61 Degrees

I crawled out of bed at noon today and checked the thermostat. 61 degrees! (16C). @#$%^! My feet are cold, I've lost the will to live and I have to be at the college in an hour to take a class. Tonight it is supposed to get down to 49 degrees which considering the historic low was 41, recorded in the early 20th century means we are close to settinga record. It must be freezing Up North!

Bruce,BMW,BPK

Bruce rented a trailer from U Haul in his hometown of Santa Fe, and in an act of holy faith, dragged his motorcycle to the Keys for a few days rest and recreation away from the cold and ice of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. New Mexico is far too dramatic for me, because if everyday I had to look out the kitchen window and remark on the shape of the Blood of Christ mountains I would feel obliged I am sure to ponder the origin name, a reminder of the universal reach of the Church of Rome of my Italian forebears. Bruce enjoys pinon trees and New Mexican cuisine and has given up trying to learn Spanish.Life is simpler for Bruce who has been retired for 14 years from a life of building secret whatsits for Lockheed Martin, a defense contractor that used to be reviled daily during the Cold War, but which paid Bruce a handsome war dividend in the form of secure employment and a proper, old fashioned pension. What's a retied engineer to do? Why tinker of course so he decided to get a motorcycle, load it up with computers, and then park it in his garage out of the blizzards blowing in off the Sangre de Cristo mountains for the winter.I suggested he and his wife rent a home in the Lower keys for a few months and do the snowbird thing but he demurred, worrying about driving so far with their dogs. The fact is that after a life spent fiddling with slide rules and micrometers Bruce has lost the drive to plan, so a nice slow road trip followed by a stay short enough to require but one visit to our washer/dryer is sufficient apparently to take the edge off a New Mexico winter. It was a pleasant winter afternoon in the Keys, the recent cold front had blown through with some force, leaving us basking in afternoon temperatures above 70 degrees (20C approx) and we took advantage to head out on the back roads of Big Pine Key. We checked for alligators at Blue Hole but finding none we spotted this one, in pink, on a seawall at Port Pine Heights, on the northernmost tip of Big Pine Key, where we took a stroll to admire the architecture and the balmy afternoon air. We weren't alone:These women peddled past and on turning around asked if the nice dog was ours, we shook our heads though when we strolled by this "nice dog" used a great deal too much energy yakking at us from behind his upstairs bars wherein he felt safe:Bruce and Celia's lives are dominated by an obscure breed of massive dog called Bernese, which look a bit like the animal in the Canadian comic strip For Better or For Worse (which the Citizen doesn't carry, unfortunately) and like most breeds of big dogs, Bernese are relatively quiet companions. This was not a quiet bucolic neighborhood. Someone was out being industrious with a weed whacker buzzing loudly and someone else parked their over sized pick up truck in their driveway and left the diesel engine rumbling cosily.

When I used to drive a tractor trailer I avoided truck stops like the plague and parked my rig in out of the way places where nothing could be heard for miles around, instead of the endless rumblings of trucks whose drivers couldn't stand to switch the things off and enjoy the thoughts in their heads. Some people though can turn it all off and enjoy the moment and I envied this character:This is a man who has spent altogether too long fighting snow drifts and fog and knows where he is well off, weed whacker or no. His neighbors were pleased to remind the rest of us where our place was, firmly out on the street:As though the fence somehow failed to carry the stern warning all on it's own. We strolled past a McMansion that had run out of steam. Bruce the practical engineer was convinced this was a duplex, thanks to the fanciful twin flights of stairs leading to the massive atrium:I thought he was joking at first but his precise mind couldn't grasp the concept of vastness for the sake of it, and he declined to believe this might be one person's (bankrupt) vision of ideal waterfront retirement:Carl's design seems to have fallen on hard times, but this isn't the only over sized home sitting on the delightful shores of Big Pine Sound:Bruce insists he enjoys the seasons, and it's true he is not climatically adapted to life in the Keys. The humidity irritates his skin, just as the desert dryness irritates mine, mosquitoes love his blood as much as they don't go for mine and Bruce loves to worry about the imponderable so hurricanes loom large in his mind as does global warming and sea level rise, things that I view as part of life in the islands. The fact that by his own accounting the mundane risk of getting hit by a drunk driver in Santa Fe is far higher even than in the Keys doesn't rate as a risk to him, as it does to me. Not to mention the need to keep everything under lock and key in a state with high levels of poverty and crime. He gets to ride much more interesting mountain roads than do I, even if summer lasts the bat of an eyelid in the Sangre de Cristos...Oh and we have Key Deer:Love them or loathe them, and they like to graze the edge of the roads through the Big Pine Key Deer Refuge. Some of them are more relaxed about posing for a picture:Hitting them while riding might not be so great even if they are half the size of a white tailed deer:I took a short spin on Bruce's 800GS BMW and he took my Bonneville for a tour of No Name Key:Of which comparison more later. It was a most satisfying, simple afternoon, for me a day off work for him another in an endless series of days off:Just messing about on motorcycles.

Vignettes XVI

Today is the day:

He is popping up everywhere even on a little scooter decal on a Key West city street. As I write Barack Obama is President-Elect and as you read this most likely after twelve noon eastern time he will be the 44th President of the United states. I hope he can meet our expectations, which are limitless at the moment...

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I was on the parking garage of an afternoon, recently at Grinnell Street and I was enjoying the blue sky. I suppose a poet might have called it cerulean but the names for shades of color leave me confused. Then a plane came crashing through heading for the airport:Looking down I saw Finnegans Wake, the Irish pub enjoying the last of the evening sun along with a couple of cyclists:And on the other side these evocative, old Key West tin roofs proudly displaying rusty marks of the passage of time:And then I photographed the sewage plant for the Whalton Lane essay and walked back down to my motorcycle.

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I was in the Tax Collector's on Big Pine Key paying the annual motor tax on the Nissan and the Sebring ($172 for both for two years, quite the bargain Florida) and I saw this which looked like a nice juxtaposition: The Big Pine Key Tax Collector's office is a part time operation with clerks from Marathon staffing this office on Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday, and as it is a small office (next to the Library) it has a very small town feel. I was too embarrassed the day before to snap a picture of the hand written sign If you need tags come back at 1:15pm. I liked that- I wonder what people in Miami would do if they encountered such a sign?

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I had some leftover pictures form the working scooter essay, carefree people riding scooters, including this passenger with some geometric tatooed writing on her back: I hardly dare speculate what it might have said.Working scooters, someone's main transportation, parked ready and waiting to go:And that other symbol of key West transportation, the working cyclist:And then there are the visiting land cruisers, huge machines lumbering around town hauling the kitchen sink in their multiplicity of bags and stuff, like this BMW outside the Courthouse Deli on Whitehead Street:It's a style I've always liked but it seems like overkill in a community a hundred miles from the nearest freeway. Not to mention the purchase cost equivalent to two Triumph Bonnevilles...

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Someone asked for prices on real estate in the Keys and though this isn't a real estate site, like so many blogs trying to sell stuff to strangers, I did have reason to notice this sign on Flagler Avenue:So the dreaded auction is coming to Key West gradually. I have heard of numerous properties headed towards foreclosure but so far house prices are nowhere near collapsing. Home sales have dried up compared to the boom years but I heard a rumor a six million dollar Old Town home was recently snapped up by singer Kenny Chesney who probably isn't short a buck. For others though the prospect of forking over three quarters of a million for a home might seem a bit much these days. I saw these listings for middle Keys homes:I expect 2009 might bring a few more bargains to the market.

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Highway One, the bane of my life lately became the scene of severe personal embarrassment last week. The wife and I were leaving Key West in the car with a load of fresh vegetables to take home and plant when I spotted a bunch of half wits riding in a clump up ahead:

They were a dozen motorcyclists riding in a gaggle of discombobulated idiots, blocking both northbound lanes on Boca Chica and holding traffic down to less than 50 miles per hour in a 55 zone. The white van was fit to be tied trying to persuade them to let him pass but they droned along in a mess of 46 mile per hour weaving bikes holding back a dozen impatient drivers. I hung even further back anticipating a disaster.They fumbled their way through Big Coppitt and the sewer installation roadworks and popped out in the Saddlebunch Keys where the limit goes all rural and gets back up to a heady 55 miles per hour. Not us. We were stuck behind the morons still weaving and and out amongst themselves, still facing sudden death from the white van caught in their midst. A couple of them dropped out of the pack suddenly slowing and stopping on the shoulder for reasons known only to themselves and their women perched high on inadequate pillions. We passed them by at a funereal pace only to find the extra lame slow pokes suddenly bobbing in our mirrors:We were moving so slowly I was tempted to ask my wife to get out and stroll alongside and take a few pictures as we rolled through the sunny afternoon... but eventually we got closer to home with me wondering if all this talk of wanting to see more people out on two wheels is really a worthy goal for advocates of motorbikes and motorcycling.As I turned off the Highway to go down my street the last I saw of them was a slow moving procession dawdling along towards Big Pine Key, and happy to see the last of them. There will be more I'm sure.

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I have no idea what this was doing leaning up against the perimeter wall of St Paul's in downtown Key West. It would have been a better conveyance for some people who think they should be out riding motorcycles.

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I just can't resist a full moon especially one setting on a cloudy morning over the night lights of Summerland Key:

Night night.

Salute Restaurant

Say "Blue Heaven" out loud in Key West and everyone within hearing jumps for joy and spontaneously claps their hands. Everyone love the restaurant in Bahama Village and the place has become a byword for exotic Caribbean cuisine in Key West. The owners have made a nice living from the place and now it seems like they need a new challenge. While Blue Heaven bubbles along nicely on Thomas Street, Higgs Beach has seen a breath of fresh air blow through the city's most beachified eatery:Salute (pronounced: Sal-ooh-tay) in its previous incarnation suffered from inconsistency as a friend of mine put it, someone with experience in the table waiting trade. Sometimes food and service were good, and sometimes less so, but prices were always fairly stiff so the expectation was that things should be good. My wife wanted to celebrate her 55th birthday on the beach and so we gave the new management a shot and it worked out quite well. We got three orders of the day's special, yellow tail snapper on salad greens with mango-eggplant salsa:Which was really quite excellent even though the unpublished price, as it wasn't on the menu was $17:50 which seemed like a lot of money for lunch. Bruce got the roast chicken-pesto salad sandwich off the regular menu for an advertised $10, quite the deal by comparison:And, being the unsophisticated New Mexican he is, he got his first taste of orzo pasta which got his seal of approval. We all four shared a gazpacho soup and a white bean soup which was better for me on this freezing cold day (65 degrees- 17C) than the cold gazpacho:The regular menu is quite reasonable and includes some rather bland sounding pasta dishes, primavera, marinara, and something else I can't remember:Salute currently finds itself in the middle of a modest, by Key West standards, political tug of war. On the one hand Monroe County owns Higgs beach but the Sheriff's department, as a cost cutting measure pulled out the two deputies that were assigned to beach patrol on ATVs. With the departure of the all terrain vehicles, and the deputies with them, the homeless population, especially in winter, has burgeoned at the picnic facilities:The county had previously suggested handing the park over to the city but the city commission recoiled in horror complaining of the cost of maintenance- cleaning the beach of seaweed, cleaning the park of bums etc...Now the relatively new county administrator, the exotically named Roman Gastesi is suggesting turning the shambles into a first class recreational facility for Monroe County. And, as odd as it may seem I think the new management at Salute may have inspired this fresh attitude.From the outside the restaurant things haven't changed that much, the colors remain the same more or less as does the decor inside the building. And the horribly noisy muzak still blares from the wall doing it's best to hatter the beach ambiance:The food was excellent and the service cheerful and owing to the chill we were spared the clusters of local subjects lurking on the sand. Understand these aren't working poor or distressed locals, who enjoy the benefits of numerous caring social service agencies. These are people who chose to live at Higgs Beach during the winter and live out their drug induced dramas in a public park and very tedious they are too. The fact the restaurant is thriving, particular in the lunch hour I'm told, may indeed make it a decent "anchor store" for Gastesi's ambitious renovations planned for the beach. The outdoor area filled up as our lunch progressed and on a day of cold north winds it was perfectly comfortable to sit outside:The inside seating area and bar looked snug too:There is even a little, colorful, lounging area outside where this dude was reading the Paradise insert from Thursday's paper and sipping a beer:
I hope Salute (pronounced: Sal-ooh-tay) makes it as a vibrant part of Higgs Beach not least because people, including families, have been clamoring to get their picnic and beach front area back. Dog owners get dog park across the street for off leash romps, and parents get their toddlers off leash at Astro City and now we effete wine sippers get to eat pesto off leash at Salute, no longer moribund.Quite the views of people playing on the Higgs pier and the fishing boats snug at anchor, protected from the biting north wind:A nice place for lunch.