Cudjoe Walk 3

The camera perspective makes the car look like it is miles away lost in the distance. I could have walked to it in a minute.I snatched a few quick pictures of pine needles, blue sky and rocky trail before my dog called it quits and looked longingly back at the car. The Florida sky was just perfect. The clouds were being blown along by the crisp Spring breezes that continue to blow, keeping the humidity at bay. I call them the Florida colors, green white and blue. I know everyone's dog is their favorite but Cheyenne perked up when she read the comment about being the star. I think she is the smartest Labrador to have crossed my path.

She has noticed that when she gets covered in mud she gets a quick going over with the outdoor shower when we get home. So now she studiously avoids mud holes and primly comes back to the car as clean as she left it. I am rather sorry to think the shower has spoiled her fun.

Florida is filled with all shades of green including these palmettos which are everywhere .

Cudjoe Walk 2

I miss walking the woods. There I've said it. Cheyenne humored me for about a hundred yards then she took up her "This far and no further" attitude.There's this house on the north side of Cudjoe Key and it looks to be quite a nice house in the usual stilt house sort of way. There's a boat parked in what would be the driveway, if it weren't so overgrown, and there is patio furniture on the deck and everything. But it is abandoned and overgrown. I have been watching it revert to nature for several years. Who knows what the story is.It's hot and empty and... did I mention it's hot? They say that for a Floridian a good parking spot is a place where there is shade. This shaded Harley was looking quite attractive as it sat there waiting for a rider. Cheyenne dismissed it with a sniff.

The big limestone rock in the picture below is a warning not to drive into the canal. I felt like jumping for a quick swim. A friend of mine said he and his neighbors have stopped swimming in their canal since one of them spotted a bull shark swimming around in the canal.

The rule of thumb for anglers around here is not to throw the bits into the canal when you clean your fish.

Cudjoe Walk 1

I generally carry a motorcycle magazine or the newspaper when I walk Cheyenne these days. In winter she romps, in summer she paces sedately. Then she stops, pants and finds a patch of shade.I look around, enjoy the view and read a few paragraphs, contemplate my mortal coil and generally feel good about being with my dog. I sunbathe, she shade bathes and we pass the time. Cheyenne seems to really enjoy sitting and watching the streets as much as actually walking when the temperatures are this elevated. I don't think Cheyenne notices the decorative details I see when we're out and about. One day I want a sailfish like this on the side of my house. I wonder if my wife would agree. It would be rather ostentatious for someone like me who doesn't even fish. The calm days of summer aren't quite here yet, we are still getting winds blowing from all points of the compass but the canals are nice and flat. This next picture is your classic Lower Keys palace, a nice big lot, stilt house, and room to park an RV with a canal in back. Who could ask for anything more?

Cheyenne was shade bathing as this Sportster came blatting round the corner.

That's what Cheyenne loves to do when it's hot, just sit there and watch the world go by. A serene way to spend a baking afternoon.

Boca Chica Bay

An afternoon swim at the key West Harbour Yacht Club and I took a few minutes to take some pictures of the boats in the channel between Boca Chica and Stock Island, where I was standing.I learned to sail on the fractious and complex waters of Coastal California on Monterey Bay, a place of strong winds, extremely deep waters and very large swells and waves. Every time I left the Santa Cruz Harbor on my sailboat it was to head out into the face of large swells and northeast winds sweeping down the coast at twenty miles an hour or more. I always craved warm waters, never finding much pleasure in sailing in 55 degree salt water that had made it's way south from Alaska. Anchoring in a relatively quite cove did not mean one could go swimming unless one was a polar bear. I had a girlfriend for whom swimming was an imperative and in the way that one does I learned to put a brave face on my dislike of freezing cold water, but when the relationship ended so did my swims off the boat. To live in a place where one can go boating in a t-shirt and not shiver, in waters so calm one can stand up in kayak and not lose one's life. That is bliss.

My boat has had it's Spring service and the evenings are longer before darkness falls. All of which means that it's swimming season in the Lower Keys.

To have had access to a heated pool during the winter was excellent. To have access to a heated ocean in summer is equally fine.

A neighbor of mine asked me if I ever use my boat. All summer long I replied. All summer long.

Turtle Kraals

The boast was that you could circle the world in beer at the bar and restaurant at the waterfront at the Key West Bight. My wife and I went for dinner instead.

The name is derived from the American word "corral" and why it was corrupted into Afrikaans I have no idea. This place was in fact the center of turtle capture and canning for sale around the world and there is a museum on the docks, the old corrals in fact, that illustrates the history.

I find the pictures of turtles stored helpless on their backs awaiting the butcher's knife to be rather disturbing so I prefer not to delve too deeply into that side of things. They have renovated the place and have added barbecue to their menu. Of course one doesn't spend a lot of time pondering the fate of the cows and pigs that gave their lives in slaughterhouses across the plains at the hands of underpaid illegal migrant workers hired by familiar names in food processing so we could eat $12 sandwiches at the Key West waterfront...Life is complicated. I was selected as civilian of the quarter a while back in the Police Department and part of the honor included a gift certificate by Rudy Molinet's sponsoring Real Estate company so we got our meal for free with that rather nice piece of paper.My wife likes to mix up her sauces and they have plenty to choose from.I suppose we should have had a drink in the tower bar and all that cool stuff upstairs, a trip we will save for next time, as we neither of us felt much like alcohol that night. No alcohol? Odd I know for Keys residents but there we are. Key West Diary; idiosyncrasy in action.

http://www.turtlekraals.com/index.html

Key West Bight

With the departure of the winter hordes my wife and I decided to penetrate deep into Old Town for a little tourist strolling in Old Key West. We came out from our waterside dinner in time to see the sun setting over what is known as the Key West Bight.A "bight" in nautical terms means an indentation in the land, or a loop of rope depending on the context and the Key West Bight is very much focused on the water. This dude was putting on a show cutting up a fish. It was only on the eighth or ninth attempt to get him still enough to be in focus in the half light that I noticed the prosperous young woman in a bikini in the background. So I figured to include a second picture of the fish gutting to appease the perverts in the crowd. In this second shot she is about the only person in focus.Have you noticed how much trash we generate? This stuff will all be bagged and hauled 200 miles to a mound of trash collected at the landfill near Pompano Beach. I can hardly bear to think what an incredible waste of energy it all is, especially considering we used to have a waste to electricity plant on Stock Island...Tourists love their sign posts. Most of these places are unknown to me, and some I have heard of but never visited. I've traveled a lot, and it doesn't amount to that much when you view the shape of the world from your neighbor's perspective.Boats dragged ashore and used as monuments give me pause. It is very unnatural to see this sort of thing, at least for me. The shop underneath, part of the Historic Tours Empire I believe, sells Chinese made stuff for the edification of visitors."The Woolworth of the South" says a sign above the store.

How odd it is to think that Key west's famed Tourist Economy depends on increasing sales of this stuff. Long may it last.