My wife's summer vacation is coming to an end so I have been feeling more driven than usual to take her 2004 ET4 out on the road for a few rides before summer turns to Fall and school gets back in session. That's when she takes the scooter to work and leaves it there for use on round town trips when she's away from the classroom.
At 150cc the "little" Vespa can pull 65 mph and returns 70 mpg which makes it a nice ride even for someone as impatient as myself. However on Highway One, my only route to and from work, the scooter does have a couple of limitations. One is that it is almost impossible to safely pass any vehicle that is doing 45mph or more. That can be a bit annoying if the car in question is dawdling in a 55mph zone...The other issue with a scooter is that some other drivers see me coming and start to drive badly as a matter of course. They will presume the scooter can't go "fast enough" and they like to crowd me.
I read a comment recently on Scooter in the Sticks blog quoting some "expert" who said one should never ride at night. http://vespalx150.blogspot.com/2010/07/into-night.html Huh? I guess I didn't get the memo because I've been riding at night for 40 years for pleasure and enjoyed every minute of it.
Last week I had an overtime shift starting at one in the morning so I decided to take the Vespa and see if riding my wife's scooter after reading that ridiculous statement felt any different. Not so far. I made it safely two miles to the Dion's Chicken (closed!) on Summerland Key. 
I have never even considered not riding at night. The idea makes a nonsense of using motorcycles as sensible alternatives to cars. Besides, I like riding at night.
Riding at night is a whole world of different sensory pleasures compared to riding in daylight. Especially in the sub tropics.
I enjoy the warm night air of summer. In daytime the temperatures have been hovering in the low to mid 90s, which I find pleasant enough. But at two in the morning the air is that much cooler, and softer on the skin. The night smells of seaweed, cut grass and the occasional night blooming flower hang over the highway. To my surprise there are a few cars passing in the night and choosing to stop in the middle of the road is an an exercise fraught with a little danger. I like the resulting picture...the ET4 in the middle of the Overseas Highway, with oncoming traffic. 
Leaving the house thirty minutes early gave me enough spare time to choose to stop along the way and investigate spots along my 27 mile commute that I would usually ignore in my hurry to get to work on time. I stopped under the street light and to my astonishment, when I stopped the motor to listen to the sounds of silence, I was instead deafened by the sounds of amorous bullfrogs.
It gave me great pleasure to stop on the bridges along the Overseas Highway and look out across the dark waters of the channels, their outlines marked by mangrove islands, low and black in the night. Then I'd fire up the Vespa and take off for another blast of relatively cool air.
I read in various forums about the "improvements" people make to their machines. I have decided I'd rather ride than improve my ride. I have the greatest respect for the engineers who take a blank computer screen and create a motorcycle out of nothing more than thin air and the thoughts in their minds. From such unpromising material they put together a machine that runs and performs to exact specifications. And I want to be messing with their handiwork?
Past Boca Chica Key (Mile Marker 7) the highway gets street lights, a shock after the darkness of the rural Overseas Highway. On Stock island bridges give way to mangroves and salt water gradually disappears from view in the approaches to Key West itself.
In the photo below I played with the mirror and realized the lights of Stock Island were visible in front of me. Like the other pictures in this essay I took this picture with a steady hand and set the shutter speed to compensate for the lack of light, probably a tenth of a second under the street lights.
As I rolled down a deserted North Roosevelt Boulevard into the city I noticed a heron standing on a small mangrove island fifty feet off the side of the road. I stopped the scooter in a bus stop and balanced the camera on the top case.
Across the street I saw George Carey's manatee hovering over the main street into Key West. Carey died ten days ago in West Virginia, his public statuary lives on.
A mile from work I was stopped at the lights at Kennedy and North Roosevelt and i took a quick picture through the windshield. I had no idea it was so mucky. The little round dot on the shield is the manufacturer's label. 
By the time I reached the traffic light at North Roosevelt and First Street I was almost at the Police Station. Some days on my ride in to work I catch every light on a red and my progress gets very herky jerky. Other days the lights are all green and I progress like royalty.
And then, finally, forty minutes from home, there appears the pink rotunda in front of the Police Station. Home from home, and the blessings of overtime. It's hard to believe that in these economically depressed times I have access to overtime, however not enough capable people want to dispatch in party town USA so we few, we happy few, get to do all the work. A happy band of dispatchers.
If anyone tells you riding at night is anything other than pure pleasure tell them they're quite wrong. At least that's what my experience tells me.
At 150cc the "little" Vespa can pull 65 mph and returns 70 mpg which makes it a nice ride even for someone as impatient as myself. However on Highway One, my only route to and from work, the scooter does have a couple of limitations. One is that it is almost impossible to safely pass any vehicle that is doing 45mph or more. That can be a bit annoying if the car in question is dawdling in a 55mph zone...The other issue with a scooter is that some other drivers see me coming and start to drive badly as a matter of course. They will presume the scooter can't go "fast enough" and they like to crowd me.I read a comment recently on Scooter in the Sticks blog quoting some "expert" who said one should never ride at night. http://vespalx150.blogspot.com/2010/07/into-night.html Huh? I guess I didn't get the memo because I've been riding at night for 40 years for pleasure and enjoyed every minute of it. Last week I had an overtime shift starting at one in the morning so I decided to take the Vespa and see if riding my wife's scooter after reading that ridiculous statement felt any different. Not so far. I made it safely two miles to the Dion's Chicken (closed!) on Summerland Key. 
I have never even considered not riding at night. The idea makes a nonsense of using motorcycles as sensible alternatives to cars. Besides, I like riding at night.Riding at night is a whole world of different sensory pleasures compared to riding in daylight. Especially in the sub tropics.I enjoy the warm night air of summer. In daytime the temperatures have been hovering in the low to mid 90s, which I find pleasant enough. But at two in the morning the air is that much cooler, and softer on the skin. The night smells of seaweed, cut grass and the occasional night blooming flower hang over the highway. To my surprise there are a few cars passing in the night and choosing to stop in the middle of the road is an an exercise fraught with a little danger. I like the resulting picture...the ET4 in the middle of the Overseas Highway, with oncoming traffic. 
Leaving the house thirty minutes early gave me enough spare time to choose to stop along the way and investigate spots along my 27 mile commute that I would usually ignore in my hurry to get to work on time. I stopped under the street light and to my astonishment, when I stopped the motor to listen to the sounds of silence, I was instead deafened by the sounds of amorous bullfrogs. It gave me great pleasure to stop on the bridges along the Overseas Highway and look out across the dark waters of the channels, their outlines marked by mangrove islands, low and black in the night. Then I'd fire up the Vespa and take off for another blast of relatively cool air.I read in various forums about the "improvements" people make to their machines. I have decided I'd rather ride than improve my ride. I have the greatest respect for the engineers who take a blank computer screen and create a motorcycle out of nothing more than thin air and the thoughts in their minds. From such unpromising material they put together a machine that runs and performs to exact specifications. And I want to be messing with their handiwork?
Past Boca Chica Key (Mile Marker 7) the highway gets street lights, a shock after the darkness of the rural Overseas Highway. On Stock island bridges give way to mangroves and salt water gradually disappears from view in the approaches to Key West itself.In the photo below I played with the mirror and realized the lights of Stock Island were visible in front of me. Like the other pictures in this essay I took this picture with a steady hand and set the shutter speed to compensate for the lack of light, probably a tenth of a second under the street lights.As I rolled down a deserted North Roosevelt Boulevard into the city I noticed a heron standing on a small mangrove island fifty feet off the side of the road. I stopped the scooter in a bus stop and balanced the camera on the top case.Across the street I saw George Carey's manatee hovering over the main street into Key West. Carey died ten days ago in West Virginia, his public statuary lives on.A mile from work I was stopped at the lights at Kennedy and North Roosevelt and i took a quick picture through the windshield. I had no idea it was so mucky. The little round dot on the shield is the manufacturer's label. By the time I reached the traffic light at North Roosevelt and First Street I was almost at the Police Station. Some days on my ride in to work I catch every light on a red and my progress gets very herky jerky. Other days the lights are all green and I progress like royalty.And then, finally, forty minutes from home, there appears the pink rotunda in front of the Police Station. Home from home, and the blessings of overtime. It's hard to believe that in these economically depressed times I have access to overtime, however not enough capable people want to dispatch in party town USA so we few, we happy few, get to do all the work. A happy band of dispatchers.If anyone tells you riding at night is anything other than pure pleasure tell them they're quite wrong. At least that's what my experience tells me.
Further to all this brouhaha the development would never actually revert to the city for the developer proposes to build it with a 34 million dollar public bond (municipal bonds! What a moment in history to sell municipal bonds! Ah public debt, public panacea!!). Not only that but the development would generate enough income to pay off the bond, pay the developer a hefty management fee and even leave left over cash, supposedly, for the city to enjoy a substantial extra income. Of course, the developers get the fee first as they would manage the property in perpetuity and the fine citizens of Key West would get the left overs and the rather low paid jobs preferred by the developers. The fact that the City has managed marinas for years quite successfully and paid it's employees a decent union living wage has nothing to do with it. Mayor Cates inexplicably seems to be siding with this plan to give away a priceless city asset, a city I am relieved not to reside in. Perhaps he fears following in the footsteps of the last President of Keys Community College. 
That unfortunate woman allowed her self-described "potty mouth" to drive her into unemployment reportedly because she was exceedingly unpleasant to work with in her office. Her bigger crime was to oppose these same developers who wanted to bid to build dormitories on land leased by the College. Two year colleges are forbidden by state law from competing with four year colleges by having on campus housing. The plan, which is going ahead under different leadership is to lease land at the college, build the dormitories and have them operated as a separate entity to allow out of town students access to affordable housing and for the college not to violate state law. The former President nixed the developer's plans because there was a clause in the proposal that said if the development didn't go ahead the developer would get ownership of the land by way of compensation. The former President awarded the bid to the competition and was gone shortly thereafter accused in a cross burning of epic proportions of being impossible to work with. Apparently she was.
Now the woman who led the charge against her has suffered her own crucifixion in the Blue Paper accused in large headlines of fixing a friend's child's grades and came close, according to the paper to getting fired. That she didn't was either a) because she has a friend on the Board or b) because the new President is an independent person who hires and fires at will. She has denied any wrongdoing but that hasn't silenced the papers. Meanwhile also on the education front the wife of the former school superintendent has decided to plead guilty to charges of stealing some $400,000 and is to be sentenced at the end of the month. The going rate I hear may be six years in prison. What a ghastly waste, and now with a proposal on the ballot to have future school superintendents appointed not elected I have no doubt future school boards, like the one that was asleep at the wheel during this crisis, will get to appoint their own serf to the leadership position. One finds it hard to remain sanguine about the future of education one way and another and that's a shame because teaching has remained a high priority so far in this district even as schools across the nation face slash and burn budget cuts. God knows why anyone would want to repeal a national tax cut of three percent for people earning more than $250,000 a year. Our schools certainly don't need the money, though perhaps the very useful War in Afghanistan might. 
Monroe County development plans seem to have fallen on hard times. A proposal to turn Wisteria Island (Christmas Tree Island to locals) into a second upscale Sunset Key development has apparently failed and the dismal dead tree spoil island faces no immediate prospects of change. Equally the light industrial suburb of Stock Island, home to trailers, fishing docks and small handy entrepreneurs faced the immediate prospect of urbanization and upscale development all of which came crashing down when when the developers went bust to the tune of a hundred million dollars. The Depression may have saved the bacon of the working people of Stock Island for the time being but Higgs Beach is now on the county agenda for "improvement."
At a time when municipalities across the country are turning out street lights and reducing back roads to gravel to save money, development continues unaffected in the Keys. The idea for Higgs Beach's future is to shift the road back from the beach, clip a corner off the ample dog park and devote more effort to the beach front. All this while beautifying and somehow making this county park in the middle of the city less attractive to bums. The winter population of homeless-by-choice in Key West is staggering and large numbers choose to congregate here at the beach. Why Higgs needs to be the object of lavish financial attention I'm not sure but there are still many people who believe the way to the future is through continued consumption at ever increasing rates. 
There is a delightful air of unreality about it all, as one reads of tens of millions of unemployed Up North, Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami going bankrupt because it is the only public hospital with a mandated conscience, and thus obliged to take in the indigent, uninsured and hopelessly underfunded. It was going to be an issue to figure out how to keep the recipient of Life Flights from the Keys open. On that subject we have heard no more. The Life Flights continue ($20,000 for a one way helicopter ticket. Pay as you go.). 
There had been a plan by the big time developers who have eyes on the Truman Waterfront to create a vast convention center out of the hotels they own all along the entrance to the city. The Beachside was to have been the beginning of that development but it failed in fine style and the Mormons of Marriott fame took it over. One more hotel in the chain in the Southernmost (licentious) City. The airport redevelopment which I suspect was a publicly funded part of the Convention Center plan has been completed at ridiculous public expense and horribly over budget, but the convention development seems to have gone the way of so many projects in this Depression. Frankly the way the line of hotels currently presents itself, the Holiday Inn the ex-Radisson the Comfort Inn etc...doesn't look that enticing but it seems we are stuck with them, and the prison-like brown walls of Fortress Marriott Beachside for the time being.
The unfailing truth about working for a living in the Keys is that when your job is lost, so is life in Paradise. And that unhappy truth makes serfs of us all. Bring on the development and let a few employment crumbs slide off the table to our out stretched hands. A job, a wage, perchance a year or two more to eat, to drink, to sleep, to dream. And to wake up to the sight of sun and coconuts and one more fine new building rising like a phoenix from the ruin of the Conchs' little paradise lost.
When we got Cheyenne the workers at the shelter told us Cheyenne only liked playing with rawhide and even though my wife likes buying stuff Cheyenne has proved impervious to the stuffed toys and rubber dust catchers. She likes her rawhide.
We were also told to get a crate to get her used to being at home. We were dubious as we've never crated dogs but one day in the pet store Cheyenne saw a crate and walked right in. Our compromise is that we leave the door open and she can use it when she wants to be alone or eat something messy. Like a rawhide or a smoked pig knuckle which Winn Dixie sells for a buck apiece. Rawhide is still her favorite.
We've had Cheyenne for nine months so she must have hit her 9th birthday by now and she is settled into her new life. I have no idea if she spends much of her time pondering life as it was or if she has nightmares while she twitches and snores remembering what happened to her in the bad old days. She isn't giving anything away. I know she had a great time in the woods of North Carolina but...this is her home.
They saved a couple of Vizlas from a puppy mill, a gruesome place that kept them in pig crates for 6 years and never trained them, played with them or treated them like anything other than cattle.
My wife and I haul our dog with us pretty much wherever we go and it becomes a habit to see Cheyenne at our heels when we go out to dinner or to an event.
She has put on a few pounds despite the massive amount of exercise she gets. We are still looking for suitable food, Iams, Science Diet and so forth, she doesn't much care what it is. Chuck and Wayne boil rice and carrots for their dogs whose teeth rotted away in their puppy mill cages but Cheyenne is rather more robust. 
The early hours are tough for me after a night spent sitting up at work, but for Cheyenne this is the best time of day. There's no one around, everyone else is going to work or sleeping it off. Even in these woods where a lively population of homeless doss down, there is no one sitting around with a beer when your average hobo is asleep.
Just me and my dog. And a few rain puddles left over from the night before. My wife called me at 2 am to say the thunder had woken her up and for the first time Cheyenne was scared by the noise. I was sitting in the Communications Center 30 miles away where it was a dry quiet night with not a drop of rain in sight.
I have no idea what fascinates her- trace of deer perhaps or boot of tramp. 
