East Hollandes Cays. San Blas, Panama, Thanksgiving 1999.We got a dog shortly after we got married. My wife started to get faxes at work (we didn't use the Internet in those days if you can imagine) and pictures of dogs started to appear. We went to the pound and I found Emma, scheduled to be executed Sunday because her three weeks in isolation were up and her kennel cough wouldn't go away. It was Friday evening and I left her in jail to return Saturday to save her. We lived together for almost 14 years. we sailed together too:
On passage Mexico to El Salvador. 1999After we'd had Emma Goldman for a while, a neighbor's dog came visiting while we were gardening at our Santa Cruz, California home one summer afternoon and he flopped in my wife's lap. Eugene Debs belonged to a neighborhood teenager (he called him "Bullet") whose single mother was exhausted and hated us for loving her dog more than she did. Eventually they agreed he was better off with us than with them and Emma Goldman got her soul mate Eugene Debs. They were inseparable till he died five years later of liver cancer. 
Sea of Cortez, Baja California, Mexico November 1998.
Sea of Cortez, Baja California, Mexico November 1998.We decided to take off sailing in our Gemini catamaran and clearly we weren't going to be crossing the South Pacific not least because the distances are vast, requiring weeks at sea. Then when one arrives on some micro-speck in the middle of nowhere... every single country except the French Islands (and Palau, oddly) enforce an animal quarantine prior to entry...besides we speak Spanish so Central America was our goal, by default. The dogs? They had to come too of course. So off we went, leaving Santa Cruz, California in August 1998, bound for Key West.
Cuba's North Coast Inside The Reef. February 2000It was tough sailing with two large dogs for a number of reasons. The Pacific Ocean is enormous, stretching ten thousand miles at it's widest and this distance, even when one isn't crossing it, produces a monstrous swell that crashes on American beaches in huge curling waves. Landing the dogs was an operation constantly fraught with peril. We tried to seek out coves and bays where we could find a quiet spot to rush the dinghy ashore with a chance of landing safely. Our arrival in the Caribbean after transiting the Canal was a relief as even though sailing weather got tougher there was the prospect of much easier beach landings.
Approaching Miraflores Locks, Panama, Summer 1999The other thing about sailing with dogs is that they hate peeing on the boat and we tried to re-train them to go in the cockpit or on the deck- anywhere! They resolutely refused. Thus we tried to keep our hops as short as possible making it tough to drift under light winds and take our time. each passage was carefully timed requiring the use of the engine every time our speed dropped. Landings in new countries required we find a quiet spot to anchor first so the dogs could get ashore and relieve themselves so that later when we waited for customs they could snooze, relaxed and relieved on the boat. Frequently in anchorages we found ourselves going ashore no matter what the weather to walk the dogs while our neighbors snugged down below decks and watched in wonder as we tramped around amusing our animals.
Rinsing Debs Off. Cuba February 2000The other thing was we had to sail with a watermaker. We had a six gallon per hour (24 liter) machine that made fresh water from salt consuming a fair bit of our meager electric supply. We used the water to rinse the dogs every time they came back on board from any trip ashore. We also cooled them off with fresh water sprays on hot days. Once a week they got proper baths with Head and Shoulders shampoo which kept them smelling fresh. People will tell you wondrous things about pet husbandry, like showers and chocolate are bad for dogs but ours thrived on both. Then again they thrived on sailing.
On The Beach For Maintenance. Costa Rica Spring 1999 The truth is Debs hated sailing and Emma wasn't too keen either. Debs slept during passages curled up under the table in the main cabin or in my wife's arms in bed. Emma slept in the cockpit where the motion was less. But they both adored arriving and they had the time of their lives. I met another couple with a German Shepherd and they were extremely fussy about letting their dog off leash. I gave up early on with the leash fetish. Mexicans think leashed dogs are fierce ("Bravo?" They'd asked fearfully) and if i walked these two monsters on leash they'd empty sidewalks for blocks. So we let them ramble at our heels and what they found and ate they ate. We tried to be philosophical about it. Someone remonstrated with us once as Emma snacked on gutter food and I said: "Do you want to put your hand in there and get it out?" They thrived as did we on street food, though ours was paid for...We never got a stomach ailment nor did our dogs.
Emma Was Always Hungry. Miki G's cabin. Somewhere.We carried four twenty-pound bags of dry dog food and discovered Pedigree was available everywhere in Central America. It wasn't the organic frou frou food found in the US but it did fine for them. We had tremendous adventures in thirteen different countries, riding buses, renting cars, visiting cities and sites all over the place. The dogs swan in Lake Aititlan, Guatemala, in Lake Nicaragua and Lake Miraflores, Panama. Debs loves to chase monkeys in their trees and crabs on the beaches. Emma sat in the surf cooling off while he ran himself ragged in the tropical heat. Every landing was an exhausting marathon of dog walking.
I don't write much about our dogs. Debs has been dead about seven years and Emma three but I find thinking about them still painful. We kept on keeping on after Debs came down suddenly with cancer, and I saw with my own eyes how Emma mourned him for a year, sad and lonely and nothing I could do would cheer her up.
Emma And Our Solar Panel. Gun Cay, Bahamas. Spring 2003Emma got old, happily for me, but our last trip to the Bahamas was too much and she suffered frightening heat stroke seizures. We sold the boat and installed our love in a house where she tottered gamely through her final years to the inevitable appointment with the vet's needle. I'm starting to miss cruising again after several years away from sailing, but not a day goes by I don't think of Emma and Debs and our crazy adventures in Central America. One day perhaps I will be able to write about them without feeling them so much. For now I keep them stored in my head where they float around threatening still to cause me pain when I think about how much I miss Emma and Debs.
Miki G, Gemini 105, Hull Number 529, Warderick Wells, Bahamas.My current fantasy is to get a small cheap boat and take off some February for six months drifting through the Bahamas. I want a relaxed cruise next time, not a marathon, and if I can't have Emma and Debs along for crew I don't want to go with a dog. Not next time, not until I can get over how glorious was the time we four spent together, and how unrepeatable.
Calais Lane crosses three blocks, from Amelia to United streets and it is a real weirdo of a street. At the Amelia end it looks like this more or less:
The fashionable refurbished home with the pink shutters is on Amelia and so far the lane looks fairly normal. But here it follows its own outlandish pattern. 
The cyclist is actually riding on the bank parking lot and Calais Lane is hidden behind the low white wall, like this:
The First State Bank on Simonton Street has a large parking lot:
Calais Lane itself isn't really residential (someone will pop up and say that of course they spent most of the 70's on Calais Lane in a drug induced haze, just to prove me wrong!) but there are houses nearby:
They've also just built a new pocket park alongside the lane. These little gardens have been popping up all over town, but this one is still a little sparsely decorated:
The plan is for a facade of a cigar factory worker's home to be erected inside the park. This location was the site of worker housing for the nearby Gato cigar factory, which is now county offices on Simonton Street. This area was known as Gatoville thanks to the high proportion of Gato's dependants who lived here before the cigar factories decamped and went north to Tampa. I guess Key west was expensive even in those days. Who knows maybe a hundred years ago these two youngsters could have been cigar workers wending their way home down United Street: 
Dion's is actually a fairly innocuous chain of inconvenience stores in the Lower Keys offering the usual mish mash of convenience items at inconvenient prices, but Dion's has a very special arrow in it's quiver.
This particular store is on the corner of Truman and White in Key West, located at the Citgo gas station:
Gas prices have been coming down in the Keys like they have everywhere else though in the city gas isn't as low as it might be; it never is. It's a bone of contention that Key West prices are generally 20 or more cents higher than elsewhere in the Lower Keys:
And the Chevron across the street follows suit, or vice versa:
I've heard rumors the Chevron might be changing hands and become something else but that's a noise that's been floating around for a while and so far nothing has changed, except they got a mobile seafood vendor on their lot. But this isn't an essay about fresh fish (I've done that one too lately), this is about chicken.
Walk in and turn left and there it is heaps and piles of fried goodness. Well, not actually goodness so much as stuff that tastes pretty darn good. I am probably going to get a talking to when my wife gets around to reading this but with any luck it won't be until next week as the weekend looks pretty busy. She's a bit fussy about what I'm supposed to eat and fried chicken isn't on the list.
They offer combinations of fried chicken wings, legs and breasts. Some people prefer wings because they have more crispy coating and less meat but for the purposes of this demonstration, strictly for the camera I ordered a single breast. Which cost me just under $2.50. I repaired to the Triumph for a quick demonstration of how to eat a Dion's chicken breast:
There are a couple of things you need to know about Dion's chicken if you are an amateur. I have seen grilled breasts at the Stock island store on Highway One and they do taste good without the artery clogging deep fried effect, but if you are a Dion's novice, fried chicken is the way to go. A well fried breast is a work of art, crispy outside, moist inside but properly cooked all the way through. No salmonella thanks:
I carry my own utensils, of course though Dion's does offer the plastic kind along with paper napkins, which I usually forget to pick up. Personally I eat this stuff with my fingers, trying not to burn myself if the meat is just out of the fryer. The best Dion's is obviously the fresh stuff and sometimes you can get a cooled rubbery chicken part that doesn't taste so great, which may be why you will meet some people who actually don't like Dion's, but they probably are weird in other more private ways as well. My colleague Noel for example prefers Kentucky Fried saying Dion's skin tastes like chicken unlike the Colonel's which apparently tastes of something else. I like Dion's and a picture is worth a thousand words, to coin a phrase:
And that, sadly, completes the experiment. I have to insist that first timers try the fried chicken, but there are other foods available for old timers:
I prefer the Jamaican beef patties myself over bait fish, and the poppers aren't bad either. It's up to you to branch out and see what works. Exciting exploration awaits at Dions. Lots of people stop by:
These people aren't necessarily buying chicken, weird but true, but Dion's has every kind of processed food product in bright colors:
Dion's has stores on the bigger islands between Key West and Marathon and also a store in Florida City on Krome Avenue at Palm Avenue and I've heard there may be one in Homestead somewhere.
Hard times are upon us so these are the times a piping hot crispy breast from Dion's hits the spot, and calories be damned.
Of course one also is forced to wonder how come I showed up at the park completely unprepared for what I was to find there, having done no research at all. I have ridden past this imposing gateway a million times and always thought about stopping until Jeffrey made a comment about it a while back. Then I had to ride up to the mainland on unrelated business and so there I stopped early Monday morning, and met a wheezing jogger who breezed past my motorcycle:
On the third hand a quick search found nothing about why this park got this name. It offers six miles of trails (quite a few requiring a permit apparently) and 2400 acres of land which includes tons of wild and endangered animals and insects. A piffling dollar fifty charge gains you admission to this botanical garden, but I skipped the honor box as I had no change and I hold a park pass (with the Monroe County endorsement which costs extra of course!). The state parks website points out that this was to have been a condo development, as though there was actually a square inch of Florida that has ever avoided that dread designation? The condo thing may account for the remarkable paved roadway, two separate lanes no less that lead into the park.
With a freeway like this through the woods I might have done better to have brought my bicycle, but that would have shrunk the expedition to ten minutes from the 45 I actually spent wandering and getting lost. The state parks website also mentions a self guided tour which I think involves those little plaques visible above and below:
Or this substantial name tag:
Having knowingly encountered my first and possibly last Jamaican dogwood I feel no great uplift or satisfaction of knowledge. I am not, by inclination a collector. I like butterflies well enough but there weren't any in evidence even at the butterfly garden, an excellent place for a picnic were one so inclined:
And those extravagant condo developers did like to show off their roadways and traffic circles with decorative masonry:
There were intriguing trails branching off, unpaved paths that were closed even to permit holders apparently:
I could not resist a quick peek round the corner where I saw nothing startling:
The state parks website mentions this is the best time of year to visit owing to fewer mosquitoes and cooler temperatures. They were right on that even though a couple of mossies did land on me, luckily I was wearing my mesh motorcycle jacket as the temperature was a brisk 68 (18C) and the sun was still low in the winter sky. Some people delight in telling you Florida is flat and boring. Flat may it be, but boring never, not if you know where to look. In the Florida Keys even, despite the lack of land mass there is still plenty of mysterious beauty, if you bother to find it. Lots of people will tell you there is nothing to do in the Florida Keys and nowhere to go but they just haven't even tried in my opinion. Granted this isn't majestically awesome like Yosemite or Denali National Parks, but these are still places that will delight you with their own brand of magic:
I am happy there are many people who like snow and ice because if they were all down here this little park would have been packed with noisy nosey people. As it was I was alone with my thoughts and my camera and some rather intrusive signs:
Naturally I was too law abiding and polite to trespass, but it so happened that around the corner the post and rails were on the ground and there were no signs at all, so I stepped through and found my way to the intriguing cement structure visible, barely, in the distance:
A bonafide tunnel built for cars, looking more like an overpass though from where to where is anybody's guess. The inside was creepy and dark with pools of light shining down from overhead:
There was a fence at the other end but it was wide open so... I went on through, only to find myself I knew not where. Had there been a white rabbit checking his timepiece and tut-tutting I'd have followed along blindly, I'm sure. As it was I had to make my own way and instead of coming across a Mad Hatter's tea party I found a cement house, possibly never occupied or long abandoned:
And beyond it the abomination of desolation with all greenery swept impressively aside:
Of the ocean a little to the south there was no sign, just the gentle sea breeze and...off to the left the sounds of construction, a beeping of reverse gear, rumbling engines and clanking. I went to explore and passed what seemed like an idyllic canal to the left:
Though it may just have been a rock quarry for all I know. I wanted to wander along its banks but time was speeding by and I had an appointment in Fort Lauderdale so I walked rapidly on towards the sounds of clanking construction machinery:
I never did see the machinery itself but I saw this: 
Which was sufficient to indicate to me that I had probably strayed well beyond the park boundaries and perhaps it was time to get out while the going was good. I plunged into the shrubbery on a side trail as I heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. Imagine my surprise when i walked past this construction sitting out in the woods all by itself:
Should it ever get frosty in South Florida this is where I will come to stock up on seasoned firewood. Heaven only knows what the story is behind this place, a crumbling ruin of wooden beams and tar paper roof yielding slowly to the ravages of time. I made my way back towards the park itself, back through the tunnel and out into the paved highway where...Good heavens above! People! He and she were from Orlando down on a bird watching expedition though they were dressed like Park Rangers who had lost their guns, though it's possible that interpretation of their appearance was just a product of my guilty conscience:
He was garrulous and keen apparently seeking out a blue shouldered cuckoo (I think; it sounded very odd whatever it was,) while his sidekick stood patiently like a Sherpa waiting for us to finish our pointless conversation. I have no understanding about the mad desire to look at birds. They clumped off asking hopefully if they were close to the sea. I shook my head.
I did see a bird though, and I suspect it was actually checking out the nearby landfill on Card Sound Road. I think its a buzzard or a vulture or something like that:
When I prodded the Triumph into gear on Card Sound Road I did come across the entrance to a construction site so I suppose buildings will soon infest those quiet areas I walked around. I also got quite a selection of mud specks on my pants as I rode through their mess in the road. I had my revenge though because little did they know the mud under my boots came from inside their super secret building zone. Ha, I get everywhere and I'm neither a bird nor a plane. Nor a white rabbit come to that. I'm just an explorer in the Keys.