Melatonin

1) Put the little orange flavored pill under your tongue before going to bed the night before you fly.
2)Put the little orange flavored pill under your tongue before sleep on the plane.
3)Put the little orange flavored pill under your tongue the first night in the new time zone.
4) Rent the motorcycle as soon as you arrive at your destination and get riding.
Melatonin- how to overcome jet lag the easy way.

And with just ten days to go before I have to give up this remarkable motorcycle I
have some riding to do. Thats the good news. the bad news is that Italy is going
through a cloudy thundery rainy period this week and my desire to ride this 170 hp
1200R BMW is overwhelming my common sense.

Italy is horribly expensive notwithstanding the exchange rate that has dropped the Euro all
the way down to 1.55 to the dollar. And I haven't even had to add gas to the crotch rocket
yet at $9 to the gallon. The good news is, if I fall off the thing (and it is REALLY fast!)
medical care is free.

Giovanni looks tired and he is looking forward to a few days off, goofing with me.
His wife Rossana is tired too and dispirited by the cramped economy,
the lack of raises and the cost of maintaining and supplying the expanding needs of two teenaged
children. When I visit Terni, in Umbria, and see the reality of provincial Italian life I am reminded of the popular US stereotype of La Dolce Vita and Fellini films which doesn't translate into 21st century reality. It's great to visit though, with a fistful of dollars (even weak ones) and no obligations a all ( my wife's
present is secure already. I know which side my bread is buttered on). I probably shouldn't say it but it does make me more glad than ever that I found the common sense at a young age, to emigrate. That I landed up in the Keys wasjust icing on tha particular cake.

Gotta go find a real cappuccino and a jam filled pastry for breakfast, oh I miss eggs over easy,
and there's a tank full of horribly expensive gas to burn in them thar hills. And this computer sucks eggs. It has a mind of its own.
Aren't vacations great?

Further Moods of Highway One

This post I published originally in July last year, and as I am on vacation here is a repeat from the days I used to ride my Vespa 250 everywhere:

Its closing in on 5pm and that means its time for me to start thinking about pulling it all together for my commute into town. I collect my bag and my lunchbox, slip into my formal going-to-work shoes and head towards the Vespa, which is parked under the house.

I wear an open helmet with goggles, leather gloves and a broad smile as I putter down my street attempting civility at a sedate 25 miles per. Its always a hassle leaving the house, the quiet, the dappled sunlight, the comfort of the arm chair, the books, the radio, the whatever-I-want-to-do-next. The desire to stay is mitigated by the desire to ride, as ridiculous as that sounds.

So off he goes, Snoopy to the Rescue, all I lack is a scarf as my Vespa makes a nice substitute for a dog house. The riding position of the scooter requires a straight back which makes for good posture but its also very comfortable, unlike most motorcycles which usually demand contortions from your arms, and a bottom made of asbestos the seats are so uncomfortable. Burning ass syndrome. Why do we ride motorcycles? Because we like our self image I dare say...

And because we like to skirt complex traffic situations which do arise from time to time in our Florida Keys.

I don't know what backed up the traffic going into Big Pine that day but whatever it was I had the camera with me so I could stop and make some good use of the moment. I have also made some good use of time by poking around the back streets of Big Pine Key, and this at first glance doesn't look like such a bright idea.

Big Pine is so named because of its size, not because of the size of the trees that grow there. Big Pine is also synonymous with down-at-heel stores, landscaping designed and implemented by moles and homesteads apparently occupied by residents who remain firmly convinced despite all evidence to the contrary, that planting a car will grow a new automobile. Nevertheless when Highway One is jammed this is one place in the bottle neck (Matecumbe Keys is another) where you can ride the back roads to avoid the arterial blockages that occasionally hold up traffic in downtown Big Pine.

Its a matter of slipping past the trailers in their lots, darting round long dormant cars, finding the gap in concrete barricades put out with the express purpose of preventing the use of the street as thoroughfares, and eventually making your way to Winn Dixie shopping center. Once there you have outsmarted Highway One, and wasted a fair bit of time too, because the back roads really aren't faster if Highway One is moving at all.

Heading south, past my street, Highway One opens up into a series of long open straightaways, open vista bridges, sweeping curves and occasional businesses, frequently modeled on the Big Pine style of minimum landscaping and maximum neon and plastic.

So, on the ride in to Key West, its a matter of inserting oneself into the traffic flow as best one can and taking the road as it comes. Some days, in summer mostly, especially in the later, hurricane prone months, the traffic gets lighter and the road is a fast run to Stock Island, sometimes even less than 30 minutes followed by a straight shot to work with cooperating traffic lights. In winter the highway becomes an endless stream of snowbirds. God only knows what they are doing on the road during commute hours but they successfully manage to clog the highway and slow everything down, by a few minutes.

The rise of the bridge over Niles Channel gives me the best view of the surrounding waters, in the morning its an apocalyptic vision of a blood-red sun rising through the thunder heads. In the afternoon its the same sun, this time worn out by a day of shining, that blasts into my eyes as I weigh up the chances of passing as we hit the down slope and the dotted yellow lines. (The old Flagler Railway Bridge alongside, vintage 1911, is now a fishing pier).

After the descent into Summerland Village, a mish mash of small businesses including the keys best pizza (Slice of Paradise) and a good video store that keeps us going, we have another quick chance to pass slowpoke cars at the entrance to Cudjoe Key but after that its long straightaways, sweepers and hedges of mangroves broken by bridges, views of the water and then more mangroves, more bridges more water.

The 55mph stretch through the Saddlebunch Keys is always good for a quick cheap passing thrill. If I'm in the mood and there's an end in sight to the traffic I can slide up behind the last car in the line and zip past in one of several dotted yellow line sections with good sight lines.

I think it shocks people to see a "moped" passing them, where a "real" motorcycle would be just a fact of life. Passing with the Vespa does tend to take a bit of planning. I don't do it if the line of vehicles is endless, I see no point in just moving up a few dots in the string. If the cars are doing a real 60 mph in the 55mph zone I also tend to hold back. But if they are dawdling at 50mph, they're dead meat. My dead meat. I hold back, eye the gaps in the cars in front and as the last oncoming vehicle approaches I wind up my gearless 250. I surge up to 70, pass the offending dawdler and tuck myself out of sight on the right hand side of the lane, where I can see past the vehicles in front on the inside of the right hand corners.

And then we get in close to Key West, the four lane opens up and I'm in the fast lane immediately and they think i will be a hindrance on my moped... There's only six miles of four lane, from Big Coppitt and East Rockland, past the Navy base on Boca Chica, through Stock island blending into the urban island) sprawl of North Roosevelt Boulevard in the city.

By the time I'm stuck at the light at the baseball fields I'm 5 minutes from work, so at a red light I pull my sweaty helmet off, stow it with my gloves under my seat and cruise refreshed in to work.

Commuting was never meant to be like this, and for millions it isn't. But for me, even on a rainy day smothered in my rain suit, passing wobbly giant SUV's whose occupants are terrified of water it seems, this is too much like fun. On windy days with gusts of fresh damp air tugging at my sleeves it is supposed to be a nuisance commuting by two wheels. Not for me.

The Internet forums are full of words of caution about small wheeled scooters, words that should fill me with dread on the crusty, tattered surface of the highway with its holes and its bounce and its patches and its dips. My Vespa eats the miles like they were velvet and my back shows neary a complaint. Not even when I'm riding my wife's 150cc Vespa with its modest 10-inch wheels- and it hits 65mph easily!

Railroad To Pale

Another rebroadcast, my favorite story from our Balkan journey by rental car in the Summer of 2007:

This was not what I expected when we turned off the main road, and started driving confidently into the narrow valley off the main road from Gorazde. We were on our way to Sarajevo, but my mind was full of the civil war that had ended 12 years ago and I could clearly see a narrow winding strip of white on the map, a road that led to Pale, the former capital of the breakaway Republica Srpska,the homeland desired by the formerly genocidal Serbs.

Gorazde, seen above, was a Bosnian-Muslim outpost surrounded by Serbs in the civil war, but nowadays bolstered by European Union money it is a prosperous little town on a sunny July afternoon.

The road we were on was not following the dictates of the map and it was deteriorating rapidly into little more than a goat track. We climbed up the valley on a narrow twisting road. The sun made itself visible shining on the greenery high up the granite walls of the valley but down on the road we were deep in shadow.

We came to a steel bridge crossing the river, a fast flowing, boulder-strewn cut through the mountains. The bridge had seen some rough use and the metal plates were buckled in an abstract, interesting way. I plunged onto it lest we start thinking too hard and the heavily laden station wagon bounced as the wheels dropped into a cleft between the plates.

"Er, " Layne gurgled as the car lurched. I kept driving, it was too late now. We scrambled off the end of the bridge onto the roadway and I focused on the fact that other vehicles must use this structure too...

We passed a logging mill, wood piled up outside a classic stone and brick Balkan house with a pointy red tile roof and the road that wound close past the front door. A boy sat on a stack of fresh planks, a dog licked its paws and ignored us as we droned past. The trees closed in and the road waggled its way along the edge of the river. Until we reached the gate.

Somehow we had found some sort of power station, possibly a hydro-electric plant or something, nestled in the woods, guarded by a lonely man in a sentry booth. He let us turn around and when I asked : "Pale?" (In the local lingo pronounced "Pah- lay?") he replied in rapid fire Bosniak and I understood nothing except his hand pointing backwards.

It all came clear as we turned in the parking lot of the power station and headed back to the mill. There we noticed a little cardboard sign, hand written: "Pale Something" which I took to mean "Pale this Way" in cardboard English. We looked at each other and, saying nothing, I turned the wheel and our eager Ford Fusion scrambled up the bank onto the narrow dirt road.

At least, it looked like a road, at first; then we met this...

And then the penny dropped. This was a railroad line and apparently long disused by the trains but still in use as a road. Weird! Cool! We're on the road to Pale. Not waiting for my wife's radiating disapproval to slow us down I kept my foot on the gas and we rumbled into the tunnel.

The first one was a short one and that made it easier to get into the second one which also was short and we could see daylight seconds after starting into the gloom. The third tunnel was much longer, and darker and damper. It gave me shivers as we penetrated the darkness with tendrils of damp sliding down the walls, potholes large enough to reduce our speed to a slow walk and barely enough width to allow us to open a door and get out. that I figured would be a killer if we got a flat...

"What if we meet someone coming the other way?" my wife asked with a half giggle.

"Buggered if I know," I muttered, swinging wide to avoid a hole of particular dimensions. "Lets hope they know how to back." We kept on rumbling, the diesel engine growling in low gear.
"What's that?" she said, cocking her head.

"That, " I said with a sinking feeling , " is our opportunity to figure out who knows how best to back up."

Suddenly their headlights were upon us. A moped lurched out of the darkness and without waiting for me to engage reverse streamed past my door and buzzed out of sight towards the light. Like we weren't even there. Which would have been okay if there wasn't a compact car following close behind him.

I sighed and twisted in my seat and started backing.

I must have gone 50 yards and I'm proud to note without faltering. We pulled to one side and the graceless hulks inside the car flashed us a glare that said if looks could kill we would have been incinerated, and in a flash they were gone, my friendly wave frozen in mid air as though petrified.

And so we gave it a second shot, this time with complete success we popped out at the other end of a tunnel that curved in the middle and must have been 200 yards long, at least. maybe more. it felt longer, I will say that.

The road to Pale came out of the tunnel and coasted alongside the river for a distance, dappled sunlight playing on the trees overhead, the mountain looming over us and still cutting off the lowering sun, for it was close to 6 pm as we drove along the railbed.

"Does this seem like a good idea?" My wife asked after a couple of minutes of silence.
"Umm," I replied. The thought had been occurring to me that we might not be headed towards anything good. Pale had been home to the gruesome killers of Ratko Mladic, the "hero" of the Bosnian-Serb militias. These were the people famous for the slaughter of Srebrenica and the torture by sniper fire over Sarajevo. Pale was their headquarters where they planned the reduction of the Bosnian Muslim capital city. As we bounced along the railroad track with no end in sight ( another quick tunnel) I was mulling over the wisdom of following this trail to nowhere.

I imagined us arriving in some Carmen-like bandit camp high in the mountains and stepping out of our Austrian registered car with weak smiles on our faces and then being lost forever to the rest of humanity. Just two more mounds of dirt in a country littered still with mass graves. It was not a pleasant picture.

"Do you think we should turn back?" I asked.
"Only if you do," she temporized.
"Um, " I temporized.
This trail had probably been pressed into service during the war to connect Pale to the rest of the Serb-held Western Bosnia. Now it was probably just a short-cut across the mountains for a few hardcore people who really want the Federation of Bosnia Herzegovina split into two, or three parts.

In any event we stopped, we took pictures, we turned around. I was ready to not keep going, we knew the rail bed went somewhere, and we didn't want to arrive in the dark, or get stuck in the dark and Pale was there somewhere ahead, on a proper paved road, I was pretty sure. This track led to Pale but through God knows who's back yard.

The relief in the Ford was palpable as we back'ed and forth'ed and got facing the way we'd come.
"I expect those guys who passed us called ahead and now the bandits are waiting for us."
"Long wait," I said. We passed the long tunnel, and two more and finally found the sawmill, dropped onto the pavement, crossed the funky bridge , went back down the valley, turned left on the main road away from Gorazde and took the long way round the mountain.

Pale was easily accessible by main road and a drab, down-at-heel town it was too, about as threatening as a page from a history book. 'The banality of evil' was all I could think as I checked the Soviet style apartment blocks and the hurrying hunched pedestrians on their way to nowhere. We drove through, not stopping, and went on our way to Sarajevo and a night in America at the Holiday Inn. We wanted service with a smile and a pretense that outside the door lay midwestern suburbia in all its unthreatening glory. We got a Lego building inhabited by surly Slavs instead. The good ole USA was still a long way away.

We were a little tired and stressed by the Balkans at this point.

How To Drink A Coconut

A few months ago Sears delivered me a new fridge and the deliverymen were a couple of seasoned Jamaicans who pushed and pulled the fridge up the stairs into the house on stilts I call home. I call it my tree house because the stilts put the windows on the leaf level of the abundant mature trees that grow around my home. The deliverymen were impressed by my nut collection. I saw greed in their eyes and offered them as many as they could take. They literally leaped at the offer and in addition to money they took bunches of coconuts home as a tip. I'm not sure which pleased them most.

I've seen people selling coconuts to Key West visitors, and they charge a pretty penny to give someone one of God's own coconuts with a straw stuck out the top. Here's a way to save a buck or two, and learn some self reliance as the housing market forces your food budget into the toilet (so to speak).

First, pop downstairs and pick up your machete, make sure its sharp and ready for work. Your curved Tibetan machete isn't much good for this kind of cutting as the point will hit the ground. To open coconuts you need the American traditional straight blade, and you might want to keep the blade sharp with a whetstone (the blue and white thing in the picture). Then collect your long handled tree trimmer, unless you fancy climbing the trees like people seen on National Geographic, and head for one of your very productive coconut trees. Remember coconuts are not native to the Keys, they were imported for food originally and now people grow them because they are what people expect to see in the (sub)tropics. They want coconuts, not scrubby thatch palms and the like, its what they expect to see on an exotic vacation. Palm trees are so called because the first European visitors to see them though they looked like human palms waving in the breeze. Very ethnocentric I'm sure. In the 19th century coconuts were farmed on plantations because they were the sheep of the plant world. From a coconut you could get oil, copra (the mat-like stuff that comes off from around the hard nut): And naturally the flesh of the nut itself:Here's where you start:

Put the nut on the ground bottom end to the side and start whacking the copra soft shell: Peel the outer skin off and then crack the hard inner nut. Hack a small hole in the hard shell and gently poke a hole with the tip of your machete:Put the opening to your mouth and drink. Repeat until the liquid gives you the runs.

I have tried catching it in a glass and adding rum and ice cubes but on the whole I like it best straight out of the nut. Then put the nut in your yard waste can and get it off to the dump as nuts go moldy and never seem to break down. Alternatively wait for a hurricane to blow by and let the flooding wash them all away. Dried copra makes an excellent barbeque fire, by the way, when the temperature drops below zero (70 fahrenheit).

Coconuts and fish may be a bland and tiresome diet but its what you eat when the cash runs out and you live in the fabulous Florida Keys. For all I know they do something similar in Minnesota too, but that would be another story.

Electronic Meltdown

So, I went to New Mexico last weekend and I put the blog on autopilot, I wrote the essays before I left Key West and scheduled them for publication while I was away- a new feature offered by Blogger and it worked perfectly, posting on time while I was hamming it up with Bruce and Celia and their hell hounds in Santa Fe. It was a test run for these next two weeks when I am taking my annual vacation and going to Italy for some family visits and a motorcycling celebration of my oldest friend's 50th birthday. Giovanni and I grew up together riding mopeds around the Umbrian hills and we still try to get together every year and go for a motorcycle ride. So I was all set to write up some Florida essays and get them ready for posting while I was gone. I even bought a new camera for the trip as my old Nikon had been dropped one time too many and was starting to creak and groan...that was when my laptop died. There is a virus seizing the machine and we've sent it off for repair or replacement.

This fiasco struck in the wake of all my other recent catastrophes, major and minor. The air conditioning dying, and that was repaired within a few days making the house habitable. The propane nearly ran out and was promptly refilled by Suburban Propane exactly as promised. It rained so the cistern got some water back and we are off the aqueduct again. The camera is replaced as mentioned, and I've got new luggage for the Italian trip after American Airlines first lost and then trashed my suitcase on our flight home from Albuquerque... and I've replaced my toolbox man purse with a neat new backpack with shoulder straps and everything. I'm ready for anything! And then my glasses frame snaps in two while I'm polishing a lense at 3 in the morning! GRrft#$%^&! And what are the odds my opticians in Key West will have a frame in stock compatible for my lenses? I guess I'm traveling with my spares on my nose. When will this streak of breakages and failures end? Rude words.

Anyway I apologize in advance as I know some people have come to expect a new tropical essay as part of their routines and I am unable to update the blog properly as planned. So what I have done as a compromise is pull up a few of my favorite older essays and re-routed them for self publication while I am in Italy. They should pop up approximately every other day and I hope they will tide people over till I get back mid June and things get back to normal. My wife has promised there will be a working lap top at home by then. The first re-run comes up tomorrow and I leave for Italy on Tuesday.

I have found writing the blog to be very relaxing and I have missed being able to get online at home. I have lots of essay ideas I've had to put on hold and I will get on with them when I get back. With a new much improved camera to boot. I'm very excited about the quality of night photography possible with the Canon, I experimented in Santa Fe and the pictures were very sharp. Key West By Night pictures should be outstanding when I can, once again start downloading (Grrr!). One piece of good news (touch wood) the Bonneville is running fine and I will miss it while I am in Italy whoring around with a rented BMW. I will only be unfaithful to my Triumph through force of circumstances (no Triumphs for rent in the entire city of Terni apparently). A man has to do etc.

TTFN (Ta Ta For Now).

The Beauty of Palms

There is a stereotype that equates a palm tree with the most desirable beaches in the most exotic locations, places where the rest of us go to escape the dreary reality of life. Palm trees are symbols of vacation in the tropics. Palm trees are cool, especially at night.

Park the Bonneville under a street lamp shaded by a spreading palm and the resulting picture takes on the qualities of some place far from Key West, where trees grow tall and banana palms thatch palaces. Its just the parking lot at Banana Bay Resort. And the resort's office looks out of this world behind its palm facade:Across the street the boring old Fairfield Inn, a chain hotel of epic architectural conformity looks magnificent with its splendid growth:I took a lunch break to check out Key Cove, a funky little street off North Roosevelt which allows some few people access to a canal, like those of us lucky enough to live in suburban out islands in the Lower Keys. But the moon was obscured and I couldn't see anything and could photograph even less. So I took some pictures out of boredom and I saw the Banana Bay become someplace else in my camera:This is the landscape occupied by Graham Greene's Quiet American, a place of heat and intrigue, of broken promises and heart breaking diseases, a place where life is lived like an onion, layer after layer of secrets need to be unpeeled to get to the nub of whatever the issue appears to be. The banality of a Key West hotel becomes the stuff of movie scripts. How cool is that? And all thanks to the humble palm tree.
I go home to that suburban home I was just referring to, and even from the top of the Niles Channel bridge it is invisible. Not just because its so small (around 800 square feet-72 square meters) but because the original owners who built the house in 1987 added trees, and look at them now:I have my own grove of coconut palms, and what a tremendous amount of work they are too! Each tree produces a vast number of coconuts in continuation all year long and alongside them we get tons of fronds which I hack with a machete to fit them in the bins for the garden waste mulching program at the landfill. Coconuts are not native to the Keys, which may come as a surprise, but they prized because they set the right tone for the islands. The fiction is that the Keys are tropical ( they are sub-tropical as they lie North of the Tropic of Cancer), that they are in the mythical Caribbean Sea (The Keys are in the South Atlantic- the Caribbean laps the south shores of Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, the islands known as the Greater Antilles), so ever since tourism took off these lumpy rocky islands have started to sprout palm trees to dress the islands up for the role of tourist haven; because Palm Trees spell Exotic Relaxation.

My neighbor keeps a vacation home vacant most of the year but his palace is shaded by these same trees which give his place the requisite vacationing air:I have wondered for a long time why palms are called palms and the answer I got for my troubles was that the trees appear to look like human palms with fingers extended, especially when the breezes blow and the trees sway back and forth. It sounds pretty stupid to me, but I've met no better explanation for how they got their name. And so they grow, like the clappers come rain or drought, sunshine or shade. Amazing plants and vastly underrated in those sickly advertisements for vacations and liquor and... all that other stuff. Respect your palm trees, oh vacationer and doff your hat to these remarkable survivors of all that nature can throw at them.