It's almost a hundred years old and it is looking pretty good despite total abandonment by the great state of Florida.
According to the information published by Florida State Parks the Bahia Honda Bridge spans almost a mile of open water, and 5055 feet is not much compared to the span of the nearby Seven Mile Bridge but the distinctive features of this erection make it quite a landmark in the Lower Keys.
The State took the railroad bridge over after the railroad went bust and built a narrow roadway on top of the thing in 1938 and that was how one drove to Key West along the narrow Highway. The Park had a card illustrating the old road:
All the land in the picture is now part of the park and the new road cuts across the bay to the right, a boring flat cement bridge with four lanes and a helpful 55mph speed limit, useful for those of us in a hurry of course, but not so scenic:
The new road was inaugurated in 1982, the year after I first came to the Keys so I must have ridden my Vespa over the old Bahia Honda Bridge but honestly I can't remember it. The Seven Mile bridge was much more memorable I guess, especially for people with four or more wheels as the old railroad bridges yielded a pretty narrow roadbed. But they sure do look spectacular those old piles:
The state very kindly cut out a chunk of the old bridge to allow sailboat masts to fit through the gap, as Bahia Honda ("deep bay" in Spanish) is a not just a state park but a nice little anchorage as well.
I have no idea what the work boat was doing but it was all terribly industrious chugging around the bay. The park is one of the more beach oriented locations in the Keys, it's got all the water related activities one might expect. It also has a fair bit of sand and these are islands that don't generally offer the strands that mainland Florida is famous for. The Keys are made of rock unlike the rest of the state which is a land built on sand as it were, and has long sand beaches as a reward. And in even in November people are flocking to the beaches of the Sunshine State:
We've had a succession of cold fronts lately, lots of north winds and temperatures frequently dipping under 70 degrees (20C) so it's long past swimming season for me. Not for visitors to the Keys it seems:
This time of year I like a ride to Bahia Honda, fifteen minutes from my house, for the pleasure of a walk not a swim. One of the most spectacular strolls is to the top of the old bridge. The approach road has become a tad overgrown with the passage of time:
The bridge itself has been smoothed over with cement and extra handrails have been installed for the benefit of visitors but it is more or less as it was, a work of art of compound curves:
The view from the top is glorious, vistas over land, the park itself to the east:
The power poles marching off to the north mark the track of the new Overseas Highway. To the southwest: sea and setting sun and not much this side of Mexico:
More towards Cuba there is actually a little land, though not much of it:
And there, across the divide lies the remainder of the bridge, untouched, unloved and unwalked upon. It's too bad really, as I think it would make a great bike path with unbeatable views. However I guess preservation wasn't worth the expense though you'd think corporations like to spend fortunes naming sports arenas after themselves, so why not an old bridge? One that still carries the old main water pipe in its nether regions:
As you can see the old road bed, laid on top of the railroad tracks, is a bit narrow especially for modern SUVs and commercial trucks. Old timers tell me that when two trucks met on these bridges they sometimes had to fold their mirrors and inch past so little room was there to spare. For my Vespa it was a different story of course.It is a pleasant place to stand of an evening and watch people down below being busy:
As I walked away small groups of people started up to the bridge along the sea grape covered path. "Quick!" she said, "Or the sun will be gone!" as she chided her family to step out. What the hell said I to myself. I'll come back tomorrow, the old bridge will still be here. And I got on my Triumph and went home:
And I will be back.
Emma and I, Punta Jutia, Cuba, February 2000
It was small, salty sailboat, a tried and tested cruiser on long ocean passages. From the same friends of Flicka website I found this picture that summarizes superbly the tight but very agreeable living conditions found on this micro cruiser:
Turtle Bay, Baja California, Mexico, October 1998. Baja Ha Ha Rally.
East Hollandaise Cays, San Blas Islands, Panama, November 1999.
Pretending to be a mechanic. Inside Belize's Barrier Reef. January 2000. 
Figuring out the laundry with Emma looking on. Puerto Corinto, Nicaragua. December 1998. 
Miki G, our Gemini 105 catamaran on the beach for maintenance. Costa Rica, January 1999.
Eugene Debs enduring another passage on Miki G. He loved arriving. I still miss him daily.
Welcome to El Salvador. Far nicer than US officials. La Union, Gulf of Fonseca. 1999.
A beautiful day turned within hours into a ghastly storm. And Punta Gorda, Belize, has no harbor. We sailed for our lives back to Guatemala. January 2000.
Ferries serving small villages between Colombia and Panama. January 2000.
Gas station, pull up in your dinghy. Rio Diablo, San Blas Islands, Panama. December 1999.
Technical sailing in the Panama Canal. September 1999. Three months before the handover.
Thanksgiving 1999. On a deserted San Blas island, and food flown in from Panama City!
End of one adventure, beginning of another. Miki G at Key West, February 2000. 
The full moon obliterates the stars in the night sky but they will get their turn in a couple of weeks when the moon wanes and makes way for their more subtle light. I read an article in a National Geographic at the dentist last week saying that there are millions of people in the developed world who never get to see a proper night sky. I hadn't thought about it really but being at sea on a small boat is still as dark as it ever was. When I was out cruising I'd sometimes turn the navigation lights off and sit in the cockpit and sea the night sky in all it's glory and it really is astonishing how many more stars one sees in a profoundly dark place on the ground. I got the idea that comets, before the advent of street lights must really have looked liked some messenger from the gods. I saw a comet, Hale-Bopp I think, about 15 years ago from a well lit street in California and it was so insignificant I wondered what all the fuss was about.
I should have been living on this street back then. There are no street lights where I live and the night sky from my home's deck is almost as good as being at sea, or in the prairie, or in the mountains, where human lights are held at bay.
And tell the truth, you want people to give you real all-American service-with-a-smile when you get to your hotel. And what if you were feeling poorly and no one answered 9-1-1 because the relief operator was STUCK IN SLOW POKE TRAFFIC? Exactly, the mad motorcyclist you are holding up could very well be the person assigning you your room after a long tiring drive, or the convenience clerk selling you expensive gas at the end of the road. So please don't forget Florida law allows only written warnings if the speed limit is exceeded by five miles per hour or less so if you risk driving sixty on the Highway in a double nickel zone you will not get a nosebleed from the g-forces, I promise, and you will make me happy. And that has to be worth it, right? The truth is, one doesn't really save any time at all by going sixty as opposed to fifty, but it is mind numbingly boring. There, I said it. Sitting in a line of cars at 47 miles per hour sends me to sleep and not paying attention really is dangerous as we will see.
The car was coming towards the camera in broad daylight, the motorcycle was coming from over my shoulder and was passing Rest Beach to the right. The car wanted to turn into the beach parking lot where my Bonneville is parked. The car turned, not seeing the motorcycle, which braked hard, leaving a long black smear on the road, hit the side of the car and the rider's unhelmeted head went under the rear wheel.
I didn't know the rider, he was a bar tender downtown, but his sudden death left a lot of people shaken up because he was a very popular decent guy by all accounts. His wife was devastated, and whatever his relationship with her, she expected him home that day and he never did show. That was a death notification I was glad not to be involved with as the news went down hard, very hard I am told. In these kinds of situations it is easy to get caught up in figuring how you would be smarter and avoid the death trap. I don't know anything more about the circumstances other than what people have said and the newspaper has reported. The investigation continues and other than the horror of the scene the investigator has told me nothing. But I will say even if the motorcycle was speeding or pulling wheelies the car should have seen him coming. And it apparently did not.
One person told me he laid the motorcycle down to try to avoid the car and as Irondad will tell you that is the worst thing to do (I'm betting he never took any training either). If he did slide the bike that action slid his unhelmeted head under the wheel. Perhaps a helmet might not have saved his life, because if he was going fast the impact could have broken his neck anyway. Who knows? I like to think I ride and pay attention. I go as fast as I dare when I deem it safe, and its never safe in crowded urban areas. I treat cars as unpredictable, I generally wear a helmet boots and gloves. I hope for the best, I pay close attention, I look ahead. But above all I tell my wife I love her every time I leave home and I am glad to see here when I get back. All actions reinforced, powerully by this horrid wreck. Oh and I don't pull wheelies, because I've never learned how. The self preservation of the fearful.
And some people pay good money to have other sweaty people keep them in good order on their streets:
Coconut palms are not native to the Keys, they are imported to give the required "tropical paradise" look to the islands. They annoy some people with their profligate ways, spewing fronds and nuts year round. They used to annoy me but I am becoming mellow in old age. Oh dear.
We had some friends over for dinner last weekend and tried out the fireplace I bought on a recent trip to Miami. Indeed this cast iron thing was the reason I drove the car to the Italian Consulate instead of riding up, so it had better work:
We had dinner upstairs, a collection of people I work with and their partners. Young Noel now forbidden forever by Amendment Two's voter approval from marrying Matt ("I don't want to get married like a boring straight!"); Belen who plans to marry Yeye in January; he wants seven kids, she wants six despite my warnings about poverty and stress and over population ("Yeah yeah; you aren't Cuban, you wouldn't understand, old man."). After dinner we went down to my wife's beach, or sand lot really, and started the fire.
Belen was mother and showed Diggy, our token Nicaraguan how to build a smoky cripsy melted marshmallow into a sandwich and we sat around and talked and poked the fire and watched the embers swirl up into the warm November night. Rachel, our token immigrant English speaker developed a taste for pyromania and was seen casting very dry, very flammable pieces of coconut matting into the flames and squeaking with fear and delight as they flamed up.
It was a good night, no one got drunk and threw up, we relieved some work related stress and I listened to the brown and the black and immigrant and native young Americans talk about Obama and their future. I think I may soon get Noel to finally register to vote; of course if he registers with the wrong party I'll have to kill him, but freedom comes with a price. It was good to be there and watch them all cement their one-ness with that perfect symbol of American-ness, a graham cracker, a melted marshmallow a square of Hershey's and a final slice of graham cracker to hold it all together. S'mores, the constitutional glue that binds us all together.
My wife's 150cc Vespa ET4, lurking behind Overseas Market one afternoon when I stole it for a ride. I miss my Vespa.
There is a funky area next to key West High School and it's name is Duncombe Street. Which sounds like it should be Done-comb Street, as in "I'm done putting a comb through my hair." Because this is Key West, that is not the case. Duncombe was, according to J Wills Burke a prominent man in Key West a century ago, but left no clue as far as I know how to pronounce his name.
So the little street off Flagler next to the High School is pronounced Dun-comm-bee with the usual Key West flair for getting the job done. Any time I have to dispatch an officer to Dun-comb (juvenile mischief? It is next to the High School!) I set my teeth on edge when I say Dun-comm-bee instead. But I do because no one knows it by any other pronunciation. In any case this street is easily missed even though it is next to the landmark thrift store on Flagler Avenue:
Duncombe is a utilitarian street and serves to connect the main avenue to the high school, but it certainly isn't all pretty:
There are a handful of dwellings along the west side of the street before it ends at the new High School campus after a block. The right turn at that point becomes the strangely named Venetia Street. The campus is no longer so new but it did replace in spectacular fashion, like a phoenix, the old run down collection of buildings that used to be the high school:
The auditorium is where I get to go each winter to enjoy productions the school puts on, and the excuse is to see offspring of friends but the truth is I enjoy the energy of the campus. Unlike so many high schools in cities across the US, the Key West campus is open and unfenced which I take to be a measure of the civility of the city. Perhaps too I enjoy the evident irony of the school's mascot, standing proud, and oversized in the parking lot:
"Key West High School, Home of the Fighting Conchs." I have spent many happy hours observing the antics of pacifist conch as they trundle across the sea floor in the shallow waters of Bahama islands, and the mollusc's rate of progress through the sand, under the gin clear waters is remarkable, considering how laborious is their means of locomotion. They get where they are going but the have all the speed and the agility of stoned tortoises, which makes a "fighting" conch a contradictory image in my over active mind. Nevertheless this is the island of conchs so the mascot has to be just that.
Oh and the campus is, for safety reasons, located right under the main flight path to the airport across the salt ponds (east winds prevail around here so aircraft land into them by flying across the city). Luckily they are mostly propeller aircraft feathering their way to earth so they tend to sound like ducks farting loudly overhead which is quieter than the occasional jet but noise, in my opinion is noise and I'd rather live with less of it. Perhaps the residents of Duncombe might agree, but there aren't too many of them. A block of flats:
And a couple of well loved and pretty little cottages:
And as the sun sets across Key West illuminating the happy hordes no doubt at Mallory Square a couple of miles away, this little corner of New Town is seeing the sun out of sight but doing what residential neighborhoods do every where in the side streets off mighty Flagler Avenue:
Same old, same old away from the tourist and drinking centers; dinner, bed, and up and at 'em in the morning. And I have to get the wife's Vespa back to her workplace before she notices it was gone.