Cheyenne likes to spend time outdoors and the dog door is in frequent use as a result. After I saw her curled up on the mat I moved her bed out to the porch and she immediately took up residence.
I have no doubt I dote excessively on the dog but I think she looks cute while sleeping. One of the things about getting a dog from the pound is that you know she has been treated harshly or at best with indifference and that makes me anxious to help her make up for lost time.
But one can't snore away a beautiful Fall afternoon so we piled into the car and drove a couple of miles down the Overseas Highway to Summerland Key. I had to mail a package and I figured it had been a while since we had been out in that neighborhood so she might find it interesting.
She waited quietly while I mailed off my package at the Post Office Mile Marker 25 but when I pulled across the highway and stopped she knew it was her time. She was off. The county has been blocking off these back woods roads, those that were planned for developments that never happened but the big yellow barricades leave enough room for pedestrians and Cheyenne isn't shy.
I had planned to walk the subdivision around the homes, as Cheyenne frequently enjoys the suburban walks, but she wanted nothing of that on this occasion. She took off smelling and tracking and back tracking like a blood hound. Then she paused.
I didn't bring the paper, or anything else to read so I was reduced to playing with the camera.
It was a reminder of just how seasonal my life is, in this land of no seasons. Actually I can define them clearly enough in their own way. Summer is hot and humid and relatively windless. Winter is dry, windy and cool and humidity is absent except just before the arrival of a cold front (which come every ten days or so on average).
So in the summer Cheyenne doesn't want to to walk as far and urban walks are easier because they can pack a lot more interest into a shorter distance. But in winter she seems to like long back woods rambles so I expect we will return to all the old haunts over the next several weeks and months. This would be the time of year I too walk more and swim less, a lot less, if at all.
I like the mangroves in winter when the mosquitoes are absent and the winter whistles in your ears as it blows across the wide open spaces. And even though the mangrove flats look unremarkable I always seems to find some odd thing to look at, be it a bird posing or an old can of iced tea shrivelling up under the stress of sun and sea air.
Walking the mangroves puts me in a contemplative mood especially as I almost never meet another soul out here. Perhaps stories of rattle snakes put people off, or maybe it just takes a weird perspective to find anything of beauty in these endless plains of short scrubby trees.
Old gravel quarries fill with water and make impromptu lakes, even though the Keys have no hills or rivers or any other distinguishing geographic feature.
I took this next picture with a 2000th exposure. But mindful of gripes about dark pictures...
...I also took one with 1250th exposure. I like the picture above better than the one below.
I also like the darker picture of the two below:
Cheyenne at rest is a thing of beauty but I am just prejudiced, I guess.
I am continuing to rediscover the back woods that have lain dormant in my life all summer long. I heard on the radio of snowstorms in the upper Midwest which would have one wonder if winter is coming early this year. In the Keys the weather continues cool and sunny and dry, so much so my padded liner seems to be a permanent insert in my riding jacket.
Leaving work at six in the morning is tough for one of my feeble constitution, a temperature reading of less than 70 degrees (18C) seems entirely inadequate to someone who doesn't enjoy feeling cold on a motorcycle. For Cheyenne on the other hand the brisk temperatures are just what she ordered, so we take to the woods after a long hot summer of short walks and a lot of shade seeking. A few photos next of the manchineel ("man-chin- kneel") tree, as it is known in the Caribbean. Around here they call it, rather more prosaically as the poisonwood. 
Black blotches on the silvery bark give it away. They remind me of ink drops spreading on blotting paper, a simile that dates me a bit in a world that probably doesn't use blotting paper anymore. 
getting the sap of this tree on your skin will give you a nice rash. Standing under it in the rain has a similar effect. I got my first taste of the poisonwood a couple of months ago when I brushed the leaves away with my forearm after a heavy rain and my arm went all red itchy and pustular with big wet blisters and the mess stuck around for weeks, freaking out my colleagues at work.
Considering how few actual perils there are in the back woods of the Florida Keys, rattlesnakes and cottonmouth poisonous snakes by repute, the poisonwood tree deserves a fair bit of attention as these buggers are everywhere.
Big Pine Key is very attractive to Cheyenne not least because Key deer hit by cars crawl into the bushes to die and she finds their bones. She tells me they are delicious. 
These pine woods are a delight for my dog.
Aside from the dreaded poisonwood tree I rather like the mixture of palms and pines that grow side by side. The sunlight is bright and crisp this time of year, and though I miss the puffy white clouds of summer the deep blue sky makes a pleasant contrast with the greenery below. 
Vultures circling looking for dead meat.
These back woods walks are a complete contrast with what one expects to find in the Keys, and an hour or two spent alone with Cheyenne out here sets me up to go into work in the evening and deal with another night of crazy ass 9-1-1 callers.
I can't help but wonder if Cheyenne compares this to her former life, whatever it was.
Rainy season has been over long enough that many of the submerged trails are drying out, making my Crocs a bit less essential for these walks. 
Laying on my back staring up at the sky wishing for a cloud to come by to break up the blue monotony. 
On Coco Drive Cheyenne found a bony snack.
Then we were back out in paved civilization and Cheyenne took the time for a last quick look around before getting back in the car. 
Big Pine Key, an island made for dog walking.
After a visit to the rheumatologist we were both ready for lunch and my wife, who was full of injected cortisone and punctured like a pin cushion by attempts to draw blood, was able to think on her feet and came up with a new-to-us plan for lunch.
We plunged into the heart of the heartless city and parked the car in an underground lot underneath a recent development around the corner from the Doctor's office.
We have frequently passed a barbecue joint on Highway One, known around here as South Dixie Highway, and this my wife said, was going to be the day. We walked through the empty development. There were some coffee shops at ground level with people sitting out on the sidewalks in the winter sun, but this place missed the development boom of South Florida by a year or two.
Citibank is now open to loan you back the money they were bailed out with. Or not. I am thinking of declaring myself to be a bank so I too can borrow money at a quarter percent and loan it back to taxpayers at better than 4%, and by this miracle of ingenuity award myself a nice fat annual bonus, also at taxpayers' expense. Besides all that banks are also being allowed to get do- overs when they are caught trying to use fraudulent documents to foreclose on homeowners. Luckily not every criminal gets a Mulligan! 
This part of the world has it's share of Key West type street people. After hurricanes when street people in Key West are evacuated along with other car less residents to the Miami shelter set aside for Keys' residents, the Citizen newspaper is full of comments about leaving them there. I don't think Miami really wants our residentially challenged people as they have plenty of their own. 
Shorty's is all decked out in the usual hokey barbecue theme as though license plates and rodeo equipment really would make you feel as though you were in West Texas. It is not the down home barbecue joint we thought it was from the street.
It turns out the restaurant at 9200 South Dixie Highway is just the flagship of a chain of five Shorty's that go almost all the way to Jupiter up the coast. This place has been around since 1951 so they must be doing something right.
Silly me, I was quite surprised to see Spanish advertising in the stiff plastic menu. There is nothing down home about the slick advertising covering every square inch of space on the multi page menu. 
Shorty's caters to everyone and the relatively inexpensive meal makes it a place to go for large families. The genuinely friendly waitress was a surprise when we realised what a cattle market this place is. They seat you "family style" which isn't really family style as neighbors and strangers don't make eye contact- this is Miami after all, not small town West Texas.
The children on either side of us were remarkably well behaved, which was another pleasant surprise for me. I'd rather be gnawed to death by dogs than have to engage in conversation with a small child. Perhaps the waitress grinned at us engagingly because we spoke the same language. The abuela who sat opposite it us had not a lick of English and ordering was done by her grand daughter.
We got a plate of beef ribs each and the meat was perfectly done. The fries and Texas Toast were undistinguished, the coleslaw was okay and with tomatoes to start and a small pitcher of beer our bill rose up to $27. Giddy heights indeed.
It was a little extravagant but we rarely eat barbecue in Key West now that Mad Dawgz has died, so it was worth the taste. And the taste was good, not exceptional but reliably well done in a mass produced sort of way.
The thing is though that Miami offers a huge variety of cuisine, from Haitian to Indian to Jamaican and all the diaspora of South Americans who call Miami home. We've eaten Spanish and Argentine and there is lots more to try, so it's unlikely that barbecue will hold our attention. When we were hungry in this part of town we used to eat at a fascinating Asian fusion place called Origins which we loved. They had several Asian cuisines in a Bento Box and it was a real away-from-Key-West treat. But they've gone... so we tried Shorty's and we're glad we did. One more bucket off the list of Miami eateries to try.
Decidedly not the worst possible choice of places to eat in southern Miami but not the most interesting or adventurous either. 
My wife had a couple of beef ribs for Cheyenne who went to work with a primal will. "She won't even remember that it was me that gave them to her," my wife grumbled as the dog looked up at me with pure adoration in her eyes.
Full of meat and potatoes we got into the traffic that never seems to diminish in this crazy town. It was three o'clock on a Thursday afternoon and south 62nd Street looked like the starting grid at LeMans. 
We keep thinking that we should do more tourist stuff when we go to the Big City, but our trips tend to be utilitarian, sparked by something as mundane as a doctor's visit and ending up purely as a shopping trip.
It works for us but it tires Cheyenne out. Sometimes a girl needs to stretch out on the floor, not on her bed, for reasons known only to herself.
Not that she would stay home given the choice. Taking walks in Miami between shop visits is an adventure she wouldn't do without.