Sunshine Skyway

Here she is enjoying a rest after a walk on that funny little beach found on the approaches to Tampa Bay's Sunshine Skyway. We were on our way to St Petersburg where I lived 24 years ago -that long?- and where I had been quite unhappy. But I did discover a few interesting or odd places to hang out like this one that got the seal of approval from my dog.

We had left Florida's east coast in the morning, late, crossed the state with lunch in the middle, in Clewiston and late afternoon saw us approaching the 220 foot tall weirdly suspended freeway bridge. There is a toll but I forget what it is as they take Sunpass and we rolled straight through,slowed only by the dimwits who still think you have to stop in the pass lane. Grr.

The old bridge got a span demolished when a pilot missed the gap and drove a freighter into a support, knocking cars off the bridge breaking the old structure they decided to build a new suspension bridge from scratch. Sunshine Skyway Bridge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I used to sail here from my berth in St Petersburg and I never tired of looking up at the structure as I sailed underneath between freighters. Seen from the roadway it's just as impressive.

It was a gray overcast day, a cold front Up North was setting records and down here it was 67 but the wind was cold and rain kept coming and going. Not your typical Florida day unless you really know Florida as it really is in winter.

Heading down the slope toward St Pete those islands flanking the road are great places to stop, and the fishing pier is the stub of the old bridge. A stop is in order.

And unlike the Florida Keys, the west coast of Florida is all sand, and my dog was happy.

There was some lunatic out in the arctic air paddle boarding. God knows how cold the water was.

These guys were smarter, standing on the beach flying a radio controlled helicopter. My wife thought it was cool. Hmm, so a plane isn't too geeky? She said no. Thinks...

People on the mainland aren't too friendly to strangers so Cheyenne and I enjoyed each others' company. We are deeply in love.

It was a nice pause on the journey. I started fiddling with the camera when Cheyenne decided to pause. Here's the result:

I do like a road trip.

 

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Got Pho?

Monday kids get back in school and my wife is back in the classroom and she hasn't done much these past two weeks outside the daily chores. Sooo...time for a road trip I guess. Card Sound Road, ten miles dead straight from Alabama Jack's to Homestead.

My wife had to go to see her rheumatologist and because her treatment can rough her up a bit she needs a driver so I took a leave day and off we went. The dog always needs a break after two hours of watching me cut and thrust my way up Highway One, and McDonalds in Florida City has clean toilets some very decent mango smoothies and space for Cheyenne to stretch her legs.

With my wife getting shot up at the doctor's Cheyenne and I were off the leash for a good long walk. The thing about the way I walk my dog I usually end up in the least scenic spots in town. It's always been that way for me. When we sailed through Central America my wife and dogs saw every alley, industrial dump and back street with the best smells. So when I find myself crossing railroad tracks on a brisk winter morning, 64 degrees and breezy, I figure I must be trailing my damned dog....So it was:

So we ended up ducking out of the wind by checking out a very suburban subdivision, warm finally in the sun, street after empty street. Cheyenne was bored by the cleanliness and I was freaked out reading Wisconsinland with views of true blizzards. And even though it was on my pocket phone the tiny picture gave me a big chill. I know northerners like seasons and all that but feet of snow and sub zero (Fahrenheit) temperatures are no joke. Better a sleepy Miami suburb than snow shovels Up North.

I'm surprised more fog owners don't take their hounds on the road with them. I love having Cheyenne along and my wife gets great comfort when she travels alone with Pooh Bear. She does get bored sometimes after hours in the car but she is the most patient traveler most of the time. As she does at home, when we are on the road she gets me off my butt and out exploring. Too often of course we end up trolling tedious subdivisions, which is where America parks its motels... But listening to her snore at night makes La Quinta (the dog friendly chain with decent beds for people) sound like home.

My wife is one of life's explorers and to her goes the credit for figuring out the doctor's office is at the epicenter of eating and drinking. I had long wanted to try the national dish of Jamaica and it was around here that I got to taste it, Key West Diary: Ackee And Salt Fish. This time we stopped by the liquor store. My wife the shopper was entranced, wines, liquors and beers by the dozen, yes, but there was a well stocked deli too. I guess we'll be back.

It's an odd thing for a woman who chooses to live at the end of the road, but she perks up when she gets the rare chance to check out big city shopping but it's always practical stuff, store sales at Macy's, Nordstrom's Rack and Target and the Zcontainer Store and of course the new Miami Trader Joe's...I know them all by name but they leave me cold. As often as not I stay in the car with my Kindle. It's how I don't burn out shopping and my wife has her fun. I watched this kid bump his butt against my mirror twice as he loaded his mom's Heffalump SUV. I was going to wind down my window and point out that he might get lucky the third time and break it properly... I bit my tongue and all was well. Are you proud of me? Key West kids in my experience are really polite, despite what you hear people grumbling about them.

My wife's navigation skills have grown massively since we trained her to use the map program in her iPhone, but every now and again it lets us down. I had been grumbling about wanting Vietnamese pho for a while and so determined was she to have some we ended up downtown in Miami, a ratty place of boarded up stores, pigeon shit, shuffling lost souls and no sign whatsoever of Vietnamese soup. Thanks Apple GPS!

Vroom! We got on the freeway and headed north, me focused on driving and she fiddling with her phone looking for pho. Cheyenne was stretched out on the back seat snoring. The Lexus Lanes were wide open and our Sunpass was paid up. For a buck and a quarter I took the empty side of the freeway. The Sunpass is free, charges off your credit card and charges a lower toll than the cash or automatic license plate reader. Yet thousands sit in line on the free side. The toll seems low enough that it seems like a no brainer for people who live in South Florida and own a credit card. If you live in the Keys your main way out is on the toll road called Florida's Turnpike so the Sunpass is already in our car as we are frequent travelers as any blog reader knows.

Apple finally got on the job and led us to Pho Vi on the main drag in Hollywood, a Fort Lauderdale suburb. Hollywood Boulevard is filled with restaurants, Greek, Peruvian, French, and even Romanian our first choice and now closed, unhappily, but also and above all Vietnamese. Our appetizer was a spring roll, not brilliant, rather plain actually and crisply cold as though prepared ahead and chilled, but with peanut sauce and Srirachi hot sauce made edible.

My wife had a salad and she liked the grilled meat though the vegetables were bland. I had a big bowl of ten dollar pho and I liked it, so in the end all worked out. I like adding bits of lemongrass, sprouts, peppers and lime juice to spice up my soup bowl. The noodles were a bit clumped to start but I broke them up and I could not help but think that in Key West the noodle shop charges twice as much for less.

You can forgive a lot for a fifty percent price reduction, but there was nothing terrible to forgive, just a lack of love, of passion in the kitchen. Walking past a realtor's office we had another attack of the cheaps when we saw the price of a third floor condo, as small as our house, two pools and all the trimmings for $56,000. In Key West I saw an office in a commercial building for sale near the Green Parrot for the same price. I wonder how much Hollywood Police pays dispatchers? I banished the thought as unworthy.

Pools aren't in short supply in Hollywood Florida, it turns out as our hotel has one too. However it was 64 degrees so far too cold to even think of immersion. I have to say we left home with no proper plans which included forgetting to bring our cold weather gear. My wife yielded and stopped by a bargain store to get herself a purple wooly top to fight the arctic air sweeping South Florida. I felt I deserved the pain of suffering and decided to tough it out in my shirt sleeves. You've got to be tough if you're going to be stupid. I spent a fair bit of time thinking about my snug wind proof vest hanging snugly in my snug clothes closet in my snug home as I fought off the bitter winds.

Cheyenne liked it just fine and found it warm enough she needed to cool her heels, literally.

And after a long day on the road my hound did what she does best. For some reason she prefers the floor. Believe me she could be on the bed if she wanted. She chooses to reject me.

It's not a good road trip without a snoring dog at the end of the day.

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Cloudy Evening, By Smartphone

I caught this image from Trumbo Road looking southwest toward the city. I thought the cloud cover was impressive, even though I'm sick of cloudy days. I took a picture, with my Android phone, no tripod, no film and who knows what the image might look like were it blown up or printed. But that is not my way, and fine by me I thought...

Then I read this article in Britain's Guardian newspaper:

The death of photography: are camera phones destroying an artform? | Art and design | The Guardian

 

I love digital photography; it has liberated me. In the old days photography was terribly expensive, not simply the cost of developing but also the cost of film and the price of simply taking pictures. Imagine taking a picture and not knowing how it would come out! That was skill and luck and determination combined! If the shot mattered you had to take several pictures bracketing the exposures. If you were organized, and I wasn't, you noted the speeds and settings in a notebook so when the film came back you could compare the results with the intentions. Nowadays who thinks of that? Not only can you see the picture instantly, you can also open the appropriate page and the digital camera has recorded all the settings for you! Amazing.

I tried using a darkroom in school but I hated the chemicals and I disliked the whole business of fiddling with paper and bottles in the dark. So though I lacked the control I had over the black and white images I went to color which was more fun when it came out well, but the development process rapidly became so automated the pictures came back washed out, badly cropped and generally treated with indifference. Nowadays I can use digital effects when I take the picture or even afterwards if the recorded image isn't the way I want it to look. All in my phone! Then with a click I upload it to my Picasa account where it is stored and available for use in my computer when I want it. The technology is amazing.

Above we see the future of Key West, another huge hotel by Pritam Singh springing up behind Schooner Wharf Bar. Below we see the present, a city occupied by panhandlers bugging the tourists that feed us all. Pictures courtesy of my unobtrusive Smart Phone!

It costs me pennies to use my Google Blogger and Picasa accounts, but I fear the true price we pay is loss of privacy. These free, or nearly free accounts are sold by the providers to their advertisers. We are the product sold like chattel. And as we have seen thanks to Edward Snowden something digital is forever. Scrub your computer and the words and images can still be retrieved. As a result my blog rarely says anything about certain subjects and is for me, a worker bee dependent on my job, simply a trove of pictures about where I like to live. I have opinions and I express some of them as is my right, and yours to disagree. I don't have any deep dark secrets in my life, I could hardly have undergone the scrutiny I did to get a job at the police department had I been nurturing some fireball of horror in my past. But we are all flawed, layered people that the Web seems to try to unravel a little bit too much. To me that's what we have to guard against, not the death of decent photography.

Professional photographers are bound to lose out, as in every technological innovation or political twist. When President Reagan changed the rules for broadcasting news readers like me lost out big time as our bosses were no longer required to broadcast news in the public interest over the public airwaves. We've seen what that rule did to consolidate ownership of broadcast outlets. A colleague of mine described us as "the best buggy whip makers in town" and we changed professions. I miss my days as a radio reporter, but I wouldn't want to do it now with the emphasis on garbage news gossip and "tips" as the format. News has been replaced by tips on how to improve your waistline, love life or cooking skills. News? Really? I get my news online and I hope I have the judgement to sift the crap from the newsworthy and reliable. Certainly the mainstream is all crap, unhappily because real news makes you think, it requires mental involvement.

I don't know whether or not amateur photography rots peoples' brains, or deprives us of the ability to see. I don't think most people use their phone cameras much, not to record the day to day beauty of their lives, the dimple pictures of their worlds. If they find I wish they would post them. I think my blog is unique, and if not unique it's a format unusual enough that I can't find many other bloggers who simply photograph their worlds, and the periphery around those worlds. The streets, the parks, the crowds, the shops, the beauty of daily living, and I see lots of unrecorded beauty and humor and intrigue in my islands. Like the article says, everyone seeks a picture of an event or famous face but from what I can tell that which they see everyday they seem to ignore. I wish I could go online and see a resident's view of Buenos Aires or Port Stanley, Haïfa or Aquaba, here or there. A story to go with the pictures, a phrase to make me think would be nice, a meditation on the place, an argument or a conversation. So many blogs are family scrap books, some actual, some disguised as informative. Photos are few or small or repetitive. Content they tell us is the key, and photo content will keep photography alive and it needs to live, in all of us.

I'm not very good at seeing people properly, of capturing their essence. I wish I were better at it but it is my Achilles Heel, and I live and adapt. People with phone cameras do the same, and professional photographers will have to do the same. Buggy whip makers all.

 

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Postcards From The Edge

The weather has been gray and I thought one of the first pictures of the new year should reflect this unnatural state in the Fabulous Florida Keys.

I was out with Cheyenne in the old year and together we enjoyed a couple of morning stops along the Overseas Highway.

The trash can was not apparently close enough to the table:

There is a public loo at Veterans Park and an outdoor cold shower. Some people swim in December around here. It's warm enough for shirt sleeves most days, but water temperatures won't resume normal operating levels until March or April. Anything less than eighty degrees is unacceptable for swimming.

Dishwashing in public. The joy of van abode living.

Dropping the dreary details of life, the beach is a good place to be.

 

The edge of the known world:

Well, not really but close enough for dog work.

And fishing:

 

 

 

Bird convention on the old Flagler railroad bridge:

Fishing on the edge. I had to hold on to Cheyenne to keep her out of his bait bag.

Best wishes for the new year, wherever it takes us all.

 

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