Cold Night Ride

Irony anyone? I rolled out of bed at eleven minutes to five and scampered to check the thermostat in the hall. 62 degrees. This sucks! It was supposed to be warming up. This place is supposed to be the warmest in the Continental US, not as warm as Hawaii or Puerto Rico but warm nonetheless. I hit the "heat" button and the reverse cycle kicked in. This makes two days in a row we've had the heat on. The good news is the house hasn't been smelling like singed cat and that is because I had the presence of mind to get the a/c unit serviced. Usually when the heat hasn't been run in months, or years, dust accumulates on the heater elements in the ceiling and the smell of burning fur fills the house.

We generally keep the water heater on the "warm" setting but this morning it was totally inadequate and the shower felt cold to the touch. Things were just getting better and better. I was reduced to blowing my wife's hair dryer all over to try to restore circulation.

I call my home a treehouse because the downstairs area is open on all sides between the stilts that support my 770 square-foot home above the flood plain (I hope). This morning the lights illuminated a scene of desolation, dead leaves blowing in the wintry north wind, no newspaper in the driveway yet, and the Bonneville shining coldly in the bright white light. "I have to rest myself there?" I thought to myself, eyeing the cold metal fuel tank butting up to the hard frigid vinyl seat...It just got worse. I was swathed in my gray furry jacket, that and a sweat shirt are my only winter clothing, and on top of that my mesh motorcycle jacket with its shiny padded liner. The outlook for my head wasn't so great as my open face helmet was downstairs with the Bonneville and I couldn't be bothered to clamber back upstairs to find my full-face helmet. I dragged my thick elk skin gloves on and clipped the helmet on my head while the air-cooled parallel twin warmed up.

I've become snug on my Triumph over the past 4300 hundred miles. My hands fall naturally to the grips and my feet go straight to the pegs and my eyeballs line up right above the top of the Parabellum windshield. Its a nice piece of plastic, that windshield, and it does a fine job of keeping the wind off me without producing unwanted wobbles in the track of the motorcycle. The trouble today was that the north wind was cutting diagonally across the Highway and the wind, all 25 miles-an-hour of it, was clinging to my beard and my nose and my eyes, making them stream water down my cheeks.

The wind, sliding round the shield pressed up against my chest and sought out the cracks in my clothing, spreading cold tentacles across my chest and around my neck. My feet were warm inside my boots, and my heavy yellow gloves kept the digits snug but my knees out in the breeze were soon blocks of ice. Its been a long time since my teeth chattered but fifteen minutes from home I was in agony. It was actually a beautiful night. The cold winds had long since blown the cloud cover away and the skies were clear. There wasn't much traffic on the road and i was following the cone of white light through a dark canyon between the mangroves. The temperature gauge showed something around 58 degrees ambient temperature and I was feeling every bit of it.

Halfway into my 40 minute commute I was crying uncle. I was cold, my teeth were chattering and I couldn't feel my knees. The ride, even at a steady 55mph seemed endless. Most mornings I wish the commute could last another twenty or more minutes, I'd like to have left the house early to take in a side road or two, but today, under the constant onslaught of cold air I would gladly fold and stop and suck up coffee, hot and lots of it. Instead the long endless black ribbon of Highway One keeps inexorably unrolling in front of me.

"You could always take the car," my wife said last night with the none too subtle inference that I must be mad as a march hare to ride through the Keys equivalent of a blizzard. "People Up North are snowed in," I said in defence of my madness. "A sixty degree morning would be cause for rejoicing across much of the motorcycling land," I insisted. Maybe so, but I was totally frozen and down to 50mph by the time the street lights of Stock Island hove into view across the Boca Chica bridge. Every traffic light was red, but instead of mumbling, this morning I took advantage and pressed the side of my knees into the cylinder heads one at a time to generate warmth though my uniform trousers.I arrived in the parking lot at the police station like a mobile popsicle and Diggy pulled in right behind me on his Honda 750 Aero. He had a tight woolen cap held on his head by a pair of goggles, his jacket was bulky with stuffing and his 25 year-old face with suffused with excitement. "What a great ride!" he said. I couldn't see his breath on the cold night air but he was radiating pleasure in the cold. "Yeah," I grumbled. "You only rode from Bahama Village," which I didn't need to point out was seven minutes away.

There's supposed to be a warming trend floating in over the weekend, while I'm busy working. Highs are predicted to be around 75 degrees. Neither soon enough, nor warm enough, in my jaundiced opinion.

22 Below

Last night, while I slept huddled under blankets, I'm told the temperature was supposed to drop to 48 degrees Fahrenheit, about 9 Celsius, and in Key West that equates to 22 Below Zero, when zero locally is rated at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. It was cold, and I got up to see a sight reserved for higher latitudes and stronger attitudes: 55 degrees in the house...It's been windy cold and nasty for two days and I can only surmise what might be happening Up North. This man at the Big Coppitt Shell was huddled against the cold and he's from Michigan, so I don't feel like such a wuss when I moan about the temperature, and wind chill and all the meteorologic mumbo-jumbo. The wife had a buddy come round to drink chai, talk, eat pizza, talk, watch a video, talk, and hang on the couch with heating pads and blankets to have a nice talk, so I took off for a manly movie involving a manly ride in to the Big City and our mainstream 6 screen multiplex in Searstown.The ride in to Key West was a brutal affair, the temperature gauge on the Bonneville read 58 degrees when I pulled out from under the house and rose to a paltry 62 for a little while in the bleak sunshine that soon vanished behind a mass of black clouds. Great! I thought, all I need is some icy rain to make me feel completely manly out here dodging wind squalls, trailing long lines of cages wandering along at a modest 42 miles per hour. It was a very unmotivated ride, one way and another.

On the other hand I Am Legend was a most enjoyable couple of hours in the big dark room. I had a couple of talkers in front of me during the endless previews but they soon shut up when the Last Man Alive started chasing deer down the endless empty canyons of Manhattan. His only companion was a dog and you know nothing good will come of that. Unhappily the premise of being the only human left alive had its own appeal to a misanthrope like myself, and I delighted in the notion of all the movies and all the books with none of the day-to-day stupidity bumping into me. I imagined myself setting up house in a big steel tug anchored in the very middle of the harbor from which I might whistle at my enemies, but that would make a rotten movie, so cinematic heroes never make their last stands afloat.Human beings do though and I spotted this catamaran snugly anchored behind a clump of mangroves just north of mile marker 18. I knew the boat was inhabited as there was a dinghy flopping around off his stern, and I know all too well the experience of hunkering down during a cold front and waiting inside the freezing fiberglass cocoon for the weather to get back to normal. He had my sympathy.

Mind you I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. The road ahead to my tree house was still cold and gray and the Bonneville, a proper classic motorcycle, doesn't have the ability to bring out the sunshine on command, so I rode home under the crisp unnatural cloud cover, just grateful not to be stuck on the hook cooking flower pots to keep the cabin warm. And privately I had to admit to myself I was kind of grateful to have someone to come home to that wasn't a) a vampire or b) a mannequin.

I am only a legend in my own imagination.

Mud,Mud,Glorious Mud

On a morning when the north wind is howling through the Keys and the temperature, away from the wind chill, has plummeted to 60 degrees, one imagines fondly a life lived far from the tentacles of the cold. Cold is relative, and a 60 degree January day on the Great Plains would be cause enough to do some gardening in one's underwear. In Key West it's a test of character and will to keep functioning normally in such arctic weather.Its at times like these that a middle-aged man's thoughts turn to a recent weekend spent in heat, humidity and mud. It was on a hot humid day in the not-too-distant past (Sunday) that I found myself having a conversation with a man on a mule while standing up to my knees in quite possibly fecally-impacted waters.It was at this point in our drive through the back country from Luperon to Puerto Plata that I felt a burning desire to turn back and take the main road. However the truck was perched at an awkward angle, I could see no way to safely reverse or, God forbid, actually turn so we were committed to what was to come. The man on the mule was not reassuring. "No," he said shaking his head. "It's not much better up ahead. Less water perhaps. More mud." He laughed hollowly when I asked, joking, where the nearest tow truck was. "No hay grua!" he grinned toothlessly. He told me with pride that they had electricity these days, even if the road was a tad old fashioned."Stay on the high side," was his advice as I climbed wordlessly back into the truck with a hollow feeling where my chest used to be. Oh dear, I thought to myself, what have I got myself into?

When we got up before dawn in our splendid five star hotel room in Santa Domingo the idea was to hurry out of the city and head north to Santiago 200 kilometers up the four lane Highway One across the mountains, Then we would visit the sailor's haven of Luperon, cruise through Puerto Plata, visit Scott's refuge of Sosua where he lived 15 years ago, and buzz back to room service and a bottle of wine at the Hotel Intercontinental.

Aside from a little rain, which made the industrial city of Santiago look worse than it did in the sunshine we executed the first part of the plan flawlessly. I knocked off a quick picture of Santiago's only claim to tourist interest, the monument to the nation's heroes, and we turned onto Highway Five, greasy in the rain, towards Puerto Plata on the north coast.At Imbert, in the sunshine beyond the rainy mountains, we turned off towards Luperon 20 miles away, in time for a 9:30am breakfast. Luperon was our morning's goal because it is a sailing cruiser's destination. I have been reading about the delights of Luperon for 20 years, a secure anchorage surrounded by mangroves, a nice little town with easy bus access to the facilities of Puerto Plata, the end of a long bash south through the islands of the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos. Luperon is said to be well adapted to its place along a sailor's migratory path to the Caribbean. As former cruisers my wife and I enjoy the company of maritime travelers.Well, suffice it to say, Luperon was a major disappointment. It did have a nice bay to anchor in, filled with boats and muddy waters entirely unsuitable for swimming, our major recreation while cruising, and the town itself was somewhat run down, to our eyes. Just to prove how small a world it is, on the pier we met Pablo, the owner of a marina in Panama where our cruising friends Ian and Anna keep Gecko, their catamaran. We also found the cruiser hangout, an American-run restaurant now called Capt Steve's offering laundry, internet, food and swimming pool, as the best cruiser haunts do.But the owner, married to a Dominican woman is tired of the life and is looking to sell. Meanwhile he offers a nice $5 (150 peso) breakfast, American style, decent coffee, pork chops and the fixings: The main road into town from the jetty was lined with small shabby businesses and blood ran in the gutter, doubtless from some porker sacrificed for the New year's holiday to come. It was a picture of a small industrious town in a very impoverished economy. Which is fine and dandy, though I couldn't for the life of me imagine spending months here whiling away a tropical winter when there are beaches and islands and incredible reefs not many miles away. I crossed Luperon off my list of places to sail to.On our way out of town we spotted the entrance to a dirt road marked on our map as a brown dotted line headed along the coast towards Puerto Plata, avoiding the main road at Imbert. We took the plunge. I have never been much of an off road driver, most of my land travels I have taken on two wheels, and when I'm driving a vehicle I can't physically push I tend to be conservative in my choice of paved roads. This one got away from me completely.

It started out with a motoconcho that I simply couldn't keep up with. How he rode, with a passenger and parcel so fast I don't know, and I can only attribute his sure-footed speed to experience. Then we forded a couple of streams, a broken bridge or two, some sand, then rocky hills, picked up a couple of field workers looking to get home, and as we slid down a steep incline we came upon a sight froze my blood. Another Isuzu, a Trooper, stuck in the mud surrounded by "helpers." If they are stuck, I said to myself, what's going to happen to me? The good news was that the Trooper was two wheel drive and with some shoving and digging he got out of the mud leaving me a completely messed up hole to plough through in low-ratio 4-wheel drive. "Schumacher," one of the passengers complimented me as my Isuzu reared up out of the mud and came to a stop on hard ground. Its the car, I thought to myself, not the driver. "If we're going to do much more of this," my impeturbable wife said, "I'm sending you to that off-road driving school in California." She settled her arm in its cast on a pillow and our hitch hikers got in the back for the rest of the drive through glorious scenery,and on a continuously mashed up roadway, less on the rocky hilltops and more in the muddy valleys. Further down the road we picked up a couple more hitchhikers, walking out of the fields burdened with packages. They asked us to stop at a roadside collection of huts where they washed off their mud in the stream, ate a coconut, chatted with the neighbors and picked up a pig in a sack for the ride to Puerto Plata in our truck. It made me feel a bit like a plantation owner, driving around with people in the bed of the truck when there were perfectly good seats inside, but when in Rome...On the paved road the woman howled with laughter as the 50 mile-per-hour wind tore her hair from her headscarf, the pig in the sack seemed less amused but calmed down after I dug a hole in the sack for it to breathe through and we traveled without incident, as bizarre a combination of people as any on the roads that Sunday morning in Puerto Plata. Little did passers-by know where we had been to church. Like they say, God protects drunks and idiots, and we made it through without a scratch, and I was definitely not drunk.

Dominican Adventure I

The east wind was blowing strongly across the little peninsula that juts out across the south coast of the Dominican Republic and is home to the grandly titled Aeropuerto de las Americas, the international hub that serves this half of the island of Hispaniola. We climbed into the alternative car Mr Hertz's representative told us was all that was available. It wasn't the compact we had reserved but it ran, had air conditioning and the diesel engine wasn't too loud, really, and the bench seat wasn't too hard really, and we are adventure travelers after all. So here we were Friday morning, with nowhere to go and nowhere in particular to be. So, do we go to the Five Star Intercontinental and check in, or just... take off?Sabana de la Mar? Sure, why not?

The first thing we ran into was a traffic jam blocking Highway 3 east out of town. Fire fighters were spraying down a large oil spill and all traffic was diverted through narrow side streets. That took a while, me crunching the Isuzu into first gear and revving the industrial diesel into a semblance of active life. After an hour of rumbling down the four lane highway at 60mph (100kph) we ducked into San Pedro Macoris, an industrial town which the Lonely Planet later advised held nothing to excite a tourist. That became painfully obvious; the locals were as shocked by our arrival in their bakery and sandwich shop, as the Lonely Planet was by the idea anyone would be "touring" this old river port and its dilapidated riverside warehouses. To me it smacked of Joseph Conrad and Nostromo, one of his lesser novels and, perversely, among my favorites of his, dealing as it does with Central American chaos.

The open country north from San Pedro wound through cane fields and sunny plains bounded to the north by jagged green mountains. The road was littered with random potholes and cars took to sudden swerves, indicating a particularly toothsome example of hole-in-the-road. A great deal of time we too found ourselves on the wrong side of the road avoiding potholes just like the locals, and when we missed the holes and didn't avoid them and bumped through them, my wife ground her teeth as her recently operated wrist ground itself inside her cast. She continues to amaze me, she is that tough. This whole trip was her idea: why be in pain at home on the couch when you can be in pain on an adventure?

She amazed me all the more as the road took off up the side of the mountains and she groaned not once as we bounced and lurched through holes, over holes, around holes; and where the road was torn all up at random, we just bounced through the jungle. Aside from her injured arm it was totally wild, totally removed from our cozy South Florida world we had been living in at breakfast time. This was the land of stick houses, and donkeys and kids begging by the side of the road. Other kids, the lucky ones had transport to get them to and from their work in the fields. Just two hours from our world, and its a salutary reminder of just how lucky we are to live where we do.

When we were sailing my wife and I had time to adjust to the new worlds we visited over a period of years cruising, but when we drop in on the DR for just four days the culture shock is as striking to us seasoned travelers as it might be to someone seeing the true Third World for the first time. But all this aside, the ardent traveler still needs refreshment, perhaps a splendid view of Samana Bay, an iced carbonated colored water and a fried rissole of ground meat and yucca:

And then, like visitors to the moon we jumped back into our capsule and launched ourselves off again, little the wiser for our encounter with this alien world. More of the same crumbling dirt roads, wild passing antics on the straight stretches, more cane fields and motoconchos, as the motorcycle taxis are called.

They are little 100cc and 125cc two stroke motorcycles by Suzuki and Yamaha and Chinese interlopers, ferrying Dominicans about their daily business on the highways. And so, home to our five star world of satellite TV and $12 pay-per-view movies just two hours away from a world where it might take a week to earn twelve bucks. My mind was reeling as I cranked the air conditioning and looked out from my fifth floor hotel window at Santo Domingo, Holy Sunday, the teeming capital of this contradictory land.

Caribbean Time Shift

What a strange and wonderful wonderful world: wake up in Fort Lauderdale and have lunch on the shores of the Bay of Samana in the Dominican Republic. It was a short two hour flight and we were picking up a rumbly, slow diesel truck for our wheels. On the way down I had looked out the airplane porthole and watched the islands of the Bahamas slide by 5 miles down, Bimini, Andros, Ragged Cays and into a cloud bank faster than I could turn the pages in my book and I thought about all those weeks spent bashing into wind and wave on our boat trying to get as far south as time allowed. A matter of weeks, not minutes!

Then we landed in another world and started driving as usual, and we were in the very Third World of dirt mountain roads, bumping my wife´s wounded arm, passing little stick houses and horses and pigs and pot holes and we reached the only beach in the Dominican Republic that isn´t really a beach, just brown frothing water a very brisk sea breeze and strange fried rissoles for lunch- pictures to follow.

Back over the mountains dodging potholes and into the lobby of our five star world, soothing music, 11 dollar (US) rum punches and all services in three languages.

Very confusing, very stimulating. All in wonderful summery 85 degrees and perpetual sunshine. Sometimes Key West just isn´t warm enough.

On The Road Again

My wife is certifiable. We have to be in Miami tomorrow to get her operated wrist a new cast and she has decided we need to take advantage of a work-free weekend to travel. So Friday morning we leave the ground at Fort Lauderdale and regain sea level two hours later in the capital of the Dominican Republic. She got a couple of cheap tickets, dusted off our passports and loaded up with cash and fresh batteries in the camera. Santo Domingo here we come!

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Meanwhile I was in Key West today and parked my Bonneville in a motorcycle lot next to another machine that has long interested me. Its the tiddly ride in the stable produced by Erik Buell, but in many respects I think it is one of the more interesting.

For somewhere south of five grand you get an ultra low maintenance 500cc single cylinder (half a Harley Davidson engine) motorcycle that has a top speed around 80 mph, shakes like jello and gets 70miles per very expensive gallon. It uses a final drive belt, the engine valves need no adjusting and the fuel and oil are carried low in the frame. Its an easy bike to ride with no chrome to polish and a modest size that makes it easy for smaller riders. The streets of our country should be flooded with these bikes. Too bad Buell doesn't offer decent luggage and a nice windshield to create the ultimate inexpensive commuter for a new century. Don't get me wrong, I love my Bonneville, but the Blast could well live up to its name for lots of riders.