the locked gate I realised that I was alone on an empty, unmarked street open to all. The fact that we in the Keys live on small slivers of land necessarily gives these extra strips of open space value out of all proportion to what you see here. This is an excellent piece of parkland right off my commute and I can see strapping a folding chair to my saddlebag, stuffing a thermos of tea inside the same saddlebag and taking an afternoon to sit in the shade and read in peace and quiet, far from the distractions of modern life. No bums, no radios no nothing to disturb me or my motorcycle.
It isn't as though I have explored the whole place yet, so next time I will have to poke a little bit further, ride a little bit deeper into the undergrowth and check out a few more views.
Nevertheless I don't think that, picturesque though they may be, the Submarine Pens of Boca Chica Key are ever going to reveal the whys and wherefores of their existence.
The access road runs parallel to Highway One and then passes through some broken gates. As I rode the Bonneville through the gates I wondered, in a rather paranoiac state of mind, if armed Navy guards were going to leap out of the casuarina trees, armed to the teeth with camouflage sprouting from their helmets. No such thing came to pass, as I rumbled down the tatty old access road. In the distance, beyond Highway One, I could see the hangars at Boca Chica glowing in the evening sun:And alongside the access road the old outlines of cement bunkers, probably ammunition magazines rose out of the mangroves like large immobile turtles: I first rode to the end of the road, snapping pictures as I went, still half wondering if I was in fact trespassing, but after I got to the locked gate I realised that I was alone on an empty, unmarked street open to all. The fact that we in the Keys live on small slivers of land necessarily gives these extra strips of open space value out of all proportion to what you see here. This is an excellent piece of parkland right off my commute and I can see strapping a folding chair to my saddlebag, stuffing a thermos of tea inside the same saddlebag and taking an afternoon to sit in the shade and read in peace and quiet, far from the distractions of modern life. No bums, no radios no nothing to disturb me or my motorcycle. It isn't as though I have explored the whole place yet, so next time I will have to poke a little bit further, ride a little bit deeper into the undergrowth and check out a few more views. Nevertheless I don't think that, picturesque though they may be, the Submarine Pens of Boca Chica Key are ever going to reveal the whys and wherefores of their existence. 
They call the chassis frame members a "tridiron" in smartspeak and those frames come in silver or black. The rest of the bodywork is plastic paneling that can be changed by simply unscrewing the various panels and attaching new colors of your choice. A nice way to eliminate dings and scratches...These 40 mile per gallon cars were conceived as urban transport and the original Smarts were 600cc, six foot long cars that could park rear to the curb in half the space of a "normal" car. In Italy they sometimes end up in motorcycle parking!
These newer models are 8foot 8inches long, hit 90 miles per hour and come complete with heated seats, air conditioning and full sound systems.
The entire vehicle is designed around the cabin which is the same size as a regular car's front seats, but the rest of the vehicle is a tad bit shorter.
I found the Smart pleasant to drive, a bit clunky in automatic and but smoother with the manual clutchless shifter so beloved of modern sporting cars. It picks up okay, but not brilliantly, and feels the bumps more than a longer car might but its a very usable vehicle incorporating a modest but adequate trunk. In some respects it is a worthy successor to the venerable Fiat 500, a simple car that offered no frills, a clunky gearbox (double declutch first gear!) and got people on the road even if they had little money.
The Cinquecento by Fiat has become an icon such that Florentine jewellers were selling them as trinkets on the Ponte Vecchio when I was visiting last year. Fiat has produced a new, more comfortable 500 as part of the new/old retro wave of automobiles led by the VW Bug and BMW's Mini, but my sister still has her original Fiat 500 in perfect condition and won't drive it anymore because she's shy and says it attracts too much attention! 
Modern Europeans are spoiled for choice when it comes to attractive small cars and my wife, while passing these paragons of economy on the pillion of my friend Giovanni's much more robust BMW 1200 two wheeler, took a fancy to Nissan's (convertible) Micra as her favorite.
For myself I still like the original urban machines, like this Vespa lurking in a Florentine alley,
or the BMW 650 I rented last June, seen here at the castle at Alviano near Orvieto: 
And modest scooters of all stripes still stir my heart more than micro cars:
Inside the Piaggio Museum in Pontedera, Tuscany, there are all sorts of vehicles that speak of Italy's need for wheels in the wake of World War Two. Piaggio's Ape (ahh-pay) is still seen everywhere on modern roads in Italy and the Third World including India where they still build them; it's a classic three wheeled workhorse. My wife cracked herself up sitting in my sister's Ape 50 "moped:"
The fruit vendor used to make his rounds in my Umbrian village driving an Ape 30 years ago, weighing the fruits and vegetables in a hand-held set of scales. And I remember the Vespa 400, real micro cars on the streets of Italy in the 60's and 70's. Now they are relegated to museums, the Smart car of their day:
And here's a gratuitous motorcycle picture, a heart throb if I ever I saw one, a Gilera single at the Piaggio museum:
Take that you urban poseurs! It would undoubtedly be hell to ride on modern city streets, but the image is lovely nonetheless, for those of us that dream unfettered dreams. 
My wife still dreams of owning a Smartfortwo convertible, she has her colors picked out, metallic blue on a silver tridiron, with the comfort package, out the door including sales tax for $20,000... but its not going to happen. And its a shame because this is the first car I've ever seen her really passionate about.
This was not a showroom in the normal sense of the word. This was a throwback to the East German style of selling Trabants, the smoky two stroke cars that passed for transportation in the former Worker's Paradise. You got what you were given which was whatever the Party thought you deserved to receive, and were happy to get anything at all, never mind the color of the body or the number of doors. The coed remarked how nice the Key West buyers had been when they received their cars, a Cabriolet instead of the Passion and how they had kindly taken what they were given (for $3,000 more- no discounts for French shipping errors!).
When my colleague took a 9-1-1 call about an accident on Highway One he had to make sure the wreck wasn't within city limits. That's because North Roosevelt Boulevard is technically US Highway One, even though it is a city street. Then he turned to us two in the room with him and asked quizzically: "Baypoint? Where's Baypoint? In the county?"
Bay Point is a peninsula that sticks out south of Highway One just about a mile or so, with a couple of dead ends and a few streets that form two surprisingly distinct communities in this small amount of space.
It's always crowded it seems like, in the winter and a motorcycle just makes sense for these expeditions into the hinterlands of the Florida Keys. Baby's Coffee marks the spot on Highway One where Bay Point sits, and there's a little grocery store next door, the kind of convenience store that people in the Keys can't seem to do without. Its known as the Halfway Store as it's mid point between Big Pine and Key West. Baby's has become the sort of frou frou grocery store that snowbirds seem to thrive in. 
They sell all those super expensive candies and cookies and sauces and pastes that you buy on vacation, fantasizing that the kitchen at home will suddenly become Aladdin's cave... but it doesn't! Unless you're my wife that is, but that's another hot sauce story. Baby's which was founded in downtown Key West still sells an honest cup of Joe for a buck including tax and their selections draw crowds.
Nowadays Baby's roasts its coffee somewhere around Homestead I believe, where labor costs and building rents are more reasonable, but moved its sole retail operation out to Mile Marker 15 after Duval Street rents started to go high enough to favor pornographic t-shirts over coffee sales. Behind the store is a county park, the sort of delicious public extravagance one associates with high property values, public income spent to benefit the local community:
I was sitting in the shade at a picnic table checking out Classic Bike while my coffee cooled a little. A local passed walking her dogs and got a greeting from a Baby's employee taking a smoke break behind the store:
Then my peaceful reading was interrupted by some cretinous customer who decided to take a leak in the bushes also behind the store next to the employee who was not blind. Emphatically not. She was a very loud female barista and she got a muted apology from the idiot. "And we don't just reserve the restroom for customers," she allowed to the dogwalker, a woman spared the sight of an elderly man attempting to pee into a tree. "What is wrong with people?" Which was way too philosophical a question for such a sunny President's Day. The most philosophy I could deal with was why did someone take on this boat project in the first place:
And I know for a fact that this country is absolutely bulging with backyard projects gone bad. When I see one here in the Keys it strikes me harder somehow. I imagine the happy boatbuilder reaching the end of the road and implementing a plan to cast off on the High Seas. Which naturally comes to naught, a bad habit, a woman, a family, obligations, los of nerve, Life; who knows what happens and the boat ends up high and dry. Catch Me indeed, I'm thinking fish are safe from this one. Back on land some people prefer to buy their projects intact and stick a manufactured home up on stilts; very popular and very neat:
Some people start their homes like boat plans and plant the framework for some stilts overlooking a dreamy scenic view:
There are the snowbirds who forget to come down for a winter or two and their plants blossom while their hurricane shutters stay tight shut:
I like to see the shutters open especially when they are these old 1950's style hurricane-bahama shutter style, popular on mobile homes of yesteryear with those old louvered windows underneath. Rotten for air conditioning great for nostalgia:
The eastern arm of Bay Point has the pricier homes on this island, with more on the way:
And I thought that was all there was to Bay Point, because I knew what this place was about.
It happened that a few years ago I was a tour boat captain and my boss bought himself a home on a canal at Bay Point. It was under $400,000 as I recall and he was over the moon at the bargain. The house was a concrete block structure, CBS, not on stilts and in terrible shape. It would have to be at that knock down bargain price... We captains went to work helping to install the wood paneled flooring which was quite a challenge as we all lived on boats and floors on a boat are something completely different. It took hours to figure out the jigsaw and get the corners to match up with the boss's anxious wife hovering and their new kid squalling and us captains scratching our collective heads at how to get the floor to go round corners and fit through doorways. It was a very late pizza and beer night for us at Bay Point.
The boss's house did look a deal better than this sorry shack for sale on the western arm of Bay Point, but cross a little bridge and you are in a world of trailers of all immaginable shapes, years and conditions:
The views remain spectacular no matter where you are when you look out on the water:
And back on the edge of Highway One there is a business for sale for an enterprising restaurateur. I never understood what was special about Knuckleheads, somebody's dream business which just translated into yet another sports bar restaurant selling television games and wings, and fried fish and beer, like any number of other, better established locales along the Highway. And there its, complete with handicapped parking and an airborne generator, ready for new owners to try their luck:
And look out at yet another spectacular view while they do:
For me it was time to roll home and meet the wife who had been off with a friend yard sale-ing and checking out a flea market. For some reason she found no junque worth bringing home so it was a splendid day all round.
Still sunny, still hot with a southwest breeze presaging another cold front to lower the 83 degree temperatures just a little bit, for a little while.