The Bonneville From The Archives

I have been sifting through the archives and it occurred to me I have been around the block a few times since I bought the bike in October 2007. Above I rode an Iron Butt to New York State in 36 hours, then I went to visit Jack Riepe in 2010 recorded in one of my better essays: Key West Diary: Riding With Riepe. I also rode across Florida to a conference and got to spend a long enjoyable day in the saddle exploring the back roads of central Florida.

I used to use Triumph soft saddlebags made of cloth that was neither waterproof nor impervious to being twisted by the wind. After they tore from constant use I replaced them with heavier but solid and waterproof 1430 Pelican cases which I bolted to the soft bag frames. They still work just fine, seen here on a rain-filled ride to Georgia for a family gathering:

The Bonneville continues to run perfectly with almost 80,000 miles on the clock.

Back and forth on Highway One.

In the years between dogs, after Emma died but before I found Cheyenne, I did a lot of lonely Keys exploration by motorcycle. Fishcutters on Summerland became The Wharf:

Garrison Bight:

My preferred parking when going to a movie at the Tropic Cinema.

On my many miles of commuting I have seen fog a couple times:

But this is, in my estimation the perfect motorcycling climate, usually between 65 and 95 degrees year round.

One year I rode my bicycle to the Summerland Key polling station three miles from my home, and the poll workers said I was the first cyclist they had ever seen. As time has passed I have cone to find less and less comfort in voting as money seems to count a lot more than what we the voters have to say, but so far I have not yet found the courage to ignore the process entirely.

Another mainland trip saw me coming home from the Everglades on a Highway 27, my preferred non-freeway route across central Florida. Here at the junction southbound with Krome Avenue:

I also got held up by a massive wreck on Krome Avenue that trip which closed the road and I sat in the grass waiting...just as though it had been the Overseas Highway.

And as I usually prefer Card Sound road to the no-passing restrictions of the 18 mile stretch I found myself getting ready to pay the dollar toll to cross the Card Sound Bridge:

Frank Deford the NPR sports commentator also came to Key West in 2008, typical of the caliber of visitors to the Southernmost City in winter:

Key West Diary: Frank Deford

A day on Cudjoe Key, pre-Cheyenne, saw me riding out to the horses stabled on Asturias, and then visiting the flooded gravel pits on the other side of Blimp Road. Kids liked to drive around there and that of course had to be stopped so now they've blocked off the entrance, on the puritanical principle that fun must not be had. I'm sure it has you do with liability or some other such thing.

I would ride to El Mocho on Stock Island for my favorite Cuban food, truly the place where locals eat:

The Overseas Highway through Stock Island hasn't changed much:

They've taken out a few passing zones when they recently repaved stretches of it (bastards!) but the sun still shines on a Highway One:

The Bonneville is an easy bike to ride, not light at 500 pounds but I find it scooter-like in the ease of the controls, so I enjoy exploring back roads on it, here at Bay Point, Mile Marker 15:

Also at Bay Point Knuckleheads didn't work but it made way for what appears to be a successful eatery called Kaya Island Eats. I ate there last week and it seemed pretty good, much better than my first visit when it opened, but I suppose that was to be expected. Kaya Island Eats

In 2007 I went to my home in Italy for the first time in 25 years and I rented a BMW 650 to ride around Umbria. It was a good bike but rather breathless compared to my easy going Bonneville.

The Summerland runway is still there flanked by homes equipped with airplane garages. The signage is a bit more imposing these days.

But the point remains the same, cars and airplanes shouldn't mix.

Part of the pleasure of the Key West climate is that it rains mostly in summer when it's hot and summer rain is no big deal. Hypothermia is highly unlikely on a commute around here:

And the sunrise can be quite comforting as one rides home from a long night at work.

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Read To Ride, Motorcycle Touring

I like to travel. And if that weren't enough I have traveled throughout my life as much and as often as I was able. I have ridden motorcycles (and scooters) driven cars, ridden railways and sailed. For years I have cursed my itchy feet and my innate desire to see what's over the horizon. But as I age I value the memories, they give me a chance to travel while I am stationary, and they are even more valuable now that I have a place where I do like to live. The itch is abating at last. Which is not to say I don't want to travel, but I do know where home is, as long as I can hang onto my place in these lumps of rock called the Florida Keys.

There are those good people who tell me frequently that they would like travel but...There are so many obstacles to travel, but the biggest is usually in people's heads. When I hear that someone wants to go to England I point out, unhelpfully, that planes leave Miami each afternoon and they get people to London in time for breakfast tomorrow. They shy away, as though I had suggested they commit some unspeakable stupidity and set themselves among bandits in a far foreign land. Grilled tomatoes and greasy fried bread and kippers for breakfast ten hours away frightens one raised to think of potatoes and pancakes as breakfast food. Food is the essence of travel as an explicator of culture, for me. I have eaten camel in the desert, and boiled potatoes in Siberia and some very odd breakfast food on the streets of Yokohama. I remember drinking Guinness alongside the highway in Africa, taking a break from riding in the awful heat and talking about travel with men who lived in mud huts in a part of the world today torn by civil war, Muslims versus Christians inNorthern Nigeria.

But these are other people's stories:

I find it odd that a man who chose to ride a Lambretta 150 from Ontario to Peru did not have the digestion capable of coping with spicy Mexican food. And because he had no Spanish I wondered how much of this alien culture he could absorb on his remarkable scooter ride half a century ago. Give him credit, he does get around! And get this: he asked a woman he had first met six weeks prior to fly down to Mexico City, marry him and carry on riding the Lambretta. I have reached the bit where Tove says "Yes!"

The astonishing thing is this madcap adventure seems to have worked for them as they stayed married until he died a decade ago. She is still alive but the production of this book is a story unto itself, a labor of love by their son. THE SCOOTER DIARIES is a beautifully written manuscript authored by Ron Bowman after the trip yet never published. Thus it was up to his son Gordon to prepare it for us to read. The Canadian journalist on a scooter tells an amazing story of a ride unimaginable to people who expect to be cosseted every minute of every day whether they are on the road or at home. These two had a blast and so will you if you read this delightful travel story. They wore street clothes...no "proper gear!"

The other traveler's tale I throughly enjoyed was also set in Central America by another journalist, an American who went bust, mortgaged his home and bought a BSA to ride to Panama by himself, dressed in coveralls and a cloth cap.

It's obvious there's more to this story than meets the eye, but Two Wheels to Panama is a delightful travel story. Carroll has a tremendous sense of humor and an eye for the ironic so you can rest assured this an easy read.

The Central American roads were a nightmare but William Carroll fights the good fight cheerfully and always within sight of his camera lense. To earn some money he files reports with papers back home about stuff he sees and assignments he's given, which in turn give us eyewitness stories about United Fruit that belong in the history books. The Pan-American Highway in Costa Rica was a series of river crossings that tested the BSA's electrics, and the capacity of his boots to hold water:

This next book, like the first listed has to be ordered from the author, in this case a sensitive New Zealander living in England. His story Overland To Egypt is a ride on a 1952 175cc Bantam overloaded and hard pressed to keep going in the heat of the Middle East. I am a huge fan of vintage Vespas but from reading this story the BSA Bantam was a nightmare to keep on the road. With a top speed of 45mph it's not going anywhere fast but with stops every five miles in the worst of the heat you are amazed by the author's great good will all the time.

This story reminded me of Jupiter's Travels inasmuch as the author just loves people. Again we have a fussy eater and a man with no facility for languages but he travels slowly through countries that have since gone up in smoke and has a whale of a time. In his epilogue he briefly mentions the Arab Spring uprisings and notes that ordinary people in those countries he rode through seemed to be living happy enough lives before War came to the land. I of course wish he had expanded on that theme as I have long held to similar theories from my own travels. But what he gives us is a delight.

This is a travel story of the best sort with an annoyingly incompetent motorcycle which he uses to get him closer to people along the way. He needs help all the time and he gets it proving what we travelers already know: you are never alone on the road.

In closing I found an old book mark in one of my books, from a trip to New Mexico, a postcard of Georgia O'Keefe on the pillion of a motorcycle. For me it expresses joy and freedom and unlikely adventure:

If you really have to travel you will. May it be on two wheels if you can, some other way if you can't. But if you don't want to, or cannot travel, voyage in your armchair with these great stories, not about motorcycles, but about fascinating people.

 

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Cheyenne At Higgs Beach

I showed this pictures to my colleagues at work when we were talking about our pets. I explained how Cheyenne hunts down things that smell good and sometimes she needs my help. Nick and Shannon laughed at me indulging my old happy predator. I love Cheyenne but she is a dog and offering to read her a bedtime story won't do anything other than irritate her. She amuses herself but urban hunting and then when it's time to sleep she wants to be left in peace. Finding scraps is bound to be bad for her but to defy the common wisdom Cheyenne flourishes on a regimen of love and attention, travel and constant surprises. Here today, a road trip tomorrow, nothing taken for granted, her little doggy brain kept active by my willingness to indulge her curiosity. She gave the bone a gnaw after she found it under a van and retrieved by me as she couldn't reach it and then she discarded it and off we went again. She's smart enough to deserve opposable thumbs and fingers...

The cold front put the shrimping fleet south of the island safe from the north winds. Jack Riepe has re-surfaced on Facebook, a medium I do not enjoy as much as some people do, and asked what happens to the fleet of tankers of cocktail sauce when this happens...I have no idea. A sea of cocktail sauce with no shrimp sounds awful.

Sculpture Key West's tank still holding out at the beach, long after Sculpture Key West is supposed to be over!

Higgs Park, the open space behind the beach is closed by the county at eleven at night but during the day anyone can enjoy the open space...

...even chickens of course. As well as the idle poor.

I suppose one should be all Victorian about them and get one's knickers in a twist about laziness and lack of motivation but then one remembers how many homeless are people with mental health issues and how Reaganomics has masterfully deprived them of help and one wonders why we blame them and not our Dear Leaders. Mix in a few determined shirkers and the perfect al fresco climate and this, common sense tells us, is bound to be the result. And it will get worse as the economy only pretends to improve and the people in charge get more removed from us, the lower orders. Debtors prisons, the poorhouse, and indentured servitude soon doubtless be making a comeback as the bedrock of our social order. Deuteronomy 15:11 comes to mind.

This guy below was, like me, making a statement that we the housed also enjoy this park alongside the residentially challenged. He was using a small warped tennis racquet to bounce a ball off the wall. I wondered why he needed to make it so difficult for himself.

He said it was lacrosse, a "North Eastern thing," which I assumed meant people in pocket handkerchief sized states across New England spend the long lingering dusk of summer evenings chasing each other across statelines in pursuit of the impossibly fast ball. He spent a lot of time running around the park trying to scoop it into the absurdly small net attached to his hockey stick. Cheyenne and I ambled on.

Rain threatened but the gods were spent and they stopped weeping.

These last lingering winter storms defy the stereotype of a sunny humid town but they bring their own beauty and a certain measure of relief from endless summer days. If cold fronts brought snow and ice I would decamp for foreign parts and become a bum myself, a stranger in a strange land.

It will get too hot for her again far too soon.

 

My dog the hunter of unconsidered trifles.

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