My heart sank as we approached Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens Sunday morning. Traffic was intense, cars were parked at all wild angles occupying every inch of the verges of the approach road to the event, and Coral Gables cops were making some extra money working the detail to try and keep order for the annual Ramble Garden Festival. I am not much of a one for crowds, but my wife and I had been forced to scratch a long desired trip to the Dry Tortugas, thanks to strong north winds sweeping the Keys. "I don't get seasick," my wife remarked to friends who had planned to go with us. "But I don't like sharing a three hour, rough water boat ride with a few dozen strangers do suffer from it." So we cast around for an alternative and remembered The Ramble which takes place on the grounds of the magnificent Fairchild Gardens in Coral Gables:
The Ramble is a gathering of plant growers of every type, tents of herbs, flowers, orchids, vegetable plants and you name it they were selling them.
The grounds of the Fairchild Tropical gardens lend themselves to this kind of thing as they are filled with all sorts of nooks and crannies overflowing with greenery and in each one lurked a specialised person with knowledge to give away, a plant to sell or a conversation to offer for the asking:
My wife is a member of the Fairchild Garden so we for in for free which is pretty cool as this is a special event and with a quick flash of her annual pass we were at liberty to wander at our leisure. At the entrance to the event itself someone had parked an early 20th century water organ, a hurdy gurdy mounted on vintage Renault truck and it was the source of the marching band we could hear from the parking lot:
There were food stands lining the approaches to the plant areas and we wandered in some bemusement.
Farmers markets were in their infancy when we left California and they have burgeoned everywhere- everywhere except Key West of course! Thus every time we see one we stop and take a look when we find them on the road. The Fairchild Gardens put on a magnificent spread for our edification, we small town hicks: 
Some stuff was more familiar to Key West resident:
And I have all the coconuts I need, thanks:
And even though I like a guacamole dip as much as the next habitue of Mexican cuisine, I was a bit taken aback to see a woman up to her elbows in the stuff, mashing industriously all afternoon:
My wife likes to cook so she was ready to check out some flavors and spices that were offered in new combinations or in a format not always easy to find at home:
There was also a food court offering everything from hot dogs to crepes by way of jerk and Asian cooking. 
We went for the one that doesn't ever rear its head in the Keys, as far as I know:
There used to be an Ethiopian restaurant in Tampa when I lived there for a very brief while, and mostly what I recall eating was gloppy sauces well spiced with no cutlery and a spongy sour tortilla type of bread for a spoon. We were offered plastic forks, even though I carry my own metal cutlery as I dislike plastic eating irons, but the food was as I remembered it more or less:
The weather was mildly sunny,mostly hazy and overcast with thin cloud cover and we found it quite pleasant to wander in the 80 degree temperatures (27C). For some it was bright enough to warrant shade:
I bought some garden tools which appeared to offer the benefit of folding up small when not in use and also of being built of materials likely to last a long while, a multi function steel rake and coconut frond pruner with a ten foot reach operated by a solid rod which should be easier to use than my spring operated contraption. I also got a rather powerful set of pruning shears that operate by ratchet action and are remarkably easy to use. All for $120, so we didn't get away scot free. My wife found the most elaborate hair pin for $20:
It's quite a hobby it turns out, turning wood on a lathe: 
They had a large tent filled with decorative bowls and the like with prices ranging from several hundred to over a thousand bucks. 
We quite liked one lightweight fruit bowl thing which carried a tag of $650 which seemed like it would have been nice in another more munificent era when our house was, say, actually worth money....This I could afford though, or at least a piece of it:
At $3 a pound Jak fruit was a bargain. I thought though, my wife gave me an old fashioned look when I asked for six bucks to take home a piece:
The seeds are encased in a lychee-like pod which is all held together by the toughest fibers you're likely to encounter inside something edible. After dinner I tore apart the fiber and we scarfed the lychee things inside. I really enjoyed it. She tried to.
"Oooh!" One of my wife's friends said over the cell phone as I drove the convertible home."If you'd have said you were going to Fairchild I'd have come too!" Everyone should feel the same way.
The beans are already substantially larger, one weekend after I photographed them and they are climbing like crazy. add a little water and up they go. I put that bed under the stairs so I could run string down to them to make a trellis. They seem to be thriving in partial Florida sunlight. Lettuce is another plant that supposedly needs less heat so i stuck that bed on the north side of the house, and with a mixture of lettuce plants and seeds we are seeing solid progress:
The largest bed is five feet by four feet and has a wide mixture of experimental plants. We kind of wanted to see what would grow and how, so we threw a bunch of seeds and plants and up they came, including eggplant, cucumbers, onions and and broccoli I think. They seem to be doing fine:
We put some more tomatoes into pots, threw in a ring of cilantro and watched them grow...Lisa gave us two pineapple cuttings so we stuck them in some pots and they are growing like gangbusters, and finally we potted a Key Lime, a mango and a pink lemon tree and they are doing nicely as well.
I find it mildly amusing that now after years of swearing off it i am once again come full circle and I can be found afternoons before I go into work, checking for weeds, watering and talking to the plants in an earnest effort to get them to grow. Victory Garden indeed, these are seeds cast in most unlikely soil, to paraphrase the Good Book. But they are growing, for now, with an apparent lust for life.
Gratuitous Bonneville photograph, under the house.
I read somewhere that ancient Egyptian mummies have been found to suffer from ground down teeth owing to the surfeit of desert sand blown into their diet accidentally. "I think I'd like to have been a barber," my dentist confided to me as we waited for the Novocain to take effect. "All that blood letting and teeth pulling. Of course people ate less sugar back then," he looked saddened by the thought of less dental work. After 16 years you'd think he'd be sick of it. Not at all. I'm pretty sure he bounces out of bed in the morning and can't wait to board his scooter for the ride to work.
We chatted for a while, of course talking about the economy and we compared notes on people we know losing their homes to foreclosure. It was a long list. "Well," he said philosophically. "He took a few years off and had some good times, but the bank is telling him to drop the price below half a million, and he paid nine hundred thousand for it." He looked glum for a moment. "I took two years off to go sailing and a couple more farting around, " I replied, a little indistinct thanks to the drugs, "but that sure wouldn't make up for losing my home..." a thought to ponder as I laid back and he went to work on round one of the protracted tooth extraction.
As he struggled with the recalcitrant tooth the dentist kept asking me if I was okay. "Fine," I mumbled, "it's just freaking me out imagining what you are doing." "Don't think about it," he commanded as pressed on with a fresh pair of needle nosed pliers. So I thought about this instead: We're lucky to live our lives in this modern era, and I don't want it to change too much. I have no idea why I was born into the middle class first world life, but I like it very much, I like cheap oil. I like having choices and I like having free time. I don't even mind riding to see the dentists from tiem to time. Getting a tooth pulled is no fun, but modern medecine makes it bearable, and heaven knows when something more serious or more painful comes along we haven't got the tools available to "Bones" of Star Trek fame but things are a lot better than they were. Even when I was a kid dentistry hurt, and it hurt a lot. Nowadays they don't use laughing gas anymore which I enjoyed when that original crown was put in my mouth, and I miss it, but it's nice to have a dentist that does stint the Novocain. I wonder what the pain relief for Economic Recession tastes like? A dead fish sliding down your throat perhaps?
I am not a power sports kind of guy, though I did attend a few car races with my father in England in the 1960's, an era so far removed from the modern one I feel embarrassed to mention it, all goggles and leather gauntlets and cars that looked more like water beetles than racers at 
It so happened my instructor at the college had a field trip organized to check out the engine systems on a Marine Sanctuary boat docked at the Eco Discovery center , which it so happens put us in the front row of the warm ups for the races:
The boat basin at the Truman Waterfront has long been a Federal preserve used by the Navy and now by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And for the week, high powered race boats:
We completed our field trip against a backdrop of wildly revving engines and circling boats being prepped for the races. My young classmates were entranced:
The boats zipped back and forth in the distance between Sunset Key and the Key West seawall overflown by helicopters whether for photographic or safety purposes, or both, I know not:
The boats were flying across the waters but I don't think it's much of a spectator sport to watch the little colorful boxes splatting their way back and forth in straight lines:
I knew a guy who raced to the Bahamas on these kinds of boats. Consider its 200 miles from Fort 
The real live women wandering the paddock (or whatever it's called in boat racing slang) were a small compensation doubtless for the 
Times are tough everywhere and off duty work is a much valued source of extra income for police officers, especially in a town with a high cost of living, and off duty details are becoming scarce so officers grab them where they can. It's another way these events help bring cash to Key West. And women, let's not forget the women they bring:
Driving and talking simultaneously on a cell phone, just my kind of babe. Even if it is a golf cart it's still wrong. Of 
Some people think riding a motorcycle is dangerous but I can't say that I would feel any too good if I indulged in a sport that needed fire proof clothing. But there again the boat race women don't do much for me either. Add the noise, and this is clearly not my arena. Scooters though always appeal, however riding a scooter that matches your outfit is over the top for me:
If however the allure of racing fast boats cannot be 
I have no idea no idea what a 46-foot Skater is but I can say with certainty that 179 miles per hour is outside my comfort zone. The fastest I've ridden a motorcycle is 125 miles per hour which is an ample sufficiency. Going 150 miles per hour on the water would require kidneys made of rubber, and mine aren't. However if you haven't got a spare half mill right now (and who does these days?) there are bargains to be had:
Cut price too, however I passed. But there was one part of the boat race thing I could enjoy, a cheerful outdoor picnic with friends:
Cheapskates. We need them spending money in restaurants.