Key West Wandering

I was hoping for a splendid sunrise but it wasn’t. Riviera at 11th wasn’t getting unflooded soon so I had to make a u-turn.  

This was my second day back in Key West from Peru. I had my drivers license renewed till 2032 and my paid up van registration till 2026 so I was off duty. The workers were out getting coffee first thing: 

Elections are coming and this corner is always full of names: 

I stopped by Sandy’s on White Street for breakfast and a free weekly paper. It’s fun being a tourist in Key West. 

Virginia Street as the sun came up. 

The fire museum at Grinnell. 

Petronia Street no longer dead ends into a soccer field as long sought affordable housing is going up in Bahama Village. 

The chickens are still around but…

…this is becoming canyon country. 

Truman Waterfront was looking green and lush and me the tourist enjoyed wandering around. 

The museum ship Ingham. I’ve taken a walk through and enjoyed it. 

This was my post on it: 

https://conchscooter.blogspot.com/2015/08/uscg-ingham.html

Sunset Key across the water: 

The Truman Annex property owners once tried to close this public street. The city was ready to fold but the Navy stepped in and said no way. The Navy won and the public street stayed public. 

My friends complain loudly about golf cart rentals in winter as they are slow and block traffic. 

An actual coastguard cutter returning from patrol and not a museum:

Flooding at Simonton and Front. Nice high tides. 

Key West Bight: 

The recording studio of course:

Schooner Wharf Bar: 

It looks old enough to be a Captain Outrageous creation. I took the 911 call when he died and I never really forgot it. I liked his story of a change of life from businessman to artist in Key West and I was sorry there was nothing to be done to keep him alive. 

Getting ready to take a boat trip somewhere: 

The salt air is taking its toll on the Waterfront Brewery porch. That building used to be a grocery store when I first lived in Key West. 

Enjoying chickens on the waterfront. 

The Galleon Resort across the water. 

New owners made the Turtle Kraals name a place now not a restaurant.

Cuban Joe’s marine hardware store is still in business. 

I used to work behind the roll up door in the shipping department of Fast Buck Freddie’s. We received and unpacked the stock in that warehouse. How I ended up there I don’t remember but I was waiting to be hired at the police department. 

Buddy Owens fish restaurant chugging along on Caroline Street. 

Doug Bennett the resilient downtown survivor. It was great chatting with him. 

Doug has made a great life for himself in Key West. I tried to follow his example. 

A family from Bangladesh ran a convenience store here and the people who hung around  here called it the A-rab store when they rang 911. They hung out here and drank and made a mess of their lives from time to time and I had to send help to the A-rab store. I thought the owners of the store were incredibly patient with the “colorful” waterfront rats. They’re all gone now. 

I’m told Kermit’s has been sold and Layne wanted hard candies but they don’t make them anymore. That’s gone too apparently. Oh well. 

Sonny McCoy was mayor once and made headlines water skiing to Cuba. Lest we forget. 

It’s a bit odd remembering people who got their names inscribed in public. It’s a mark of old age I think. 

The Bocce Court. 

Rest Beach where they used to slaughter cattle shipped to the city from Stock Island in the good old days before roads bridges cars and Publix. 

The Aids Memorial. 









I don’t think cruising around Key West aboard GANNET2 is going to be so free and easy anymore. The millionaires are quite fussy. 

This used to be an open field used as a dog park on Trumbo Road. Now it’s first responder housing. 

With nice water views. 

My dentist, an inveterate traveler became my friend. I dropped in on Claude and we talked travel until time ran out. 

I had a grand time chatting with dispatchers and cops at my workplace. 

They offered me my job back but I like being retired too much. 

I found one small change I really liked.  The entrance to the Overseas Market shopping center now has a traffic circle making it so much easier to get in and out. So modern and I was shocked. 

The Salvation Army on Flagler sold me a suitcase to haul my loot back to Arequipa. 

And on my way out of town I got to spot the fried chicken capital of Stock Island, the marker that says you’re going north. 

King Tides

They are called King Tides for reasons no longer known and they produce extra high, high tides in the Fall. Because I’m curious I looked them up and discovered the water is sucked higher than usual by an alignment of the sun and moon working together gravitationally this time of year to create high tides above normal. This is Loop Road in the Everglades, the paved section looking normal this time of year. 

And this is the 11th Avenue boat ramp off Flagler also looking normal and impassable this time of year if you don’t want salt water rusting your car: 

Collectively the floods are greeted with shrugs, and an “I’ll be dead before I’m affected,” attitude which just tells me I’m a worry wart. For the time being real estate prices remain at the insane end of the scale so if you don’t have a million bucks of the means to service a loan that size don’t bother. But having to walk in a flower bed to keep my feet dry to get to Simonton Beach doesn’t make feel things are normal. 

You aren’t allowed to loiter at the beach which I think being homeless isn’t allowed but in the event I got my photos and left making sure I didn’t loiter. In Florida technically I am homeless as living in a private mail box doesn’t count I am told by the authorities. 

The visitors keep coming and the tours keep going. Flooding? What flooding? 

Rusty’s favorite walk always went underwater in late October and November. Nowadays Middle Torch Key is flooding in September. 

I can’t imagine camping here but I do remember once somebody set up a tarp in the woods. That was a long time ago one winter when I was walking Cheyenne here. 

Ramrod Key near the pool was afloat. 

In some areas of the Keys low lying streets are flooding regularly and residents want the county to spend millions to raise the roadbeds. In a state renowned for not wanting to extract taxes at the best of times raising road beds seems a tad unrealistic. 

So we come full circle and are reminded of the story about the American writer (and humorist) Robert Benchley who on arrival in Venice sent a telegram to his  editor: “Streets flooded, please advise.”  Which I suppose must be our attitude as well. 

Changes in Latitude

Once I had figured out I had to return to Florida to renew my drivers license the rest of the journey just fell into place. Being retired and getting a monthly pension reduces stress enormously because even though this would be an expense it wasn’t going to take money away from our ability to continue our journey. Were we traveling with a lump sum as we used to when younger it would have been a blow. I got to walk the White Street Pier in Key West a few days ago. Now I’m in Arequipa, Peru. Next month I get my retirement check from the city of Key West. 

I dislike the helplessness of commercial flight, the lack of decision making and the shuffling around like a package in a conveyor. I dislike the sudden change produced by six hours in the aircraft flying at 600 miles an hour. From the desert of coastal Peru to the sudden immersion in hot humid South Florida, no gradual adaptation as when traveling by car or sailboat. What took a year to drive took a day to fly.

When we first got GANNET2, our future home built inside a Promaster van we used to come out here and places like this in Central Florida to park overnight, learning how to manage the van systems and how to cope with the reduced living spaces offered by a 21 foot van.

After I got my new license in Indiantown last Wednesday I drove to Lake Okeechobee to enjoy Central Florida once again. It was as I remembered it. 

Long straight flat boring. Sugar cane country. Big sky country. The Florida free of beaches and tourists that shows up in Carl Hiassen novels and not in tourist brochures. I like it and I discovered I was reassured that it is still here and it will be when we get back. 

I bought a supermarket sandwich for lunch and I sat among the sugar cane enjoying heat and humidity and lots of oxygen in the air. There is a whole agricultural industry here you never see on the beaches of Florida. 

I had my duty to fulfill too, with stops in Miami to check on our storage locker and drop off the trip souvenirs accumulated thus far. And Trader Joe’s had its own shopping list too of course. And then the familiar drive down Card Sound Road, driven hundreds of times and still as it ever was. 

Wayne and Chuck gave me a place to stay and welcomed me to Key West with dinner at Oasis on White Street, Uzbek food as I remembered it. 

Conversation about Key West and how the actors change but the fundamentals stay the same. 

Nick my former colleague shared lunch at Hogfish on Stock Island. We spent a decade working nights together. He’s found a boyfriend in Key West and is for now settled and enjoying life in the place where he grew up. He kept me sane during many long years of office politics at the police department and during the horrors of surviving Hurricane Irma together living through night dispatch answering 911 during those difficult times. 

Poor people scraping by on Stock Island are coming face to face with the new reality of long promised hyper development. Change is always in the air in a wealthy dynamic community like Key West where ambition out strips the small plot of land on which it is nurtured. 

I’ve never heard of Haitians eating dogs in the tenements of Stock Island but these few will be gone soon. 

It’s not attractive but it is affordable. 

Eccentricity and scraping by and flitting about in torn shorts and sandals is being replaced by conformity it’s and high prices.  

I’m not at all sure what the draw is to live like this but you do get to say you lived for a while in the Keys. Scruffy layabouts used to be called characters hanging around the Tom Thumb convenience stores. Nowadays they are recognized as eyesores. 

The funk is gone from Murray Marine. 

There are stories of survival in the midst of change. Jiri still repairs motorcycles on Stock Island. He has figured out how to make it work. Some day he says everything may change but so far…His journey from Czechia to Key West has been a long one but he has no desire to return to Europe. His daughter is 16 and almost an adult. 

There are survivors on the waters around Key West and Stock Island, staying afloat just about even as the state that bans books seeks to ban free spirits. Mooring fields are spreading slowly for all sorts of practical reasons but I would miss my opportunity to take my hat off to people who can live far closer to the edge than I ever could. 

I get the feeling of limitations and restrictions closing in all the time. There was a time before my time when artists lived in Key West and wrote stories that they lived. Before the internet and the new highway this place really was a fringe community. 

It is inevitable that progress changes all things and we humans always look back with nostalgia to remember how much better things were. I dare say the new batch of hopeful settlers see what we all did when we first settled.  A new place of acceptance. 

Key West felt more like home than any other place I lived and yet ironically the city and the police department gave me the freedom to go away and live on the edge on my own terms in a van, amm no lifestyle much derided but which suits me perfectly. 

We planned our retirement and lived a fairly plain existence among bohemians. But it worked out. 

The generations pass and as each of us moves through the Keys we feel lucky to have done it, to have lived as close as we could to the edge of the continent. But we aren’t Conchs, we aren’t bound to the Keys by family ties and obligations and traditions. We came, we live, we leave. No regrets. 

Return To Lima

I’ve had a slight problem downloading pictures from my camera as I can’t get the camera to talk to the Panasonic Image app. I have a cable which I forgot to bring consequently my pictures of my trip to Key West and South Florida aren’t accessible until I get back to GANNET2. A red eye to Lima Saturday night to Sunday morning is my penance for enjoying my time all too brief, in Florida. I hope to be in Arequipa by lunch time Sunday. 

I got to see some spots I haven’t enjoyed for quite a while, 

…said hello to some old friends…

…and drove around quite a bit. 

It was great actually to say hello to former colleagues…

…and big thanks to Wayne and Chuck for looking after me as only they know how. 

Over the next few days I’ll tell the story properly when I unlock the pictures and I apologize for the delay.