Planes, Boats and Pelicans

Seen off the south shore of Key West, a pelican ignoring the hurtling boat:

 Setting up:

 Appearing to be practicing:

 Sailing can mean going slowly:

 With style:

 Different style and much faster, the seaplane to the Dry Tortugas:

 A serene afternoon off the White Street Pier:

Flagler Avenue

This si where you bring your Conch Tour Train when it needs repair:

Locals going for a stroll:

Checking out the parking lot at the Lime Tree, a down-at-heel convenience store:

An invasive type this, messy and noisy by comparison:

Around the corner on Bertha the hockey players, who knew...Conchs like their hockey:

Robert's Fruit Stand 2014

Robert Is Here

From the archives, written in 2014 click the title for a link to their homepage.

I suffer from a certain reluctance to openly enjoy certain pleasures that are, how can I put this? - too well known. Sometimes attractions become so attractive they lose the intrinsic value that made them well known in the first place and this fruit stand in Florida City should be one of those.

But it's not. I like stopping off here any chance I get, and apparently I am not alone. Last weekend the place was packed...

....despite desperate heat and rain showers laying down a nice thick blanket of humidity. There is no air conditioning here, this is Old Florida. I don't mind the heat and humidity but I hear constant complaints about it. Better here than a hundred and twenty in the desert or a hundred and windy in the Great Plains. Or 38 in Fairbanks. If you live in South Florida enjoy it and refresh yourself with air conditioning.

I look at these kinds of family industries and I wonder what it must be like to have a built-in career already mapped out for you. Half a century of selling fruit and vegetables.

And it is an industry. Trip Advisor shows 216 reviews of this place that they put in Homestead but the fruit stand itself claims to be in neighboring (and much smaller) Florida City.

If one wanted to split hairs it's actually kitty corner from Florida City which has it's western boundary across the street in the picture below, but Homestead is further away to the east. Robert's is actually in unincorporated Dade County as far as I can tell.

However Homestead is the catch all city for the agricultural area south of Miami so I guess it will do for those less pedantic than myself.

To get here turn west on Palm Avenue, which is the traffic light at the Shell station just south of the last Turnpike Exit and keep going west. Or follow the brown signs for Everglades National Park and Flamingo. Picnickers welcome.

One of my several pleasures living in South Florida is access to fresh tropical fruit. I enjoy soursop ice cream at Flamingo Crossing in Key West and here my wife went for the same flavor, known to Spanish speakers as guanabana, a thick creamy vanilla with a hint of tropical perfume. I love the stuff but the seven dollar styrofoam (really, still using non recyclable containers?) cup had us both full to bursting.

This place is more than a fruit stand or a vegetable market. It's also a playground because like I said in the opening this is now a proper tourist attraction. And parents won't come for milk shakes if kids can't do whatever it is small people do on a Saturday afternoon.

Let me be blunt: I don't like goat cheese because it smells like goat and these animals were rank.

My dog was perfect, not smelly and not noisy and certainly not undisciplined or rambunctious. I think she spent a lot of time with agitated small children in her previous life because she wants nothing to do with them now.

We walked out of there post haste. This road is part of the network of straight flat paved links connecting the fields and farms in the hinterland of what was once Everglades swamp. There is a winery out there, and it's on my list for this winter.

And we got in just under the wire at the fruit stand, as next week they close for two months. This is a sign of how peaceful the next eight weeks should be, an interlude in South Florida before snow storms start pushing people south.

Oddly enough I came across a dumpster filled with produce boxes from all over the place. Who knew Mississippi exported sweet potatoes?

Well worth a stop. It's less than ten minutes from the end of the turnpike. A soursop smoothie makes the whole weekend go sweeter.

Flora Of Key West

Let us rejoice that not every corner of the continent is gray and bleak and covered in frost.

Red mangroves know no season, they secrete salt into their leaves that when full turn yellow and die and drop off. But they do it year round as the mangrove has adapted to live only in salt water. 

It comes as a surprise to discover that in the Keys, where there is never any frost, tropical fruits will grow more or less wild. It is a grave offence to pick bananas or mangoes or other fruits without the owner's permission. Something about tropical fruit growing in these United States brings out the pilfering instinct in some people.  

The Malabar Almond tree on Frances at Ashe Streets has lost the sign that was hanging on the trunk for as long as I can remember. Howard Sands died at Chateau Thierry in France in July 1918 and his family planted  a sapling in his memory making the tree about a hundred years old. Susan Gardner was the last guardian of the tree and she died in 2015 after a  lifetime of sweeping the sidewalk and maintaining the home she inherited.

So naturally the sign is gone, the history cleaned up and the house is on the market rendered bland and inoffensive for maximum return. That's how they transform Key Wesr, it's  luxury home now.

Flowers growing through fences are a fairly common sight in Key West:

Vegetables painted on light poles isn't:

To see the rest of  Pohalski Lane just click.

Fresh new buds springing forth in January in Key West:

A Motorcycle Ride

Middle Florida 2008

I had owned my Triumph Bonneville 865 about eight months when I was sent to a training class near Clearwater in May 2008. Now that my Bonneville has been drowned by Hurricane Irma and with my dog young and energetic and eager for road trips I see no point in replacing it with a Street Twin or a Moto Guzzi 750, my preferred options, I wanted to look back at how much fun I had with over a decade and a hundred thousand miles. I miss it, the best motorcycle I owned, easy to ride, reliable and good looking. 

It was a fine trip up to Palm Bay, an anonymous strip of chain stores located north of Clearwater and west of Tampa. It's 430 miles north of Key West and I took 11 hours to make the ride, wandering wildly on my "road ready" Bonneville:

South Florida is mostly sugarcane fields south of Lake Okeechobee, miles and miles of straight roads and waving green leaves. In the distance one can see factory cities, sugar cane plants that process the raw cane:They belch smoke when they are processing and provide big black smudges of sky to alleviate the open beauty of the fields. Sugar cane is an appalling crop, it sucks the nutrients out of the soil requiring huge amounts of fertilizer to be poured into the soil annually. The harvesting of the cane is such hazardous and horrendous work the companies import labor from the Caribbean (Jamaica principally) to wear armor in the hundred degree heat and slash at the cane with machetes. All this and the industry gets huge subsidises to make it viable. And the fertilizer runs off into Florida Bay and the coral reefs of the Keys. The fields are picturesque though...

Lake Okeechobee is the second largest freshwater lake in the nation, second only to Lake Superior. However prolonged drought combined with an excessively precautionary draining of the lake before hurricane season has left the place almost dry. I looked over the top of the levee and could see no water, just miles of reeds. Riding round the lake all one can see is a high berm of grass:

The weather for my trip was about perfect. It was about 80 degrees but south Florida was swept by cooling breezes all day long and at times I was almost (almost!) chilled, by the un-summer like breeze. The Triumph ran strongly, humming along at 70 mph along the dead straight roads. I kept stopping off to take pictures and ease my butt, because the seat, though authentic for a 1960's looking motorcycle is a bit hard.

Central Florida is a very rural, very different from coastal Florida and this area is home to trucks and tractors:Moore Haven, county seat of Glades County was ravaged by the great hurricane of 1935, the one that trashed the railroad in Matecumbe Key, and the town itself appears never to have recovered completely. They have built a rather attractive waterfront walkway with trees and benches in a park like atmosphere:And the waterway itself is a cross-Florida stopping place much favored by traveling boaters. Though most land oriented tourists rarely bother to come inland to see these places...

Further north the state becomes less tropical, no longer frost free and filled with rolling hills and orange groves. Indeed Florida is bisected by a limestone spine that rises dozens, dozens I tell you, of feet above sea level. So much so they have turned Highway 17, a roadway that criss-crosses Highway 27 into a scenic route. It is scenic too. Check this out, a view across a valley!

Hillcrest Heights indeed, and I keep insisting Florida isn't flat. This is the land of rolling hills, open parkland masquerading as cow pastures and gorgeous pine forests. I was in the middle of orange grove country which is where your winter Florida fruit comes from, these funky little trees:And when they crush the fruit as they load it into trucks, fruit laboriously handpicked by emigrant pickers, the air is redolent with the smell of fresh squeezed orange:

Central Florida is also the home of retirees, less wealthy perhaps or less attuned to urban life. they come to towns called Winter Haven and Frostproof to spend their winters in tiny cottages or immobile homes, the retirement they always dreamed of. And they may be far, relatively from tidal waters, but they build their own beaches and docks around the many fresh water lakes that dot central Florida:

Friday was a great day in the saddle for me, swooping hills, winding roads, empty of traffic and mine to enjoy in perfect weather. 

Free Parking

There is a movement across the United States to allow motorcycles to lane split or filter in traffic. California is the only state that allows motorcycles to pass between cars in slow traffic though some other states are looking into it, notably Arizona. Lane splitting is the norm in the rest of the world and is one reason motorcycles make so much sense in modern congested traffic.

In the US the main reason to ride is to have fun because motorcycles are dangerous and danger is to be avoided at all costs lest we feel alive for a few short moments during a commute usually carried out by tin can with hot coffee, telephone and music available to deaden the boredom. Key West, small flat and located in a warm climate year round makes for ideal two wheeled commuting especially as it's a town with limited street parking. Enter the scooter,

Motorcycle parking on the streets is abundant and free, furthermore you can share parking spaces if you trust the car driver, though any vehicle in a car space not paid for will get a parking ticket. 

For many people who usually drive cars the freedom of scooter parking is frequently a bit confusing, though cutting corner st intersections and passing cars on the right, though illegal, is often done and sometimes scooter riders pay the price and get knocked over. Danger is real especially when you forget your precautions and good sense.

I doubt lane splitting will come to Florida in my life time. Drivers are entitled and angry much of the time and the idea that they could get used to some jerk on two wheels getting an advantage in a traffic jam would probably drive them to open fire. Never mind the California Highway Patrol endorses lane splitting as a way to reduce motorcycle accidents and reduce motorcycles getting rear ended in traffic slow downs.

I find two wheels a good bit faster in town even without lane splitting simply by taking advantage of the scooter's ability to fit through narrow lanes and it's ability to change direction easily. I don't follow tourist traffic down main streets in winter. Nor does anyone on an agile scooter  avoiding massive trucks and cars.

Gas prices go up in synch with scooter sales in the United States but when gas prices are low and stable as they are now the impulse scooter sale is much harder.  I don't view my Vespa as a money saving tool or even as  a climate change defender, it's fun and I enjoy it and that's good enough for me. Sure it gets 70 miles per gallon or thereabouts but tires wear out much faster than a car and they cost a hundred bucks apiece by the time they are installed. Modern Vespas are good runners but they need the usual motorcycle maintenance schedule and that takes work or money and I hate getting greasy... Two wheels is fun for me and that's why I ride.  

Free parking is nice and lane splitting would be nice (if they didn't shoot me from the peanut gallery) but I have been riding since 1970 so I know what I like. Renting a  scooter on a  whim is easy in Key West and you don't even have to have a helmet. And if you don't know how to ride this is not the town to practice. Too many people think Key West equates to Disneyland because they are on vacation but people fall off and die or have to get flown to Miami ($60,000 for non residents) fpr expensive nasty injuries. Scooter riding is dangerous.

I don't fixate on the dangers, I am always surprised by the need to find danger in every human activity that gets the blood flowing. It's almost as though being comatose is the desired state. 

I expect a fairly decent bill when my orange scooter comes back from the latest service but it will be worth it. Jiri on Stock Island does good work and I am looking forward to warmer weather. 

   

My old reliable, the other 150cc I own is still going strong after 30,000 miles and 14 years. I got it in 1994 with 250 miles ridden by the previous owner who dropped it and gave up after putting a  tiny dent in the leg shield. It's never been my primary ride, bridesmaid always to my motorcycles or my hopelessly unreliable classic two stroke Vespa yet this one is fast, 65 mph easily, and has never stopped by the side of the ride unless I wanted it to. Italians build good scooters. You should ride one. And park it for free in Key West from time to time.