Tortillaville Fish Tacos

There is a great new place to buy food to go in Big Pine Key. They call it Tortillaville and for a former California resident this Mexican food outlet is a welcome addition to the Lower Keys. It's a tad bit difficult to predict where they will be but weekends they seem to have settled in front of the Out of the Blue gift shop at Mile Marker 30.Brian is the male half of the outfit, taking orders while keeping an eye on the tortillas on the griddle.My wife and I enjoy their and shrimp fish tacos and the fish quesadilla was excellent also. My next step is to have a burrito. I am very fond of my Gaucho Ernesto Burrito at Badboy on Simonton but a California style burrito would be an enjoyable addition.Red white and green are the colors of Mexico. Apparently the health department in Monroe County ran them through a few hoops but all is properly licensed.This operation spends the summers in Hudson, New York wherever that is, and now spends winters in Big Pine. Key West apparently throws up a bunch of extra licensing hoops which preclude, at least for now, an appearance in the Southernmost City.Brian on the right, Allison on the left work in close quarters.Cheyenne thought this place had potential.She checked out the trash cans hopefully before settling down to wait with me.Brian says repeat business has been good, people like us like what they eat and come back for more. However business is not picking up as fast as they'd like, partly because local businesses don't see Tortillaville as a useful addition. They'd like to establish a circuit in the Lower Keys but it's slow in coming. Grrr.Heat, baby heat!I really want this place to be a permanent addition in winter months. Eating out is costly in hard times and it is a hell of a treat to spend six bucks each and get good food nicely prepared.Buzzing through Big Pine of a weekend this is what to look for.

Also you can check http://www.tortillaville.com/ or check them out on Facebook and all that social media stuff that bores the pants off me.Tall Cathy was visiting our house when I got the call to pick up tacos on the way home from walking the dog. We spread the table on the porch and checked an assortment of fish and shrimp tacos. Eight at three dollars each. More than we could eat for twenty four bucks.Two tortillas, lots of fish and salsa. We added our own hot sauce and my wife likes to throw in some extra sour cream because she can.I liked the shrimp tacos okay but they got the big thumbs up from the wife and Cathy.Cathy actually came by to make critical comments about the growth of the garden on the deck, but tacos and Cheyenne won her over and she was quite polite about our growing efforts this year. Roll on the weekend, I say because I will be back for more tacos. And after lunch next weekend I expect my lounge chair will be free so I shall get to soak up a few more rays while I doze off my fish lunch. Hoping everyone Up North is enjoying their mammoth snow storm this week.

Sunset Ride

I have been reading stories of boredom and indifference among people who ride motorcycles and who blog about it. Me? I have one main road to ride and it's flat and it's frequently slow and yet, jumping on my three year old Bonneville still gives me a thrill every damned time.A cloudy uncertain day gave way to evening sun; my chores were done, Cheyenne was well walked and snoring, there was no reason not to fire up the Triumph and go a for a ride, just for the hell of it. Yup, riding a motorcycle is still a cheap thrill for me.Bobskoot in Canada likes to make fun of me for not having a tachometer on my cheap Bonneville. It was known, before it was phased out, as a standard Bonneville; unlike the more expensive T100 which is still offered there is no chrome, no instrument to measure engine revs and it has a one tone paint job. I threw some luggage and a windshield on it, failed to add any chrome and chose not to modify the engine to increase the standard 65 horsepower produced by the modest air cooled 865cc twin and got riding. Bobskoot is no longer satisfied by his entirely adequate Suzuki 650, farkled and super equipped, and is looking with lust in his heart at a Yamaha Super Tenere that will cost him $17,000 (Canadian) plus delivery charges etc...etc...to reignite his middle aged love affair with motorcycling. http://wetcoastscootin.blogspot.com/ And yes he will get a tachometer and shaft drive and heated hand grips. In the US the base price for the "adventure tourer" by Yamaha is around $14,000 but here too you have to add a bunch of delivery charges. My Bonneville cost $6,000 but I had to add two grand more to get it out of the Fort Lauderdale dealership. 48,000 trouble free miles later here I am still as happy as a pig in a poke with my cheap ride on my straight highway in my corner of Flatistan. Bob's post about dreaming of a new bike got me thinking.In the Florida Keys the major mechanical enemy is the salt laden environment which attacks any piece of metal with airborne corrosion. You'd think the second worst enemy would be boredom- yet somehow I still love my ride to work, I revel in the fact before I took off on my spontaneous evening ride to nowhere I was lying on my deck, sunbathing with a book on the last day of January. Then I decided the other way to take advantage of the mild weather was to ride in it. So I did.Snow? Ice? Mountain passes? Twisting curved roads? What are they?My wife is bound and determined to save up enough to get us to Italy this summer, where my buddy Giovanni wants to take a motorcycle trip to the Alps, through Italy, France and Montecarlo. I wonder how we will pull such an ambitious vacation off in the year of living on the edge of international economic meltdown, but it's a nice dream, to imagine a few weeks in summer of riding twisting mountain roads with my last best childhood friend. Meanwhile I drift along, skirting tropical downpours watching the drizzle build up on my windshield as I ride. Rain is no problem in the Florida Keys, as I carry lightweight waterproofs and temperatures rarely get into the hypothermia range. Rain is just a little challenge to spice up the ride.Look at this view! How could you ever get bored with this? I know the Overseas Highway is flat and straight, as is much of the riding for 600 miles (1000 kms) north of here, and the winter traffic is crowded and slow, but still, I cannot help but get that cheap thrill from simply going for a ride. Even when it's time to commute on the same familiar 26 miles into Key West I pull out onto the Highway wondering what the ride will bring. Some evenings I am feeling in a hurry for no reason and I spend the ride looking for a gap to pass the bored texting driving drones; other evenings I am feeling lazy and slow and I drift along at the speed limit or less counting the leaves on the passing mangroves, pulling aside to let faster traffic pass me by. Some days it rains, some it's windy, some it's sunny and some it's a bit of all three.I think it's the curse of our age, a curse we are going to have to remedy somehow as money and credit dry up, that of needing fresh stimulation to retain the freshness of the experience. It's no wonder our Lords and Masters on Wall Street call us consumers, because that is all they want us to do, consume. And now, at least here south of the 49th parallel, most of us have lost the ability to consume thoughtlessly and wildly. Now we have to remember to feel and taste and enjoy with what we have, not with what we crave. Not hard to do in the Fabulous Florida Keys.I said to my wife I wanted to "upgrade to a Triumph Sprint GT," a new sport tourer with 130 horsepower, heated grips, a sporting ride for the 21st century at a modest $13,000. She looked at me real old fashioned and I burst out laughing. She continues to get cheap thrills from riding her 150cc Vespa around town; we are not by nature "upgraders." She's not alone; I spotted this red one in the trailer park on Ohio Key but I'll bet it has far fewer miles than hers. We owe nothing on our rides and basic third party insurance only (we pay for our own damage) is $80 a year for both machines.On the motorcycle forums I read not much about the pleasure of the ride and much more about the need to modify. In the Bonneville I have found the perfect companion, not too fast, not as economical as a 250cc, so I do tend to think of my 500 pound parallel twin as a bit of a luxury at a modest 45 miles per gallon of regular gas but it looks right to me, as a motorcycle should look and it does everything I ask, which is to start and run and stop without complaint. Day after day, because my need to ride never grows less.

I am grateful that my Ford Fusion is there, a reliable comfortable car to do the dog carrying duty, and the Miami shopping duty and the cross country family vacation duty, but when I am alone and commuting or traveling for pleasure it's the Bonneville that does what I need to do. I had been planning an Everglades ride this past Monday but I felt under the weather and my sage wife told me I should postpone it until I felt myself again. In a couple of weeks perhaps I'll take a day to sit in the saddle and roam the South Florida wilderness. This week I barely got beyond Long Beach Road on Big Pine...
I have a couple of Iron Butt rides under my belt, including my raid to Binghamton, New York, in 35 hours last freezing cold October. My Bonneville and I cruised the Catskills immediately after I finished the timed ride, enjoying hills and curves and twisties. Then I finally got to see the famed Hudson River, riding it's banks on my trusty Bonneville. What a bike, it does it all for me. Some people need to own lots of bikes, one to tour, one to ride fast, one for the dirt, one for around town. My Bonneville is an even bigger bargain when you consider that like it's forebears it does everything adequately. I would ride to California tomorrow if I had the time (and it were summer, let's face it).
I hope this Spring I will get another Iron Butt ride under my belt some weekend that I have off. This summer my wife says I can go back up North and see Jack riepe my riding dominatrix who wears a leather skirt and cracks a whip the length of Pennsylvania. In the meantime we buzz back and forth on Highway One my Bonneville and I racking up the miles and not wishing for more horsepower or new paint jobs or any new shopping stimulation. Some people think there isn't much to see in the lower Florida Keys and they may be right. I managed to put thirty miles on my bike with no effort in the hour before darkness and I scrapped a planned tour of No Name Key and north Big Pine because we simply ran out of daylight and I wanted to go home and cuddle my dog.

I always manage to see banal things that fascinate me on my tours of the Lower Keys. Imagine owning enough coconut palms and sea grapes to fill this many trash cans with debris. A fortune invested in trash cans alone...never mind paying someone's effort to fill them.

I met an experienced Iron Butt rider once, a man who routinely rides the continent in eleven days covering 11,000 miles on the Iron Butt Rally on his supremely well equipped Honda Goldwing. He told me of renting a scooter in Key West once and not managing to put 60 miles on it in the week he rented it. I can put sixty miles in a day on a scooter, and I have, just from the need to feed my curiosity. You need a large imagination to live well, a sense of humor helps, and curiosity they say keeps you young at heart.

Back home the sunset was once again doing it's thing. I poured a glass of wine, dragged out my book and gave Cheyenne a rawhide. She crunched, I read and all was well with the world on my deck.
Consume away folks, this is all I need, a carburetted, rusty, well worn Bonneville and a road, any old road will do, to ride it on. Hell this bike even copes quite nicely with gravel, a useful trait as money is running out for public spirited endeavors such as street repairs and highway paving.
And here I am, home sweet home, hidden by trees, off street parking under the house, the promise of more sunshine tomorrow.

My mother bought me a Vespa 50 forty years ago, in the summer of 1970 or thereabouts and motorcycles have made the long drudgery of daily driving an adventure to be enjoyed ever since. No cell phones, no music, no satellite positioning whether I want to be found or not. Not safe, not pigeon holed, not doing as I am told as an obedient consumer. Not high visibility, not drunk, not stoned, not texting. The ride is the reward for me. Keep your 2011 models, your "upgrades" and your monthly payments. A lot of talk I hear about freedom these days has got nothing on simply riding my Bonneville. Long may it last.

New Header

I am of the old school of journalism where the header doesn't change as it is the identifier, the signpost in a confused and messy web world. I liked the old header, but my Vespa GTS is long gone not to be replaced and too many people got freaked out by the lovely picture I had of the Key West cemetery with all its associations of mortality and decay and death. So, change is good right? I am not so sure but every critical person loves sunsets and I like my Bonneville. I thought about putting Cheyenne up there but she is in every essay almost and when she dies it would be too painful to face my blog so there it is, she gets a postage stamp sized picture in the profile. Bonneville+Sunset+Key West Dairy. Can I go now and do something useful with this lovely sunny day?

Vignettes

It has been a busy winter so far with plenty of visitors. Doug (left) with his partner Brian came for a weekend of fun in Key West from their home in San Diego where they work in the burgeoning electronics industry. We met Doug a dozen years ago sailing in Mexico. He is an accomplished mechanic and kept his Alden 32 motorsailer going despite numerous mechanical failures, with good cheer and a great sense of humor.My wife and I turned left at the Panama Canal to cruise the Western Caribbean, while Doug turned right from Acapulco and crossed the South Pacific in a cloud of adventures and wild times. I remember particularly one story where he left an anchorage for a day sail and outside the reef conditions were such that he couldn't get back inside and was forced to sail downwind in increasingly strong winds so that he was obliged to embark, unprepared on a week long unexpected sail to the next secure anchorage. Doug tells a great story.

The recent fullish moon left a nice golden imprint across the salt ponds across from our house. This is I fear the only mediocre picture I got of the event. It really was lovely though.Speaking of lovely here is my Bonneville at my preferred downtown free motorcycle parking spot on Eaton at Duval.As of this writing I have nearly 48,000 trouble free miles on my 2007 Hinckley Bonneville. The modern Triumph is a wonder to behold and ride. I am going to have more to say when I cross the 50,000 mile mark in a month or two.

Eye candy up next. A windy afternoon at the Key West Bight, known to tourists as the Historic Seaport.I took this picture when cousin Kirk was in town with Jay from Seattle. It was cold and windy even by the Pacific Northwesterner's standards. My preferred standards are tropical with palms:North Roosevelt Boulevard, including bicycles, electric cars and scooters for rent. What better way to get around Key West in a busy January?

On the last morning young Kristi was training with me on night shift she asked facetiously if I would walk her out to her car, a gesture of consideration after several weeks of knocking her into shape to be the excellent Channel One operator she is bound to become. We left the building together and spotted this, in the lobby:Kristi drew close to me, a startled look in her eyes; the "walk me to my car, old man" joke suddenly became real. I picked up the lobby phone and spoke to John my counterpart on the day shift that had just taken over in Dispatch. Kristi and I strolled past the man, sound asleep on the floor of the Police Station lobby. He must have arrived within minutes as the day shift dispatchers hadn't seen him and he was unavoidable.Before I said goodbye to Kristi members of the day shift came out to reclaim the police lobby:It happens all the time in Key West and yet I cannot conceive of drinking so very much that I just pass out in a heap there where I am walking. They were still busy talking to him after I pulled my helmet on and rode off. A great start to the day for the incoming shift, and I was glad to be home and in bed half an hour later as the sun came up.

And speaking of out of town visitors on binges here we have one last picture of Therese, now safely back at work at the United Nations in the Hague potting decorative plants around my home.An avid gardener she enjoyed buying some decorative plants to supplement our vegetables and then she potted some annuals next to our budding fruit trees.I continue to see the fruits of her labor weeks after she went home and they still look great.It's selfish I suppose but I hope she comes back next year to work her magic once again. Our of town visitors do bring color to life one way or another.