I'm off today so I'm not riding to work but I would be, as usual, were I on tonight. So today is the day for a backroad ramble. 
Sunny days! I remember them well! I was moved to take a few pictures of State Road 4A along it's Ramrod Key incarnation last week, before the endless summer rains seemed to set in permanently and i got by chance a few sunny outdoor pictures... It happened that I was listening to the radio (that happens a lot in my TV-less home) and I heard there was a dispute going on in Marathon, some 25 miles north of my house over ownership of a stretch of State Road 4A. That caught my attention because I knew SR4A is split between several islands in the Lower Keys, indeed I wrote an essay about the section on Little Torch Key recently, but I had no idea the road also surfaced in Marathon. In Ramrod it has pretentions to pretty leafiness:
If it seems weird that Monroe County might give up the right-of-way on a stretch of State Road to a local business, it shouldn't. The majority of our county commissioners are so half witted they don't know how to be corrupt, they're just astonishingly stupid. And I'm not someone who "hates politicians" because I'd rather eats worms than run for public office and in a functioning democracy it takes people with guts to stand for election. So at some level I admire their nerve. But this lot are so dim, it makes me wonder who elected them in a county as eclectic and opinionated at this one. Anyway parts of State Road 4A in Marathon are in private hands (!), but not on Ramrod Key where it is a public street:
Change comes slowly around here sometimes and recycling is still an art that is not fully understood. However trash comes in heaps! The Keys recycle less than seven percent of the trash stream, where even mainland Florida gets nearly a quarter recycled.
Sunny days! I remember them well! I was moved to take a few pictures of State Road 4A along it's Ramrod Key incarnation last week, before the endless summer rains seemed to set in permanently and i got by chance a few sunny outdoor pictures... It happened that I was listening to the radio (that happens a lot in my TV-less home) and I heard there was a dispute going on in Marathon, some 25 miles north of my house over ownership of a stretch of State Road 4A. That caught my attention because I knew SR4A is split between several islands in the Lower Keys, indeed I wrote an essay about the section on Little Torch Key recently, but I had no idea the road also surfaced in Marathon. In Ramrod it has pretentions to pretty leafiness:If it seems weird that Monroe County might give up the right-of-way on a stretch of State Road to a local business, it shouldn't. The majority of our county commissioners are so half witted they don't know how to be corrupt, they're just astonishingly stupid. And I'm not someone who "hates politicians" because I'd rather eats worms than run for public office and in a functioning democracy it takes people with guts to stand for election. So at some level I admire their nerve. But this lot are so dim, it makes me wonder who elected them in a county as eclectic and opinionated at this one. Anyway parts of State Road 4A in Marathon are in private hands (!), but not on Ramrod Key where it is a public street:Change comes slowly around here sometimes and recycling is still an art that is not fully understood. However trash comes in heaps! The Keys recycle less than seven percent of the trash stream, where even mainland Florida gets nearly a quarter recycled.On Ramrod Key State Road 4A is simply a street that parallels the Overseas Highway for the one mile length of the island. It's the back door to the surprising number of businesses that have sprung up on this, the least remarkable of the Lower Keys islands. The road dead ends into mangroves at each end. At the southernmost the mangroves are a little thinner and one can see water and catch a glimpse of the Torch Keys on the horizon.
At the north end I parked my wife's Vespa underneath the familiar red sign that indicates, on pretty much all the side roads off the Highway, that you've run out of road:
In between there are a number of businesses that are better known than Ramrod key itself. Boondocks, the bar and restaurant has the Keys' only putt putt golf course and not terribly prepossessing is it from the rear:
The same goes for Five Brothers Two, the suburban incarnation of the well known Cuban deli on Southard Street in Key West:
Unlike the original store downtown this one has an enclosed lanai area to eat your food in peace away from the mosquitoes, but being as how its in back of the store it is what it is. Also, unlike the Southard Street place this one was designed with a certain lack of panache, even seen from the front:
They are closed during the month of July but otherwise this is the best place to get a To Go meal break between Key West and Miami. And them's fighting words, I guess.
State road 4A is also residential with the usual mix of stilts, CBS and weird mailboxes. Rent around here for a two bedroom might be around $1200-$1600 a month depending on the usual stuff, canal access etc:
There is also a surprising amount of light industry on Ramrod Key, a nursery, a vet, a car mechanic or two, construction yards and even a welding shop to my surprise:
The Keys are always pitched as this place that more closely resembles paradise than real living but even here there are lots of people pursuing the American dream of self reliance and taking pleasure in running a business doing something they like. It's messy and doesn't quite fit with the image propagated by the "hospitality industry" but these people are tenacious. Leo set up a car detailing business on a spare corner of land:
And I use these storage lockers when hurricanes threaten, to store our powered two wheelers in, if they have any spare lockers I can rent for a quick clean week:
Usually they have something available as people tend to accumulate too much stuff even here where houses are small and land is expensive. GFS, Gordon Food Service has a store in Key West and apparently stages its trailers here. When I worked days I saw the truck driver hitching his rig together at four in the morning when I took my pre-dawn bicycle ride. I always wondered where he was going at that hour:
There are billboards grandfathered in along the islands and one is unhappily here on Ramrod, in this case advertising a Belgian brand of beer you may have heard of:
And then at the south end of Ramrod where the road ends in a red triangle there is a major construction company yard, all industrial and everything but still decorated by the de facto symbol of the Keys:
The road runs straight and true of course one does need to be careful as at one point it is sinking:
Though most of it isn't:
Key West Diary: keeping it real on the backroads.
There is also a surprising amount of light industry on Ramrod Key, a nursery, a vet, a car mechanic or two, construction yards and even a welding shop to my surprise:The Keys are always pitched as this place that more closely resembles paradise than real living but even here there are lots of people pursuing the American dream of self reliance and taking pleasure in running a business doing something they like. It's messy and doesn't quite fit with the image propagated by the "hospitality industry" but these people are tenacious. Leo set up a car detailing business on a spare corner of land:And I use these storage lockers when hurricanes threaten, to store our powered two wheelers in, if they have any spare lockers I can rent for a quick clean week:Usually they have something available as people tend to accumulate too much stuff even here where houses are small and land is expensive. GFS, Gordon Food Service has a store in Key West and apparently stages its trailers here. When I worked days I saw the truck driver hitching his rig together at four in the morning when I took my pre-dawn bicycle ride. I always wondered where he was going at that hour:There are billboards grandfathered in along the islands and one is unhappily here on Ramrod, in this case advertising a Belgian brand of beer you may have heard of:And then at the south end of Ramrod where the road ends in a red triangle there is a major construction company yard, all industrial and everything but still decorated by the de facto symbol of the Keys:The road runs straight and true of course one does need to be careful as at one point it is sinking:Though most of it isn't:Key West Diary: keeping it real on the backroads.
New Town is not the part of Key West visitors flock to but wasn't I surprised to spot a Conch train last Wednesday taking a handful of tourists up Kennedy Drive in the heart of the Conchs' Key West. I guess I'm not paying attention because I had no idea they cruised the middle of New Town. I know they have their depot, what they call a "roundhouse" in railroad parlance, on Flagler at George Streets, but that's for mechanics and bean counters, not riders:
The thing about New Town is that even though it isn't a hundred years old, even though it isn't historic it still manages to exude a Key West air by including odd architectural details or decorative motifs that don't belong in just any American suburb. New Town is where the Conchs fled after they sold their nasty wooden huts near the harbor to a bunch of crazy (gay) outsiders who overpaid badly for those cramped little homes. So, with the advent of cheap air conditioning the old timers built nice modern (soulless?) shopping malls and built themselves some ranchette style American Dream homes nearby and lined them up alongside straight wide streets, similar in all respects to Staples Avenue:
And now, fifty years later New Town is old and has its funky corners just like before. Its where one goes to escape the crowding of Duval Street. Staples Avenue Bridge, a footpath and bicycle route only, which crosses the 10th Street Canal, is deserted predictably enough at 3 am, except for my Vespa. The city promised this bridge for years to cyclists who wanted a way over the canal that avoided the heavy traffic of Flagler Avenue. Predictably the city took a long while to get around to it. The best part was some dude who kept writing in to the Citizen's Voice every month sarcastically reminding the city of it's failure to come through. After the bridge was built, the Doubting Thomas was never heard from again, not even aword of thanks, but his place in the newspaper column was taken by the neighbors whining endlessly about the "dangerous" increase in bicycle traffic along Staples Avenue. Predictably enough everyone is used to the bridge and all whining has stopped:
When the creature from the black lagoon failed to materialise I got on the wife's ET4 Vespa, filling in for the bald-tired Triumph this week, and crossed Flagler Avenue for a look at a few places that seem to gain depth, as it were, at night. The Presbyterian Peace Covenant church is another of those vaguely Polynesian looking buildings that seem to have been favored in the 1950s and '60s around here:
This place shouldn't be confused with the soup kitchen at Grace Lutheran up the street where they feed the poor who have a regrettable tendency to squabble while supping. The soup kitchen got whacked pretty badly by Hurricane Wilma in 2005 and their church collapsed like a wet house of cards after the storm. Which illustrates another thing about New Town. This place used to be uninhabited because the early settlers snagged that part of the island more impervious to what forecasters delight in labelling "weather events." Old sometimes is better, especially when faced with the prospect of a citywide hurricane flood. Across the street is a large billboard that I find rather intrusive on Flagler Avenue, big yellow and in your face every time you ride by:
I know little about school shenanigans but the Auditorium is a great new addition to Key West's list of locales to see concerts and attend performances in winter when Culture rears its head on the island. Personally I find the High School, open and unfenced, to be the perfect symbol of small town Key West. I hear big city schools rejoice in the use of scanning machines and security devices to check admission to campus, procedures sure to instill self respect and trust among the student body. Even in this town people complain (in the Voice!) about kids and their manners all the time but I find Key's kids to be polite and respectful almost universally. Another old fashioned pleasure of living here. 
Very festive. Next to the corner store there is a mysterious building which I have never ever seen open, not even when I had the misfortune to drive a congenitally defective VW Microbus. This building does no business that I know of, yet has never been taken over or altered through the decades of mad development. Spooky, or possibly encouraging:
And because the little hand is at 40 and the big hand is heading towards the four its time to get back to the star ship and take up the business of dispatching police once again. Hop on the Vespa, take a left at the green light and a right on Leon Street a few blocks down Flagler:
Me and my bad ass ride- I own New Town at three in the morning and don't you forget it.
Hurricane Bertha is wandering the Atlantic as I write, a Category One storm that 
Ansel Adams shot this picture, more or less, of the back of the church of San Geronimo:
The important food photographed with the main plaza and the church in the far background.
And we got a teapot drum, modestly sized for our modest little home. Here too Phillip Martinez was happy to be photographed:
And with our purchases they took time in this tourist low season to talk a little about their lives, which was fascinating to a degree I had not imagined. These are people who have traveled, studied, got degrees and have known the world outside the Pueblo and New Mexico itself. The worst of it was hearing how hard it was years ago for an Indian to make a living in the world outside. Not so long ago to be a Native American was to not be accepted in America. And so they do their crafts and hope to do better than subsist. Some do it with humor:
But it was difficult to admire these award winning artists and realise they were here because their hopes of professional careers in the outside world were dashed because they were Indians. Had I been denied in the same way I might have been a tad more testy about the whole thing. Naturally we wandered like tourist stereotypes ourselves, our wives shopping and browsing...
...while Bruce and I sat on a bench in the main square in companionable manly silence, possibly exhaustion, and watched the comings and goings of the Pueblo:
Another of the rules about the Pueblo includes not to piss or throw trash in the river that runs through the middle of the community, which seems reasonable enough on the face of it, and sparkling it was too in the high altitude (7200 feet) sunshine. They say they get their water from this open stream which seems a little surprising in this day and age. When I was a kid down on the farm I happily drank stream water but it always gurgled up from some dark safe place underground and came out of a familiar pipe. It was not open to God and everybody like this, but lacking plumbing this is what they have to use:
The Indians of Taos Pueblo make a lot of rules about religious ceremonies and secret rituals that an unbeliever and sceptic like me would mess up entirely were I to witness them. The residents themselves seem pretty easy going about these strictures which luckily don't happen to interfere with commerce at all. taos Pueblo is full of people and activity and cars and in no way resenbles a cloister. I suppose there is a compensation factor at work, after centuries of interference you've got to have a secret club with initiations and passwords to make it worth while to be a member. Nevertheless St Jerome's Catholic Church (San Geronimo in Espanol) is the prominent structure in the Pueblo and does not conflict, they say with the ancient and complex Indian rituals. Which include bans on running water and electricity apparently. I find these limitations bizarre but like the photography rules I see no reason to violate them. Personally I love flush toilets and electrical outlets and value them everyday as tools for a more civilized life. I can't believe there is a God that frowns on their use, but what do I know.
The round dome is a traditional oven or Horno in Spanish:
Eventually the shopping came to an end and we found our way back to the car and the open road beckoned:
Needless to say my mind was on the Bonneville as we drove the winding mountain roads. Bruce has bought a BMW 650 since i was there so at least someone I know is enjoying these roads on two wheels, as they were meant to be ridden. Outside the Pueblo it's okay for people to live with electricity and plumbing and they take advantage of the slackness of modern living in their modest farm houses:
Luckily for us we were in time for a late lunch at the local eatery a couple of miles outside the Pueblo:
the food was okay, American staples offered on fry bread instead of hamburger buns, but I did step outside the collective comfort zone as i always do when presented with something weird on the menu, and I ordered a cup of atole, which the shy young waitress endeavored to describe. Words failed her rather as they do me. Here's a picture:
It's some sort of mild blue corn concoction which needs a fair bit of sugar to give it flavor. Its sort of gritty like a very thin gruel but not in the least offensive. Atole and a kruller- breakfast of champions. While we were lunching a young couple came in and propped their offspring on the counter and started a conversation with the waitress and her mother, the cook. I thought they were family members but by dint of listening they were apparently complete strangers, just curious about Indian cooking.
It's at times like these you learn how really shy you are compared to some brazen people! Oh well. 
Rather inadequate souvenirs of the oldest continuously occupied structure in the US. And they won't even notice if the lights go out, for the rest of us.