Bike Week Key West 2012

I noticed a big orange sign in front of Boondocks, the Ramrod Key bar that welcomes people participating in the Poker Run from Miami. That was the hint that first gave me an inkling that this might be Bike Week once again. Then I started to spot elderly gentlemen promenading on the highway. Lots of them.


The Poker Run involves picking up a card at various establishments down the highway then playing them in Key West to win a hand and a prize. That's the ostensible reason for making the ride down the Keys in the deadest season of the year.


It's big business this time of year but not everyone enjoys the motorcycles, as these are mostly hardcore pirates with straight pipes which make a great deal of noise.


The routine is for the majority of the motorcycles get lined up on Lower Duval which is blocked off for them, and by Sunday they'll be leaving.


Key West is used to managing the flow and because this is the low low visitor season other traffic is light which is good for the motorcycles.


Nevertheless these big old cruisers seem to overwhelm some of their riders. This machine on William Street kept me idling in my car for quite a while while he blocked the narrow street trying to maneuver into a car-sized parking spot. My 500 pound Bonneville is like a toy compared to these monsters, and I don't envy them their bulk.


Even as the town fills up with thousands (20,000 the Chamber of Commerce hoped) of Harleys and a few other minor brands, the local fleet of hard working two wheelers claim a few dark corners for themselves.


There is quite a lot of free motorcycle parking around town, even away from Duval.


And parking is art and parcel of the main reason for gathering in Key West - standing around talking about motorcycles.


I like the "Biker..." signs that sprout everywhere. The term refers in the popular imagination to Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen and the Sons of Anarchy.


Not really this lot, wilting in the 85 degree humidity, poor dears.


Lots of gleaming chrome, no rust, no wear and tear on these Chariots of the Gods, thundering like Vulcan at his celestial forge.


The forces of Law and Order are on High Alert trying to keep speeding down and prevent bad driving practices. Very dreary for those of us who like to speed under the radar, just a little, on our way to work.


Locals ride appropriately as they know where the radar lurks.


I shall do my best to blend in as I commute this week. I shall take no pleasure in hearing at work how many "no eye protection" tickets the officers give out on the streets of Key West. I am just an'umble dispatcher and ride with a proper motorcycle endorsement, eye protection and valid tag. And I shan't be speeding either.


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V Twin Technology

Tomorrow morning I am posting a few pictures of the 2012 Bike Week arrivals but tonight I wanted to look back at the Barber Museum's collection and think about a few of the other options Harley riders could know about if they were as into motorcycles as I am. Making one brand a fetish, in any field of endeavor, shuts off so much knowledge.

In this country V-Twin generally means Harley Davidson and Japanese lookalikes but there are many other ways to slice the V-twin pie. Moto Guzzi puts the V the opposite way across the frame with the cylinders sticking out in the breeze like this Mark One LeMans 850.

Ducati stuck them in line like Harley but made the angle ninety degrees in an effort to cancel out vibration.

British Peer Lord Hesketh wanted t build a super bike for the era and had nearly 200 of these bulky V-twins built.

An employee bought the company and continued making them to order. I've never quite understood the drive to build boutique bikes not least because the effort always seems to fail in the not too distant end.

John Goodman who used to own Velocette bought Harley engines, modified a Norton frame and called the result a Goldman 1200. The engines weren't brilliant they say and neither was the frame but they looked good and spoke to some deep need in motorcyclists' souls.

They also assembled them in Tulsa Oklahoma for the US market but in the end... Off they went into oblivion.

And finally another mixed breed spawned by Goldman's idea. In this case the Norvin which combined a Vincent V-twin witna. Norton frame.

The more time lasses the bigger the legend of these strange motorcycles grows. And I get to see them at the Barber Museum from time to time.

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The Boulevard Turned Upside Down

If we're going to be honest we have to admit the language in the anonymous "Citizen's Voice" column in the newspaper has been quite intemperate of late when discussing the prolonged roadworks on the Boulevard.


Above we see the Boulevard, as North Roosevelt Boulevard is known to locals, denuded of coconut palms to prepare for the roadworks. These below are still in place reminding us what the drive past New Town used to look like and will no longer, in very order.


The view out of the car window will look the same. The State had plans to install an unsightly but "safe" metal fence along the bike path to keep addled cyclists from falling into the water but the outcry was so loud they relented and promised a slightly taller concrete wall to keep pedestrians and cyclists from plopping into the Gulf Of Mexico. One hopes it will be sufficient to keep the occasional drunk driver from launching their cars as they sometimes do.


The roadworks should last almost 900 days and the prospect of three years of chaos is driving strong residents to dark corners of the devastated city to weep and gnash their teeth. Stories of extended delays leaving the city are legion, with Glynn Archer Drive (known to some as 14th Street) closed and the Boulevard one way only all the way to Truman Avenue, things are a mite confusing.


It's been going on a few weeks now but at the beginning people were ignoring the signs and driving outbound causing several near misses and helping to sow confusion in an already messed up traffic pattern. Hence the profusion of intemperate remarks in the newspaper.


There was one brilliant letter earlier this week where the author detailed the total lack of actual physical work occurring in the construction site and I have to concur. It's amazing there are a couple of miles of torn up street with absolutely nothing at all happening. Combine that observation with the fact that traffic in New Town will be chaotic for almost three years and you can see why these hard hats are making no friends anywhere in the city.


Businesses are already reporting plummeting sales, though this is of course very slow season in Key West, but it's obvious why people are tending to by-pass the chaos. You can get into Key Plaza via 12th Street off Flagler Avenue but once on the Boulevard you can't turn right. You have to turn left and go to Fifth Street to start the circuit again.


Until the two and a half mile project is finished in mid 2014 project engineers say they plan to have two inbound lanes at all times. It's the getting out of town that is proving to be tough, and the lines on Flagler are annoying a lot of people.


The 42 million dollar plan also includes sorting out the dreadful flooding that occurs on much of the Boulevard at the least meteorological provocation. A heavy shower tends to close off one or other lane leaving the crown and a lane on each side open to drivers. Supposedly the engineers have a dastardly plan to fix this perennial problem. I shall believe it when I see it.


No flooding, a smooth surface and proper turn lanes will be nice. Currently the wide open median marked by yellow lines confuses most zombies in their boxes as they have no idea how to signal, change lanes and turn with anything approaching savoir faire.


At the moment once past the interminable traffic
light at Kennedy, the second slowest in the known universe, the light at Southard and Whitehead being the slowest, the Boulevard is wide open all the way to First Street.


Not that the killjoys want us driving too fast you understand.


And the removal of the light at 5th Street also known as Macmillan Drive (named for the British Prime Minister who visited town with President Kennedy) has sped up traffic immensely.


I've heard rumors that lights will be installed in front of Searstown, which will be a huge impediment of course. In Santa Cruz California where I lived for years the idea of responsive traffic lights improved traffic circulation immensely.


In Santa Cruz the lights change immediately in response to cars, motorcycles and even bicycles approaching a red light. In Key West lights stay red for what seems hours as traffic piles up and waits for no cross traffic at all. There are several lights that are so slow I can easily outflank them by going round the block!


With all this work I am sure no such modern lights will find their way into this 21st century renovation. In fact I am hardly affected by the closures as I go home early in the morning and avoid the snarl ups. Another reason to work nights!


I have come to the conclusion that making New Town a one way circle would improve traffic flow beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Make North Roosevelt inbound and Flagler outbound permanently and ease congestion forever. Such a brilliant idea would lead to revolution in the streets I am quite sure, as most people abhor change. Just think how a handful of sticks-in-the-mud killed the proposal to have. A pedestrian zone on a couple of blocks of Duval Street. Great idea killed stone dead.


Luckily in Key West the sun always shines no matter the rubbish we humans cast around down below.


How the snowbirds will react this Fall when their innate sense of entitlement butts up against the reality of traffic jams and road closures and bloody minded residents, I am sure I don't know. It might be fun to watch though.



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Around The Harris School

This time of year it's hard to convince myself living in the Lower Keys is a more enjoyable life than living in Old Town, but in a couple of months the situation will reverse itself like the tides and the flow of people into the city for the winter will flood the streets with vehicles people and noise. But for now one can sit on a street corner for five minutes and see nothing more than this:


The only sound the creaking of a bicycle chain screaming for lubrication. To sit on the edge of the Old Harris School on Southard Street is to be on the edge of the Earth, comfortable in the shade, and looking into the abyss of lives slipping through the fingers of their owners and tumbling into the whirlpool of alcoholism.


In the land of exasperated "self reliance" and "individualism" these characters are left on the streets with their misery and mental afflictions to shuffle past our well ordered middle class lives, pissing and shitting in the streets, collapsing on the sidewalks and passing out on private porches in a toxic haze. That's when the "self reliant" those who hate paying taxes call the government and ask us to deal with them and bitch about the absence of a permanent solution to the unsightly problem that will drive away the cash cows known as visitors. God forbid a bleeding heart suggest the creation of mental hospitals and drug clinics and treatment. Better spend the money blowing up brown people and wasting more money trying to make police officers into a pale semblance of social workers. I call this circular contradiction job security and ponder Christ's Beatitudes.


But back to the point: Harris School


It's still the the Harris School empty and useless, not a school, not a cultural center as envisioned by the Rodel Foundation, whose good works were wrecked by Bernie Madoff and his legions of the greedy. It won't be a new city hall so in the end I expect it will grind into obscurity as a collection of "professional offices" housing paper pushers who will neither know nor care what the old building was nor what it signified to the history of this little town.


Whether or not the school is a white elephant sitting in the middle of a residential neighborhood, a walk around it's perimeter well outside the "No Trespassing" signs is always worthwhile, I find.


Traveler's palms framed by gray roof and blue sky, a well netted porch with a hammock safe from buzzing invaders. These are Key West images to make a person dream, as winter starts to encroach.


I am told car heaters are being taken out of mothballs Up North, and the morning air has a touch of the crisp freshness of Fall in the temperate latitudes.


Down here construction work continues apace in the torrid heat of September in the Keys. This is high hurricane season, going well so far, and this year heat and humidity are tempered by a persistent breeze which has made the hottest time of year relatively bearable for those of us used to the stifling heat.


Winds blow leaves into the unpeopled streets, but the debris will be cleared soon. Fantasy Fest starts to impinge on the imaginations of those of us who rely on visitors for income as this is also the quietest time of year and uncertain incomes falter in September and October.


Fantasy Fest is a nuisance for a retiring type like me when middle aged jollity takes it's clothes off in the streets and alcohol rules.


Except this brand of alcoholism is a temporary escape for most of the revelers and they drink and vomit and then go home Up North to resume their lives of propriety and censure tut tutting at those grody unwashed shuffling figures who populate the dark corners of Key West and bring tourism into disrepute.



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Old Singles

The Barber Museum's collections includes more than 1200 bikes and one sometimes wonders how they manage to show even the eight hundred at a time they claim.


I am fascinated by the number of small single cylinder bikes they have in the collection, typically Italian of the kind I used to see people using to commute when I was a child.


There were lots of brands like this Bianchi, painted red wit flat handlebars and a long black seat.


They weren't enthusiasts rides, rather they were the convenient and affordable way to get around. Below the Moto Guzzi 250 single Airone from before World War Two which was part of the genesis of Italian bikes though the Moto Guzzi had a sporting reputation too.


That deep luscious red was the universal color. I look at the old bikes with fascination, their simplicity of manufacture with everything visible and their complexity of use with advance/retard operated manually and weird shifting patterns and hand shifters and so on. Their riders must have been real heroes!


This German Horex 250 caught my eye for it's rugged simplicity and practicality. I noticed the full final drive chain cover which I'd love on my Bonneville.


The engine is clean and simple to look at. The beef was it wasn't terribly exciting this nice copy of a leaky funky and fast British single. The Horex has the attributes that appeal to me!


This Ducati 450 Scrambler (below) was aimed the US market and was praised as an exciting ride. However it vibrated lime hell, sucked down gas like there was no tomorrow and was a bitch to start and keep in tune. But it is revered today, unlike the Horex...


And nowadays Ducati builds twins a d makes money doing it, but beasts like this practical Paso 750 were not much regarded.


It's little wonder Ducati today makes performance machines with little regard to practicality. It's the message the buyers have given them.


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