Fat Albert

It happens sometimes when giving directions and you mention "Blimp Road" in passing, that they think you are joking. "Uh, Blimp Road?" and you just nod your head sagely.It really does exist as you can see. It's a handy street not least because Mad Dawgz BBQ stand is right there, and this is the best barbecue in the Keys. Across the Overseas Highway my wife's "temple"crouches like a monument to physical fitness. it's called Pirate Wellness and is actually a very decent gym if you like those sorts of places (I don't). More obviously there is the Kickin' Back convenience store on the south side of the Highway, and that big white sign tells me I'm five minutes from home on my commute in the morning:
Blimp Road itself is home to the dump, now known as a transfer station, home to recycling and waste removal and all that good stuff (bring your used motorcycle oil for clean disposal) and also to it's namesake, Fat Albert:Blimp Road is couple of miles long and runs dead straight north from the Overseas Highway at about Mile Marker 21:
And the closer you get to the end of the road the bigger Fat Albert gets: And bigger (a telephoto lense helps):

I found a bunch of excellent info about Fat Albert on the Internet, and learned to my surprise that it is in fact part of NORAD, the US Air Force radar defense alert system beloved of movie makers. They say Fat Albert uses radar to detect smugglers but I had an experience when I wondered about that. I saw a smugglers' boat in a Stock Island marina after they had dropped off a dozen Cubans and had been located by the Coastguard and chased into Oceanside Marina. Cuban smuggling is big business these days as Miami Cubans will pay ten grand each to have their friends imported. Smuggled Cubans aren't allowed to stay so when they land they have to say their boat sank because if they come over on their own and land on US soil they get to stay, but if they are smuggled they don't (call your US representative if any of this doesn't make sense). So this smuggler's boat was docked and it was a 25 foot black inflatable with three blacked out outboards and I got to wondering if rumors that they use a heat seeking device on Fat Albert may not be true. That boat seemed like it would be really hard to 'see' on radar...

Be that as it may the blimp flies without any humans on board though it is piloted from the ground. I learned that when I actually met a former pilot, and though I was bursting with questions I refrained as it seems rather silly to ask a person about their involvement with something as secretive as NORAD...Anyway I learned on line that the helium filled blimp flies at 10,000 feet (3,000 meters give or take) and is 175 feet long (55 meters more or less) and 58 feet around (18 meters) and carries 1200 pounds (400 kg) of something mysterious called "payload." It is launched from a ground station visible across the mangroves:

And this is the ground station seen from the water:If you have any doubts about which direction the wind is blowing Fat Albert will point the way:At night you can see Fat Albert blinking red in the night sky. Not everyone sees it though and I seem to recall last year a small private plane took off from around here someplace and flew straight into the wire holding up the blimp. They say the wire has a 26,000 pound (13 ton) breaking strain and it didn't do the plane any good which spun out and crashed killing the people on board. The blimp kept flying until they retrieved it to check for damage. If you fly a plane, like a sailor you should check your charts. And look for blinking lights aloft:
Cheyenne was indifferent to the delights and mysteries of flying blimps. She is also not interested in the water and sticks firmly to dry land. Next summer I am planning on teaching her to enjoy the water.This is the view looking south down Kemp Channel toward Summerland Key on the left.

We have fun together. Awww!

This is the end of Blimp Road at the boat ramp:Just before you reach the end of the road there is a side street to the left but it's not open to the public:The turn off is exactly this far from the end of the road!
The exact cost of flying Fat Albert isn't made public as far as I can tell. But we do know that before Hurricane Wilma in 2005 a similar balloon flying alongside the NORAD blimp carried TV Marti anti-Castro propaganda at a cost to taxpayers of a cool $16,000,000 a year. And naturally the signal never got through as the Cuban authorities jammed it, but it kept the anti-Castro fanatics in Miami happy (and voting Republican in a keystone state). Now we are back down to one:Fat Albert is barely visible in this photograph but it is amazingly visible all round the Lower Keys in real life. It got separated from the ground once in the mid 90s and they had to shoot it down before it reached Cuba and nowadays it seems they have a remote control that can deflate the blimp and bring it to earth if it breaks loose again. One sign of impending strong winds is when Fat Albert is brought back to ground :Fat Albert may be costly but it is amazingly unobtrusive and life in the mangroves goes on as usual. If you stand right under the blimp you can hear it's steering propeller buzzing like a distant lawn mower on a summer afternoon. But out here it is silent and unnoticed:

TV Marti has thankfully faded away but Castro's in-laws, the Diaz-Balarts of Miami, who have pledged eternal hatred (a family value of course) still push for Radio Marti to send propaganda to Cuba and here it is at Mile Marker 15, an unobtrusive gated little road opposite Baby's Coffee: More taxpayer dollars being happily wasted to keep the Miami Mafia (as Castro calls them) happy. I listen to Radio Nacional on 950am (classical music) and Radio Reloj at 570 and590am (news headlines) which means I suppose I am getting a freebie from the Cuban government. Pity it's so boring! On the other hand I can't imagine how boring it is to be on the ground piloting the stationary blimp. The Cold War lives and demands its sacrifices I suppose.

Out Of Season

It's the time of year when people start compiling their year-end lists and Christmas sentimentalities and New Year's resolutions and my mind strayed back to my last ten day vacation in Italy. I arrived in time for a family gathering at my sister's place and got to scarf traditional Umbrian pork sandwiches. Food is a big motivator I guess when one thinks back to the past. These are sandwiches made from a whole pig stuffed with rosemary and roasted on a spit. The meat and crispy skin are sliced and stuffed inside kaiser rolls, but there is no lettuce mayo mustard or anything else, just meat and bread in a true Italian sandwich. Wash down with a glass of local red wine and repeat.My sister opened her shoe box of old pictures and we pored over the memories. She (and her twin) are ten years older than me which makes her a rather startling 62 now. After a lifetime spent in Italy she speaks English with a rather weird vocabulary, stuck back in the 1960s when she last lived in England, and she sounds like an extra from an Austin Powers movie. For some reason we speak English with each other, even when we reminisce about our Italian childhood:
I recall this vacation on the Island of Ischia off Naples. The woman in the picture above, Elizabeth is on the right in the picture below, while her twin, Patricia has the bee hive on the left. I am naturally in the middle with the short black hair and an expression that wouldn't melt butter. I came down with a fever and remember being stuck in bed in some palatial Neopolitan hotel room while they took time off and went to see the movie Dr Zhivago which dates the picture around 1965. We have spent a few Christmases since then.A few years later I was whisked out of school by my impetuous family and flown to see the erupting Mount Etna in Sicily, a dramatic event that buried villages and made headlines. My father in his execrable Italian asked a local where the lava was, which set the poor peasant off. "La lava, la lava!" he shouted waving his arms around. "It's everywhere!" And it was. Of tourists there were only us dicing with the hot lava flows in our rental car driving wildly around the mountain slopes. I have always enjoyed renting cars and driving ever since those experiences in my childhood. It is a point of honor for me to dice with death mixing it up on the roadways with the locals wherever I go.
My sisters were always fans of the less-is-more theory of life and while I was seeking horsepower on two wheels they contented themselves driving what have become incredible status symbols and fashionable icons- Fiat 500 automobiles. They were air cooled 500cc twin cylinder engines producing 17 horsepower capable of moving them at speeds up to about 60 miles per hour supposedly, on the flat with a tail wind. They were dead cute though. The canvas roof rolled back and there was a full bench seat on the back of the car. It was ten feet long, four feet wide and four foot tall such that when you stand next to one today they look tiny:
My wife has decided she deserves one of her own and she is hoping Chrysler, now owned by Fiat gets a move on and starts importing the Nuova ("New") 500, an entirely modern, speedy and desperately cute car based only vaguely on the looks of its predecessor. Nostalgia strikes again:

My childhood buddy Giovanni is in the throes of new motorcycle-itis and he wrote to me mentioning his desire to replace his five year old BMW 1200RT with something new. It's a great bike, a flat twin tourer that is as dry in a rainstorm and comfortable as any motorcycle built and he frequently rides the length of Italy on the freeway at 120 miles per hour. Yet he has a hankering for something new and he doesn't know whether to buy a water cooled four cylinder replacement in the 1300 version or whether to stick with the air cooled flat twin. He also has a hankering for change and he saw a scarlet Moto Guzzi Griso in the BMW dealership on offer for a smoking deal. It was in the dealership when I was in Italy last summer and Giovanni checked it out at the time. I hope he strikes a deal, as i would love to ride it next summer when my wife and I return:
In fact I wrote back and said he should get the Guzzi for a back up, and for when friends come to visit so they have something to ride. I still have fond memories of my 1200cc BMW four cylinder, the fully faired S model that I rode in the mountains last year:
I'm looking forward to more of the same this summer with my wife who is already planning our vacation. Umbria is as far from the flatlands of florida as you can imagine:
If you're going to break speed limits in Italy you need to know exactly where the speed traps are, like this Autovelox on the Valnerina Highway between Terni and Spoleto. When I was a kid riding these roads there were essentially no speed limits. I think back to the incredible freedom I had riding these mountain roads with no cops, no speed traps, no one to even enforce DUI laws- it wa sall down to me and my good common sense on my 100 mile-per-hour 350cc twins. I mad eit through unscathed amazingly enough. Nowadays the countryside is littered with these automated speed traps:It photographs your tag and sends you a speeding ticket to your home. Points are deducted later from your license and no court appearance is necessary. Welcome to the Nanny state! However health care is free and rated as second best in the world (behind France) by the World Health organization. The US rates 37th on the same scale behind Dominica and Costa Rica, just to make us all a little embarrassed. Riding a BMW K1200S through the Tuscan Alps was a blast. Even if it rained cats and dogs the last day. Memories are made nostalgic by a little adversity.How I came to live in Florida from the mountians of Italy is a long and winding tale full of nostalgia, and I feel lucky to have made it.

I feel a little embarrassed that my wife and I have jobs, health care and a happy dog to end the year. A national health care system seems out of reach, as does the ever popular hope for world peace. I can only say it has been a long strange windingly tortuous journey thus far and I remain somewhat surprised to find myself still alive and riding at the ripe old age of 52. I hope you are so lucky. The important thing I find as I grow older is to take notice and remain curious. I fear life is short enough as it is. Holding on to the good memories is important. giovanni's 14 year old daughter Eleonora hasn't figured the lesson out yet and every time she forced to sit at table with her elders and betters is an act of torture. She is too young to learn from our mistakes.May your table always be full (and may your children always be grateful).

Boats,Beer and Country Music

Even though schools are out for the winter break teachers like my wife and Josh seen here, spend time sorting out paperwork and programs during their "down time." I was fiddling with my blog and Cheyenne was napping. All of which was soon rudely interrupted by Josh who said he needed my help fixing his boat. I abandoned my comfortable hearth, my wife and my dog and took off for some outdoor adventure.I rode my Bonneville over to Josh's place where we hitched his Nissan to his boat and made another trip, this time over to Brett's place where the work was to be done.

For Josh this was manual labor that indicated school work was on the back burner for a few precious days. He bought the boat earlier this year, a machine in need of some attention and as he is all theory Josh the scientist said he wanted a project boat "to learn on."

Or drink beer on:

Brett was pottering about on his boat in his driveway. He too is a teacher and was using the break to think about things other than schoolwork. This all took place in the days leading up to Christmas, this outdoors Florida Boat project and you can tell winter was closing in by virtue of Brett's long sleeved t-shirt, which rates as heavy winter wear around here. He was busy mocking me for wearing a full-on woolly sweatshirt:

Brett has more than one boat and I think this 28-foot Mako is the middle of them and for my money quite large enough considering the 250 horsepower outboard:

First we got Josh to back into the driveway:

Under the watchful eye of one of his cats:

Josh had to install new fuel hoses, so the first order of business was to lay on his back and start grovelling around the transom. Hot sweaty December work:

I refrained from catching the plumber's cleavage as they struggled and swore at the hose. and I stood around with camera in hand thinking about my own boat ownership: I decided when my wife and I sold our Gemini sailing catamaran, to buy a small simple skiff to tie up at the dock behind our house. Our 14-foot (4 meter) Dusky has no lights or electronic equipment, which means there is very little to break, especially as we put a new 25 hp outboard on two years ago. Josh had his 1996 Evinrude rebuilt but the fuel he felt was too stale to use anymore. So they emptied the fuel tank:

Josh looked up with a beatific grin on his face, a screwdriver in his greasy hand. "God," he said, " it just doesn't get any better than this. Boats beer and country music!" He nodded at the speaker blaring Conch Country selections from a local radio station by that name. When he said that I knew I had the basis of an essay for my blog somewhere in this afternoon's activities. Besides now that he had established our bona fides as boat mechanics he started to even look like he knew what he was doing:

With fresh fuel hoses in place the steering was the next project. You've got to be able to steer a boat and this one had a seized cable, so Josh decided he had a hammer-worthy project. First he and Brett tried to pry the cable loose with some grips. That failed.Josh used to be an artilleryman in the US Marines so he figured this was the right moment to get out the big guns:

It was a matter of whacking and greasing the cable until it broke loose. And then it was time to fire up the outboard. "Er..." Josh said, uncapping another Yuengling and looking like a really naughty schoolboy. "I've left the keys at home." Brett was floored. he had been looking forward to proving how cool the boat work had been by actually firing up the Evinrude and proving the value of a winter afternoon's work. It was not to be. Boat work was over for the afternoon.Brett has a home in the Lower Keys of the type that fills me with wonder. It's not particularly luxurious or anything, it's just ideally suited to canal side living for a man that likes to use his hands. Josh says he has the best man room he has ever seen:

It is a small walk in closet kind of a room with tons of tools of every description, projects in progress on the work benches, a refrigerator filled with...beer, and a toilet to dispose of used beer. Everything in short a beer drinking, cigar smoking teacher needs on his time off while using his hands and doing useful things.

Night had fallen, it was time to clean up and take a moment to reflect on manly things. So we hosed down dirt, collected oils and rags and assembled tools.

We were going to leave Josh's boat in the driveway for the night, so Josh could come back with the keys in the morning (he forget them again, sad to say but Brett made him go home and get them!) and start his long silent outboard. It looked ready to go and just needed the prop to make it completely viable.We repaired to the "basement" and popped a beer or two and sprawled. I threw the odd languid dart, Brett told stories about his recently deceased retriever Max who used to own the local canals, leaping off seawalls, swimming, chasing balls and being a big butch alpha dog. The reminiscences were tempered by the obvious sense of loss even though the dog has been dead for four years. I could understand that. (Cheyenne did not spend the afternoon with us because a)she is a girl and b) Brett's cats might not appreciate her).

We didn't go down to Brett's waterside tiki hut which is equipped with a bar and television. we simply enjoyed the cool night air with a beer, good companionship and the knowledge of a manly job pretty well done. I don't do this kind of male bonding very often but done right it can be satisfying. Done on a winter's evening in Florida you get to understand something most people in the other lower 47 states don't understand at all: Florida is a great place to live- as long as it's the Keys!