Vespa Calvary

It was a long time coming but finally after six weeks on the road, traveling from Mason City Iowa to California and back to South Florida I got the word my Vespa was ready to be delivered. We arranged to meet at McDonalds in Florida City. I set off at four in the afternoon and by the tI e I reached the 18mile Stretch the sun was going down. It looked good from the bridge even if snapping a picture underway meant I couldn't avoid the power poles...

I flew to Mason City last September to pick up this restored 1979 Vespa 200 but the restoration fell short and the piston burned a hole in the first twenty mile test ride I took. Luckily there's a restoration shop where the previous owner should have gone for the start had he been more interested in riding than fiddling, and they agreed to replace the piston and cylinder and the ship it on. That added $450 to the original price of $2500 and through a shipping brokerage called uShip I agreed to lay $550 for a no hurry delivery.

I was worried when I went to get my new scooter, the fates have been conspiringbtomkeep me separated from my nostalgic desire for a P200, a scooter I round around the US and Mexico in 1981. I was hinge to get a low cost ride to do the bulk of my commuting and save my prematurely aged Bonneville from adding another 70,000 miles in the next five years. My cross country trip was a great success and mechanically speaking it was remarkably trouble free. I was 23 and the Vespa was brand new, purchased in Brooklyn and ridden to San Francisco via Guadalajara. The picture was taken by me of me at the Tropic of Cancer in Mexico's central mountains.

Well, there it was, on the flatbed trailer in the parking lot while the driver Carol was getting something to eat.

I did not allow myself to get my hopes up even though everything was as I left it.

I had never heard of uShip until the Vespa shop recommended it. It's an online brokerage service that connects independent drivers with people needing to move stuff. Carol has hundreds of positive recommendations and she usually moves animals which struck a chord in Cheyenne's owner. We unloaded the Vespa without incident which should come as no surprise as she had much larger machines including a six cylinder classic Kawasaki 1300 KZ on the trailer as well as a Kawasaki 500 2 stroke which reminded me of Jack Riepe and his tales of riding its big brother the 750 triple.

Carol has been doing this for four years after quitting a career as an electrician. Based in southwest Florida she goes back and forth to California picking stuff up and hauling it. The whole arrangement seemed a bit iffy compared to the kind of less-than-load trucking I used to do it I was feeling like I had got away with something that had worked out.

With the Vespa unloaded all I had left to do was release the code from uShip that in turn released her pay and take the key and off I'd go. While Carol looked for the key in her little box I loaded the Vespa onto my trailer. That was when a worn out little old man came up asking if in as from around here. I said I was from Key West and he lit up. Of course he was scrounging and my heart sank. So much for self reliance. He needed "gas" money and I needed a prop to hold the scooter up while I strapped it down. So much for self reliance! We made a mutually agreeable pact and as I know how to strap motorcycles down it took just a few minutes.

That was when I went back to Carol with the code to release the money which I had located previously and transcribed onto the notes page of my phone. I think ahead and like to be organized. Carol not so much. My key had gone missing from her chaotic little box of keys, titles, buttons and paper clips. Fuck me!

"I think I know where it is."

"Good I'll go and get it now" I replied thinking it was ather last stop in Boca Raton.

"It's in Texas, I think." Shit! I was about to get into a high holy state of righteous anger but she wasn't worth it.

"When did you drop off a motorcycle in Texas?" I asked after a moment's cogitation and speculation about the penalty from strangling her sorry ass.

"In November," she replied. Which told me she hadn't a clue where my key was. She picked the Vespa up in December. Sod this. Sod everyone. I drove off key-less.

Cheyenne and I got home without incident, apart from the cretin in a van who dislike being passed by a Vespa in a trailer who felt a need to cut me off from time to time. I was struck by the irony thatbi had misplaced my car keys when I came to leave the house to pick up the scooter. I had checked the trailer, had the bearings greased, checked the lights and hooked everything up in advance of the call to head north. So I then proceeded to drop the keys in the darkest corner of my courier bag...I found them soon enough but I never misplace keys, thats the sort of thing that drives me mad. Now I was coming home with a scooter with a new engine but no damned key!

It turns out its easy to jury rig a key for this model of Vespa and with a little work I managed to create my own replacement much to my surprise. Getting the engine to start after six weeks essentially parked in the open was a little tougher but persistence and a little telephonic help from GreenTree scooters in Iowa got my bike unflooded and running loudly and smokily winthe familar two stroke pop-pop-pop. Now when she's run in let's see if she will break 60mph on US Highway One as she should, which would make her an ideal commuter. This story isn't yet over.

Posted with Blogsy

Smallwood

It has been a while since I was at Smallwood's store in southwest Florida but I have managed somehow to retrieve these lost pictures which vanished into my archives somewhere.

This was a frontier general store at the beginning of the 20th century in Chokoloskee in southwest Florida. Nowadays there is a road to the store which makes it easy to get here, as long as developers aren't chaining the place off, which has happened and overturned by the courts. Which is lucky for us as this is a spot worth visiting.

The store operated until 1982 when it was closed for years until the family re-opened its a museum. The weird part is that the stuff inside the store is the stuff that was there when it closed. For three bucks you get to see a time capsule and get a feel for a frontier trading post as it once was. Note the oddly jutting counter which they say was designed to allow women in wide bustled skirts to stand close. That sounds odd to me as this wasn't a locale for well dressed women but who am I to argue with received wisdom.

when this place was built the only access was by water so Smallwood was serving trappers and travelers and Indians and sailors. These islands were as impenetrable then as the are today and it's easy to get lost in the mangrove maze of the Ten Thousand Islands.

Cheap air conditioning opened up south Florida to year round living in a nation hat venerates comfort. I suppose it was inevitable that Smallwood's store had to close, because the communities nearby are overwhelmed by modern Florida, high rises, impeccable landscaping and neon lit convenience stores right on the highway.

It's worth a visit for anyone cruising south on Tamiami Trail, Historic Smallwood Store, Southwest Florida Historic Site

 

Posted with Blogsy

Better Living Through Chemistry

You've heard the saying about letting sleeping dogs lie? Believe me, I try to abide by that rule all the time but my Labrador doesn't. She lies there and flashes me looks, angry, pleading, pitiful, inquisitive, loving. Fine, I take my lying dog for a walk every time she plays the passive aggressive card.

We took a long walk yesterday which was hard for me as I am fighting off a severe head cold, a gift from my sweet wife, and I was planning on an essays without words for today as I am feeling under the weather and tired. She asked me to stop by CVS in Big Pine to pick some cheerfully labeled medicine called Allegra. I parked the tuckered dog in a slightly shady spot behind a big, very BIG truck. Apparently the driver has suffered from size issues because I saw this most extraordinary sticker on the back. Is nothing private?

Here's a promise: if I ever suffer erectile dysfunction I will never ever mention it here. I expect you to be grateful, and thank me for my reticence in a world gone mad with the desire to publicize every damned thing. In my pink Crocs I plunged into mainstream America all fluorescent and cheerful and lined with important messages. Save save save. I cannot say I look forward to the arrival of the Rockland Strip Mall with any great enthusiasm.

I had no idea what I was picking up. I asked at the counter at the front where the Allegra was and they said aisle twelve which you may be surprised to learn was not the highest numbered aisle in this mausoleum dedicated to staving off age and death. And by God they had a few Allegra packets, up and down the shelves. I must have spent twenty minutes looking for a box labeled D. No luck. I sent this picture to my wife at work and added a question mark.

I gave up and went to ask the pharmacist which involved getting to the back of a line of people seeking succor for their various ailments. The picture below was meant to tell my wife how much I was suffering in my effort to get her chemicals for her relief. In fact when the dude in the orange Virgin Islands t shirt got to the front of the line he started tearing strips off the nice lady behind the counter. I was pretty sure she wasn't a highly placed executive with CVS doing a work day as an humble counter clerk and the seventy six dollars she wanted to charge the crotchety old white man for his promise of a better old age wasn't her idea. He took umbrage with her nevertheless as she went back stage to find someone to authorize a ten dollar discount. He turned to me, his second mistake of the morning and grumbled about the ten dollar increase in the cost of his chemicals.

Let me say in my defense that had the old man kept to himself I'd have said nothing, but because he never learned to let sleeping dogs lie he roused me with his grumbles about a ten dollar increase. I looked him in the eye and gave him both barrels. I told him I grew up with single payer health care and no one complained about the cost of medications or treatment from government funded services. I told him he was at the mercy of corporate America and good luck getting the corporation to listen to him, because American corporations give less of a toss about Americans than any other entity in the country, including the government. I told him the cost of his meds was the price of freedom and I am looking forward to the full implementation next year of the affordable health care act. He took a step back. Pay the ten bucks I said contemptuously, it's the price of freedom. I like freedom he mumbled, it's good. Then pay the asking price I said. Obama is leading us to dictatorship and trying to destroy the republican party to create a one party state. Oh I said, is that the line they feed you to vote against your own self interest? He backed away.

I saw him later climbing with effort into the vehicle covered with a young man's toys and on the drive home I wondered about him and his world. I should have asked him if he had declined Medicare to buy private insurance because the private sector is so much better than government run care. Funnily enough you won't find an American anywhere who will put their money where their mouth is; they all bitch, the angry old white men about the government but never turn down the services. Which is why politicians are ham strung when it comes to budget cuts. Just to drive my point home I saw this example of snowbird activism on the nutter fringe of US politics. They really do hate seeing the black man in the white man's house on Pennsylvania Avenue. Too bad for them a candidate who believed in magic underwear and couldn't string a sentence together in public to save his life wasn't what the voters were looking for.

The Huffington Post is gleefully reporting the President is promising a more determined second term as though people like me who view him as wishy washy at best should suddenly become excited about the President's leadership. Call me skeptical but I don't see any strong leaders in this country at the moment to lead us out of the economic quagmire of free trade, trans national corporatism and endless wage cuts and underemployment. Certainly America's corporations aren't stepping up, if anything they're moving more jobs away from the US. And yet the President is still a Muslim to these delusional freaks and getting rid of him all by itself will be enough to clear the national debt and crush militant Islam. I'm pretty sure the Republican Party will reinvent itself one day soon as a modern political party and throw off the traces of a dying generation that still thinks immigrants and black people and brown people and gays and women and all the rest of America are second class humans. For the moment the party is in the death grip of religious and economic nutters so it's bound to not do well in a country that rejects radicalism on principle. It's pretty funny to see the first black President as the mainstream, calming candidate of choice among most voters and the old style mainstream white voters looking like a bunch of religious fanatics on a par with the Taliban. It's the world turned upside down where the storyline tells us the brown people and foreigners are the danger.

On the subject of the drug war I discovered something new yesterday. Allegra D can only be purchased direct from the pharmacist with picture ID. It turns out this shit is made from some base used in the illegal manufacture of methamphetamine and you can only purchase a limited supply of it. Lest, I suppose you become a meth freak and destroy your body and mind seeking oblivion and escape from this Vale of Tears. Now I am totally weirded out. Corporate America makes this stuff at $24 a box, but people can't grow and smoke cannabis in their own homes? These chemicals it seems to me are as dangerous and harmful as anything yet somehow somewhere someone paid enough money to get this stuff approved and legal. My poison of choice is a glass of beer or a bottle of wine and my pill of choice is Metamucil so I guess I'm one of the lucky ones at age 55 but these rules and omissions and subterfuges confuse the hell out of me. I would be a Libertarian if they didn't hold all government in such contempt.

 

Yeah I know. I should shut up when I'm out in public but there are some sleeping dogs it's just too difficult to leave alone, so in the end I am the idiot for asking the questions instead of shutting up popping the pills and toeing the party line.

 

Posted with Blogsy

My Vespa At Last

It arrived yesterday and that was a saga which I shall write about later, but here it is all twelve horsepower of bubbling two stroke two hundred cc raw power. Actually I'm running in a new barrel and piston so I am supposed to take it easy for a while according to Dave at Green Tree Scooters in Mason City Iowa.

It still has the Iowa tag that Jeremy should have taken so I will have to mail it back to him but it's a messy job changing the license plate to my new Florida Antique for this 33 year old piece of motorized technology. I have put five kilometers on the metric speedometer (3 miles) on a quick ride round Ramrod Key keeping off the highway to avoid legal encounters. It spent six weeks getting here on the cheap slow delivery plan and when I finally got it to fire with some over the phone coaching from Iowa it blew blue smoke all over the place like a mosquito control Vespa.

I am starting to think I may enjoy this 1979 Vespa just a little bit, though how I rode one just like it cross country in 1981 I cannot for the life of me say, anymore. Technology has moved on a great deal in the intervening years compared to my wife's smooth four stroke 150cc Vespa built in distant 2004. I am guessing they should have similar performance, 60mph top speed and around here that's enough to keep up with highway traffic.

But if I want smooth modern technology I have my Bonneville which should be coming out its mechanical, valve adjustment coma sometime soon. Suddenly, an abundance of two wheeled technology in my life. Cool!

 

Posted with Blogsy

Quantum Of Solace

I have long since held a fascination with Alaskan blogs not because I want to live there but because I never would want to live there. I deed I have little desire to visit a place where mosquitoes are huge and distances are vast and roads are long and straight. Oh, wait a minute, that sounds a bit like Flatistan...

The bicycle seen above reminded me of a blog from Juneau where a tortured young woman used to live and ride a "Pugsley" bicycle. From her words I had no idea the tires were so huge, but they are. Their purpose on this sand free, snow free lump of rock seems questionable but it was certainly fascinating to see in the flesh. Cheyenne's sense of curiosity extends not much further than the gutter. This rooster tried to bait her, but without success. Cheyenne respects all forms of life, ignoring other dogs, deer and chickens. Unfortunately she also ignores iguana which gives them free rein to eat my plants.

I liked this planter using a huge truck, one of those machines that clog the streets, to hold ornamental plants. Just as on the roadway the large body does tend to block the view. Nice idea for a planter but in the end poor execution will doom this style.

The Conch Republic Seafood company is also,known as "The Conch Farm" owing to the original agreement when the city leased the waterfront for the restaurant. Conch have been fished out in the Keys, the slow moving molluscs don't stand much of a chance against fast moving divers. Nowadays they are protected and are making a slow comeback in Federally protected waters (don't you hate those government regulations?) so the city tried to help by creating a space here to grow Conch for reseeding into coastal waters. These days any conch ('konk') you eat. Comes from somewhere else, Honduras I believe, as Bahamian conch are on their last legs too. Frankly I have no clue why anyone needs to eat these flavor free slimy slugs. But they are fashionable to their own detriment.

This is the week when I avoid eating out because it's Race Week and sailors are in town strutting around as though moving a fiberglass boat through water also eerie an achievement. Their trailers are parked on Caroline Street but race in the harbor as part of the Southern Ocean Racing Conference. The boat owners need wealth to keep their boats competitive though some Corinthians (amateurs) race for the fun of it. The wealthy owners buy youth with strength and talent and put them up as the travel and feed them in loca restaurants. These are not youngsters who care one whit about the towns they visit or the people who live in them. I stay out of their way.

I was interested to see this Italian team was in town roughly translated as "Latin Rascal" where Latin refers to Rome, not Spanish speaking America. They were the challenger of record in the next round of the America's Cup hoping to take the much over hyped trophy from San Francisco Bay to Italy but they seem to have dropped out claiming poverty. Another reason to despise Goldman Sachs!

Even the wealth of the owner of Mascalzone Latino needs support and it used to be Acura that inflicted this modern piracy on Key West though nowadays it is sponsored by Quantum Sails which is at least a company devoted to making the sails that power these boats.

Race Week is another of those annual migrations that bring visitors and money to the city, just as the forthcoming food and wine festival will do the same, encouraging people to stand around and balance paper plates and wine glasses and taste food from various local eateries. Key West has, for a city lacking a convention center oddly enough, figured how to encourage people to come south for the most spurious f reasons.

These 'road closed' signs get lots of use in Key West and in this case they are closing Caroline Street at Whitehead to allow racing sailors to gather and let off steam. I'm not sure why the trees were removed, but they are gone, at least for now.

Long after the little fiberglass sailboats will be gone for another year the big old boats will still be trundling into town. They keep bringing day trippers in their thousands to the acclaim of those who make money off this lot and to the aspersions of those who don't. Business as usual in the Southernmost City.

At the end of the day the solace lies in the constant flow of money into the city. Crass but true.

Posted with Blogsy

Old Town

We reached the end of the lane and Cheyenne stood there wondering what next. If she is enjoying her walk she always goes to the very end of each dead end and there are a lot of dead ends in Key West and neighboring islands. Her indecision gave me a chance to snap a quick picture of a Christmas wreath which should have come down weeks ago.

"Should have " is a strong term but I was taught that everything had to be put away by Twelfth Night -January 6th, or bad luck would follow. I am not superstitious but I'll take any excuse to see people move on and clear up the special decorations. They aren't special if they hang around forever.

 

I liked these leaves, autumnal as the season requires yet vibrant.

Key West is frost free year round which is not to say plants don't retreat and lose leaves in the winter, but there is always some corner where Nature burgeons in these sub tropical islands.

We've had a lot of great gray skies lately and temperatures have been cool if not cold.

There's still plenty of green in the city.

The pineapple, especially when stylized is a symbol of welcome in Key West. Flagler wanted to get his rail link all the way to Key West a hundred and one years ago in part because he wanted to bring tropical fruit back to the States from Cuba. He wanted New Yorkers buried in snow buying his fresh Cuban pineapples. Welcome indeed!

I have noted on this page the problems one has with the trades in the Keys. I saw this rather attractive, high falutin' sign on the street. Had I the money and the need I'd hire them based on the sign. But then you always end up wondering if they will show up and do as they promise. My wife's cousin lives in the suburbs of Chicago and says she too has the same issues. Sweet of her to make me feel better!

I'll bet she could use tires like these, were she tall enough to be able to climb into this car. The good news is you don't have to drive very far in Key West on these doughnuts if you don't want to. More good news, the rubber jutting out will act as a bumper when an incompetent parker bumps your Jeep.

This cat was ready for Cheyenne to lurch but my dog walked blithely by intent on finding food scraps not scrapping with a feline.

Want an empty lot? You,d be surprised how many bits and pieces there are around town, unused and apparently not needed. I like to see them as a reminder that there's still a little room available on this crowded island.

A good walk a good walking town, well away from the bars of Duval.

Posted with Blogsy