Church Street, Burlington

I fell in love with Burlington, at least I did on an 82 degree summer afternoon with a cool breeze blowing up the main drag, a pedestrian zone called Church Street. 

Oddly enough Rusty did too. This former street dog who used to be scared of his own shadow, never mind crowds and noise, tugged me back after I tried leading him away from Church Street. So we went back into the morass.

 A bizarre water fountain/work of art:

 A man playing music and having a grand time:

 Us on an actual park bench, the sort of thing that Key West doesn't allow in its public spaces.

I get annoyed going to Duval Street where there is nowhere to sit and watch people, nothing to do, no shared space. Check out the people just hanging out on Church Street:

These two smiled for the camera. They brought a footstool and climbed onto the rock and smiled cheerfully to passers by. To me they exemplified the cheerful ease of Burlington's gathering place.

 No drunks, no bums, no begging, no smells, just people enjoying the run up to the Fourth of July. 

 I have no idea what caught his attention:

There were also food trucks on the same street as restaurants and everyone seemed to coexist just fine. Key West has a long way to come to get this nice:

 They even welcome people from forty miles away:

I was not so charitably inclined after our experiences in the Quebec hospital. Earthbound Trading can be found on Duval Street too. The Lambretta was frosting on the visual cake for me:

 Full recycling/waste/ compost options are normal in Burlington.

I got my wife a get better soon card and this woman gave Rusty pets and a cookie. Dogs are welcome in many of the non-food stores.

The local ice cream shop didn't shy away from political statements in support of the usual stuff:

The lights mark the junction of College and Church where College drops another few blocks to the Lake Champlain waterfront.

A happy dog:

I wish Key West could do this, perhaps even in my lifetime.

Isle D'Orleans

We found a mention of the island in a hotel pamphlet about local attractions and it mentioned this 24 mile long island just up the road from Quebec City. This narrow bridge is the sole connection to the mainland and as the island is an elongated oval you end up back here after spending most of a day circumnavigating it.

 It was a gray day and it might seem counter intuitive to go out into the countryside but it wasn't cold and it drizzled only occasionally so it turned out quite well.

My wife wanted to check the fruit stands and they grow strawberries here so she dug in and they were excellent.

Rusty was not amused by the giant advertising strawberry and much to my astonishment he started barking at it which made the farmer laugh.

 The views across the wooded rolling landscape were quite delightful:

Decidedly rural...

 And at every stop Rusty got out and explored this totally alien environment. He had a blast.

My wife made us stop at an artist's co-op, against my will, and of course it was great. Rusty stayed outside watching the world while I chatted with the artist who declined to have his picture taken. We talked about traveling, he has a camper in his old age to replace his tent and likes Tennessee. A place that felt miles away from this odd island in the French speaking St Lawrence river. 

The St Lawrence in it's awesome riverine majesty. Rusty was fascinated but the wall was too tall and there was no beach access. 

They like colored roofs Up North.

 It was windy as Rusty and I strolled and my wife took refuge in the car.

 You also get silver roofs and those gables that remind me of Paris...

I don't know what this road sign was all about. Low flying cars crushing bicycles..? Whatever it was it stopped here.

I saw a trail so my buddy and I took off down it. I can't imagine what Rusty was thinking so far from the tropical world he knows in south Florida. He was as busy as you like chasing around and sniffing everything, taking it all in.

 My wife was studying Trip Advisor and they mentioned this "Trailer at the Corner" so we stopped.

 Rusty did the rounds making friends as he went.

We ordered two lunches, and as they do duck there we had a pulled duck sandwich which wasn't nearly as weird as it sounds and  a container of poutine with duck. I'm not  a huge fan of duck but this lot was excellent, not too fat and not too rich. I am not  a great fan of poutine either, a dish attributed to Canadian ingenuity. Most people I talked to about it dismissed it as, at best hangover food. The only time it gets any respect is when it is gussied up with bacon or fois gras or truffles or something. As most people know its french fries, and in Canada they seem to like real potatoes, curds which are flavor-free lumps of cheese material and brown gravy, a British import from the years before people cooked real food in England. Make of that what you will. It's on the right in the picture below with duck meat and a sprig of green.

We drank local sodas, we sheltered from the wind and tried to keep an eye on our wayward dog. It was cold enough in July that we were wearing our winter jackets. A wooly windproof vest is my favorite cold weather gear.  

Tomorrow's lunch. They looked more like geese than duck which was possibly why I liked the meat better than I usually do:

We did the wine tasting thing as well. This far north there is limited sunshine so the wines we are told tend to be lighter and less sugary and tannic. I liked them, not that I got to taste as much as my wife the passenger. I left the windows of the car open and he was a good boy until a passerby started fussing with him and he jumped out and came into the wine tasting room much to Madame la patronne's horreur. That was my cue to abandon wine and enjoy Rusty outside for a while.

We also took in an apple orchard for the cider which was actually more interesting than you might expect as they had quite a few flavors. Rusty as usual got his walk, no wonder he enjoys travel.

Don't throw apples, break branches,climb in the trees or shake them. So there bad mannered French speaking people. But you can walk your dog, so that was all right and we didn't touch the pommiers.

 We climbed the hill as my wife the inebriate continued to test ciders in the shed.

I love how when I whistle he comes running. It never fails but I only ever call for him when I really need him to come back. That way he gets to exercise his mind and his body, to run free as a change from being on a leash. In this instance it was starting to rain and the little runt ran straight past me and went down the hill half a mile to the waiting car where my wife scooped him up and sheltered him from the weather. I plodded back at my speed getting rained on. Good dog.

Key West - Summer 2016

I have returned after a month away and I am sensing something in the air in Key West. It doesn't take much if you read the newspaper, but more than that there is a ripple of irritation running through town on several fronts. In one were an optimist one could hope that a new wave of political leadership could be coming to town to revitalize a community facing more challenges than it needs. If one weren't an optimist one might think nothing can change Key West's direction towards a muddled, money driven future.

A month away, even if half that time was spent coping with a medical emergency, offers the traveler an opportunity to recalibrate one's view of home town politics. I saw a lot that I liked elsewhere, ideas that could easily be implemented in Key West, and I also faced the questions square on: why isn't Key West a modern environmentally aware town, a place where learning to live within one's social and economic and environmental means? We live so close to nature in these islands you'd think preserving the land, revitalizing coral, dealing sensibly with trash, and taking recycling and composting seriously would be second nature, a requirement for social acceptance. But it's not and when you have moved even briefly among communities with so much less Nature but so much more respect for what they do have, you wonder what is going on here. 

I took a walk on Church Street, in Burlington Vermont at the urging of a friend and it was lovely. There was music, small food trucks combined with sidewalk bars and restaurants, lots of benches for people to sit on, in a family friendly atmosphere. The entire street is a pedestrian zone and I compared this to Duval Street and I was shocked. When I visit Duval Street there are no shops that particularly interest me but there is nowhere to sit, nowhere to people watch with or without a drink or a coffee. There are no benches, the few raised flower beds have been rendered unusable as seats and as a result the tourists are left to shuffle up and down, back and forth like zombies. 

You simply cannot do this in Key West:

There is a revolt underway in the Keys over the service provided by the hospital, and led by a prominent Conch there is now a call for a boycott of Lower Keys Medical Center, whose CEO, a particularly unpleasant piece of work, has resigned. There are stories swirling around about levels of care that rival the abysmal service my wife got at the hospital in Quebec City when her gall bladder gave out.

Unlike Quebec City where dismal service is accepted, Key West it seems has had enough of the lackluster service from the hospital. Naturally one would like to see the doctors get on board with a  demand for change but so far it's the patients complaining. One has to hope things will change for the better. I'm lucky because when I need medical care I can just as easily drive to Fisherman's Hospital in Marathon as I live half way between the two cities. 

Housing is driving people crazy too. Land use use rules, height regulations and preservation guidelines are all being twisted and tormented and essentially disregarded in the interests of "affordable housing."  I have no faith at all that anyone in charge cares one jot about affordable housing but as long as a developer says wrecking the environment will ease the shortage of affordable housing they can get away with anything. Height restrictions are being eased in Key West and the drive to raise the historic skyline is being done to help increase "affordable housing" and the marionettes on the city commission nod solemnly and vote yes. Developers offer to swap parcels of land, hotel room occupancy and whatever else comes to hand to build large new hotels, two are going up on Stock Island, and in return they promise more affordable housing. Because a quarter million dollar prefabricated house on stilts is now officially "affordable" in Key West. 

I hear complaints that the short term rental racket is now spreading to New Town. The city has restrictions on short term rentals to "preserve the integrity of residential neighborhoods." Which is great but it is proving tough to enforce especially with the arrival of AirBnB which undercuts all traditional models of tourist hospitality.

In the past Old Town was the place where visitors wanted to stay but nowadays I understand these kinds of short term party rentals are cropping up in New Town, the part of the city developed in the second half of the 20th century, far removed architecturally from the wooden homes and narrow alleys of 19th century Old Town. When you consider that employee housing has for the past thirty years retreated from Old Town, through New Town to the trailers of Stock Island...

...Then you start to appreciate the trouble that Key West is in. I accept that my desire for a walkable Third Place (LINK) in Key West is my own issue, relatively frivolous in a town already packed with non-discriminating tourists, but worker housing is starting to fall off a cliff. The move in this direction has been here for years, developers bought up Stock Island a decade ago getting ready to transform the island for the tourism economy. And now we are there. The rapprochement with Cuba doesn't help as the ferry service to Havana is planned for Stock Island and the destruction of fishing stocks by climate change, over fishing and reef destruction will justify the departure of the last of the commercial fishermen who retreated to Stock Island when their docks in Key West were sold to the tourist industry.

The revolt against the hospital fills me with hope that things might change, but the big difference I see here is that we lack a University. My belief is that universities bring education, a desire for change, curiosity, all based on an economy driven by a seat of learning. Key West lacks that driver, that force for change and perhaps that's not all bad. Key West is not likely to be driven to social conformity by a herd of fashionable students preaching to the community, but as much as that sort of behavior annoys the adult in me, the side of me that wants a more cohesive thoughtful town to stay planted at the end of the road wants people to take the hospital boycott to a new level. Demand change, build worker housing, clean up Duval. Take care of what we have that's  unique, value our history not as tourist myth but as a road map to our future. Make Key West a nicer place to live. It doesn't seem a lot to ask of the people who have made fortunes milking this city for the past half century.