"You must be Conchscooter"
Argh! Bugger that bloody dog, she gives me away every time. I kicked Cheyenne and ran for cover. The woman had a nerve walking up to me in broad daylight, throwing her arms around my neck and treating me like a long lost relative. She didn't really she just said hello with a bright smile.
Actually Sue turned out to be quite nice which I suppose is a requirement if you are going to operate a dust catcher store by the name of Bliss on Lazy Way Lane (
http://www.blisskeywest.com/). The woman, and her unseen husband, have balls of steel it turns out, not just because they say hullo to people in the street but by virtue of moving to Key West and starting up a new life and being wild and youthful and I feel old and carefully planned by contrast. I would no more throw myself on the tender mercies of commerce than I would launch myself from an airplane even with a parachute. Which goes to show we need more brave people in the world.
Oddly enough there is a contingent of people, busy bodies decidedly not in the Key West mold, who think dogs shouldn't ride on scooters and only humans should have that pleasure. The theory is the dogs might get hurt. I discussed this at some length with Cheyenne, who it seems has developed some fascistic tendencies because, as a former pound dog, she paraphrased Mussolini to me (in English): Better a day as a scooter riding puppy than a hundred years as a fenced in dog. (
Meglio un giorno da leone che cent'anni da pecora). Risk assessment is a lost art in fearful America. I blame television. Mind you riding a scooter while talking on the phone is likely to lead to a short life.
I hope it was a happy life for the kid in the picture above chattering away. I guess we all have our risk tolerance set at different levels. I did some monumentally stupid things on motorcycles when I was young, but lacking cell phones we had to be stupid in different and irrational ways. A few years ago I read on the Modern Vespa Forum (
http://modernvespa.com/forum/) a spirited discussion about how unsafe it is to ride a scooter with only one hand on the handlebar. It was about then I gave up on forums, dispensers of silly advice and started my own blog.
I see lots of people ride bicycles and motorcycles with their hands off the bars but I am too chicken to do it even though I know the gyroscopic effect will keep me upright. One handed I can mange just fine. Call it irrational fear. Cheyenne has no fear at all when it comes to the smell of food.
She stuck her head in the fence of this abandoned home, formerly owned by the Bahama Land Trust and waited for something good to happen. I should have kicked her again, but as I was joking about kicking her in the first place I cuddled her instead and told her to develop a little healthy fear even and especially when she smelled something good to eat.
My forays around town lead me to think there are huge numbers of visitors here compared to the normally somnolent nature of key West in the period between snowbird season and summer family fun time.
My street out in the boonies is seeing a resurgence of winter-like walkers and cyclists and compulsive public exercisers. Normally the street goes dead when everyone and their cycling safety gear goes North for the summer but not this year. Helmets and high visibility vests are everywhere along Highway One, not one bit put off by the abnormally high temperatures as the weather office tells us.
I was mooching around on Elizabeth Street sharing a moment of directional indecision with my dog when I looked up and saw this: 
Old electrical wire guides nailed to the wall. You just never know what you'll spot when your dog calls a halt to the walk for a breather and you decide to look up. 
She took another pause around the corner in the back of Kermit's original Key Lime Shoppe. Standing there I saw nothing of more interest than my dog, so I took a gratuitous picture of her.
I often find people like to drive slowly on the famous bridge which as a result ends up with me passing the visitors as I prefer to be at homerather than staring up their exhaust pipes. It does not seem to be a well known fact but the dotted double yellow lines on the bridge do allow passing though, like anywhere in the Keys if you are going to pass you want to do it cautiously. Some callow youth killed a couple of strangers here a few months ago in a head on that closed the road for some considerable time. Looking in my mirror this grotesque contraption followed my example:
Darth Vader on an orange tricycle followed me across the bridge. I was surprised by how handy the contraption appeared to be. I see more and more tricycles appearing in various guises on the roads so I guess a simple old fashioned hack as a sidecar is known, is no longer desirable for many riders. I had always planned on getting a sidecar for my motorcycle when balancing becomes tricky but perhaps I will have to harness something like this instead.
That would shock the wife if she went downstairs one day and saw the Bonneville had been traded in for a Volkswagen engine in a tricycle...It would shock me too.
Despite the lack of convenient parking. Scaffolding means construction:
What comes next here who knows. I shall be interested to see what happens to the former sail loft. The empty building next door has two sets of development fans, if you read the anonymous comments in the paper. I'm with the brew pub contingent as I can't bowl to save my life. Where I grew up in Italy we rode mopeds owing to the severe shortage of bowling alleys.
I had thought the new dorms at the Florida Keys Community College were going to appear in the parking lot behind the cafeteria but instead the much more sensible idea seems to have taken root to stick them in the very back of the college next to the Public Safety training g building which also houses the dive school. This last legacy of the Landesberg-Boyle administration is coming along nicely and should help the school attract students from out of state. Onwards and Upwards!
Nevertheless people were out boating and presumably out fishing.
I'm glad for the complicated waterline of the Lower Keys, islands, sand bars, shoals and places to go and see. Otherwise I'd have to go fishing.
This is a true hole in the wall operation with a serving window under an awning and a counter with a couple of stools. The coffee was hot and sweet and the sandwich came by a couple of minutes later. "Bacon egg and cheese with a medium con leche with one" (sugar) made up my million calorie order. The thing about Cuban breakfast sandwiches is that proper Cuban bread is made with lard which adds to the caloric effect. 
I only get this stuff as a rare treat and I thoroughly enjoy it when I do but a daily diet of this food will do one no good at all. On the other hand we see people lining up at fast food joints daily so perhaps...but then take a look:
The bread is crusty and flaky on the outside the egg mixture in the middle isn't greasy and the coffee is hot. This is the breakfast of champions, and the presence of the day's newspaper is the icing on the cake. I brought mine from home, celebrating Tom Hambright's quarter century as Monroe County historian.
In later life Ackland has played a fair few villainous roles which I don't think would be at all suited to the stately Mr Hambright. And then the con leche was gone and it was time to go back to reality.
