Changes in Latitude

Once I had figured out I had to return to Florida to renew my drivers license the rest of the journey just fell into place. Being retired and getting a monthly pension reduces stress enormously because even though this would be an expense it wasn’t going to take money away from our ability to continue our journey. Were we traveling with a lump sum as we used to when younger it would have been a blow. I got to walk the White Street Pier in Key West a few days ago. Now I’m in Arequipa, Peru. Next month I get my retirement check from the city of Key West. 

I dislike the helplessness of commercial flight, the lack of decision making and the shuffling around like a package in a conveyor. I dislike the sudden change produced by six hours in the aircraft flying at 600 miles an hour. From the desert of coastal Peru to the sudden immersion in hot humid South Florida, no gradual adaptation as when traveling by car or sailboat. What took a year to drive took a day to fly.

When we first got GANNET2, our future home built inside a Promaster van we used to come out here and places like this in Central Florida to park overnight, learning how to manage the van systems and how to cope with the reduced living spaces offered by a 21 foot van.

After I got my new license in Indiantown last Wednesday I drove to Lake Okeechobee to enjoy Central Florida once again. It was as I remembered it. 

Long straight flat boring. Sugar cane country. Big sky country. The Florida free of beaches and tourists that shows up in Carl Hiassen novels and not in tourist brochures. I like it and I discovered I was reassured that it is still here and it will be when we get back. 

I bought a supermarket sandwich for lunch and I sat among the sugar cane enjoying heat and humidity and lots of oxygen in the air. There is a whole agricultural industry here you never see on the beaches of Florida. 

I had my duty to fulfill too, with stops in Miami to check on our storage locker and drop off the trip souvenirs accumulated thus far. And Trader Joe’s had its own shopping list too of course. And then the familiar drive down Card Sound Road, driven hundreds of times and still as it ever was. 

Wayne and Chuck gave me a place to stay and welcomed me to Key West with dinner at Oasis on White Street, Uzbek food as I remembered it. 

Conversation about Key West and how the actors change but the fundamentals stay the same. 

Nick my former colleague shared lunch at Hogfish on Stock Island. We spent a decade working nights together. He’s found a boyfriend in Key West and is for now settled and enjoying life in the place where he grew up. He kept me sane during many long years of office politics at the police department and during the horrors of surviving Hurricane Irma together living through night dispatch answering 911 during those difficult times. 

Poor people scraping by on Stock Island are coming face to face with the new reality of long promised hyper development. Change is always in the air in a wealthy dynamic community like Key West where ambition out strips the small plot of land on which it is nurtured. 

I’ve never heard of Haitians eating dogs in the tenements of Stock Island but these few will be gone soon. 

It’s not attractive but it is affordable. 

Eccentricity and scraping by and flitting about in torn shorts and sandals is being replaced by conformity it’s and high prices.  

I’m not at all sure what the draw is to live like this but you do get to say you lived for a while in the Keys. Scruffy layabouts used to be called characters hanging around the Tom Thumb convenience stores. Nowadays they are recognized as eyesores. 

The funk is gone from Murray Marine. 

There are stories of survival in the midst of change. Jiri still repairs motorcycles on Stock Island. He has figured out how to make it work. Some day he says everything may change but so far…His journey from Czechia to Key West has been a long one but he has no desire to return to Europe. His daughter is 16 and almost an adult. 

There are survivors on the waters around Key West and Stock Island, staying afloat just about even as the state that bans books seeks to ban free spirits. Mooring fields are spreading slowly for all sorts of practical reasons but I would miss my opportunity to take my hat off to people who can live far closer to the edge than I ever could. 

I get the feeling of limitations and restrictions closing in all the time. There was a time before my time when artists lived in Key West and wrote stories that they lived. Before the internet and the new highway this place really was a fringe community. 

It is inevitable that progress changes all things and we humans always look back with nostalgia to remember how much better things were. I dare say the new batch of hopeful settlers see what we all did when we first settled.  A new place of acceptance. 

Key West felt more like home than any other place I lived and yet ironically the city and the police department gave me the freedom to go away and live on the edge on my own terms in a van, amm no lifestyle much derided but which suits me perfectly. 

We planned our retirement and lived a fairly plain existence among bohemians. But it worked out. 

The generations pass and as each of us moves through the Keys we feel lucky to have done it, to have lived as close as we could to the edge of the continent. But we aren’t Conchs, we aren’t bound to the Keys by family ties and obligations and traditions. We came, we live, we leave. No regrets. 

Return To Lima

I’ve had a slight problem downloading pictures from my camera as I can’t get the camera to talk to the Panasonic Image app. I have a cable which I forgot to bring consequently my pictures of my trip to Key West and South Florida aren’t accessible until I get back to GANNET2. A red eye to Lima Saturday night to Sunday morning is my penance for enjoying my time all too brief, in Florida. I hope to be in Arequipa by lunch time Sunday. 

I got to see some spots I haven’t enjoyed for quite a while, 

…said hello to some old friends…

…and drove around quite a bit. 

It was great actually to say hello to former colleagues…

…and big thanks to Wayne and Chuck for looking after me as only they know how. 

Over the next few days I’ll tell the story properly when I unlock the pictures and I apologize for the delay. 

Florida

Perhaps you remember that rather silly saying about a man “having to do what a man has to do…” Well here I am back in Key West about one year after we last crossed the border from Texas to Mexico. Then it was aboard GANNET2 and now it was me alone aboard a LATAM airliner from Lima to Miami. 

Six years ago, a long time ago in a very different place…I discovered I could renew my license online so instead of driving six miles to the DMV office in Big Pine Key I amused myself by doing just that. Oh foolish move!

There is a rule in Florida that you can’t renew twice in a row online. Oops. So I bought a thousand dollars worth of airline tickets from Arequipa to Lima and then Lima to Miami where I picked up a rental car and spent the night in a hotel. What had taken a year to drive going south took a day to fly back from Peru going north and of culture shock yes indeed there was a little…

Layne as always made it easy for me physically organizing the tickets and reservations so it all went smoothly enough but suddenly I was plucked out of the world of distant self reliant overlanding and instantly found myself at home in the familiar, a rainy season hot and humid night in Miami, with a quiet comfortable room, reliable electricity and a toilet that flushed perfectly. I sat on the bed and pondered how lucky I am to be able to switch my life so easily and smoothly. Passing through immigration was cheerful, a pleasant conversation between ex-dispatcher and immigration agent and here I am free in the US to wander at will, a place where thousands aspire to and few get to pass into and here I am at home. 

I slept badly of course, upended by my sudden change in circumstances and worried about managing my status as a Florida based nomad. For I had just discovered my plan to stop off in Big Pine Key to renew my license and van registration had sprung a leak. I had checked the tax collectors website on Saturday for some reason and this was the message I found online:

Well isn’t that peachy? Now what? I am technically a resident of Clay County far from Key West.  So began a search for a county that serves any Florida resident…to save me driving the length of the state to renew my documents where my mailing service is located just outside Jacksonville, nearly in Georgia. I found an office two hours north of Miami that proudly serves all Florida residents.

I got up at five and arrived at 8:30 and in an hour with a little wait I was done. I have to say the service I got in Indiantown reminded me of the old fashioned small town friendliness I used to get in the Florida Keys and there was a bit of sadness at how much things have changed, that this is the Florida I remember fondly found here and not where I remember it. They were lovely to deal with in the office and I was glad I found them. 

My business done, GANNET2 with a new two year registration and me with a new eight year license renewed with no difficulty at all, I turned south by way of Lake Okeechobee and Belle Glade and the quiet back roads through sugar cane country. 

The lake was full after a wet summer and I paused to remind myself of our early attempts at van life sleeping wild here in the van, learning how to live on the road in Florida’s back country. 

I got back to Miami around noon and stopped at our storage locker to deposit a bunch of fridge magnets and souvenirs we have collected. The idea was to make room in the van for a fresh collection as we travel through new countries. 

Layne has a desire  that when eventually we settle down we will have a few things to decorate a stationary life so we keep a small inexpensive air conditioned locker near the Miami airport. All was well there so I checked that inspection off the list. Oh and I had my other list:  a shopping list. 

I hate shopping at Trader Joe’s without Layne as I can’t figure where anything is but I felt a huge obligation to get her what she wanted for the kitchen in our mobile home so I struggled mightily and got it done hunting like a crazed shopper among the suave middle class crowds drifting aimlessly down the aisles, those lucky local residents who are used to having Trader Joe’s at their beck and call and don’t have to shop at PlazaVea in Arequipa or Super Maxi in Ecuador. 

It was all struggle as I adapted to orderly lines of cars and drivers obeying traffic lights and no roadside trash and no horns and no darting between opposing lines of cars. Easy peasy. 

And then it was Card Sound Road like I had never been gone. 

The familiar, the routine, the Overseas Highway like I remembered it mostly. 

But there were unwelcome signs of the Keys’ status as overly desirable and not terribly welcoming. 

This used to be a place you could escape to from Dade county urban strife and come and fish for cheap entertainment but not anymore. I guess there’s no money in it for anyone in Monroe County so the people in charge have tried to make it impossible to park for free and drop a line in the water.

There are still some rebels exercising their god given Florida right to fish…but laid back is now the Indiantown way not the Keys way in my mind. 

It was an easy September drive up the island chain and I was in no hurry so when I got stuck following cars that found 60mph too much for them I just sat behind them at a fixed 45 mph rejoicing in the pleasures of being retired with nowhere to be, a status I enjoy every day on the road.

Fred continues to flourish on the old Seven Mile Bridge, in my absence. I’m slightly surprised the tree hasn’t been cut down as it makes no one any money and it’s probably a hazard to traffic as people slow down to look at it.  

And then it was back to the prohibition signs of the Florida Keys. I had long since planned to stop in Pine Channel Park in Big Pine Key for a swim. We used to swim here when it was just a hole in the rock before it was developed and sign posted. 

It’s a nice park and I’d like to think GANNET2 is unobtrusive enough we could spend a couple of hours here swimming if we ever dare visit the Keys in future in our RV.  

There were a few people at the picnic tables but I had the huge salt water pool to myself. And the seawater is bath tub warm so not as refreshing as it might have been, but we don’t have any swimming in our immediate future as we set out to drive frigid Patagonia next month.  

I took advantage. 

Nice facilities here with a beach type freshwater shower and flushing toilets. 

And then Key West and a short walk on Duval Street before I landed with much gratitude at a place to stay for the next couple of nights. 

How you pay the Duval Street rent selling jerky I can’t imagine. 

I’m sorry I am missing live theater season, my favorite outing when we lived here. 

I still don’t think a spa is a suitable substitute for the bar at the top. I get a bit stuck in the past sometimes. 

There are still young people making a go of living in Key West for a part of their lives. A youthful adventure as they think of it. 

Chuck and Wayne have a brilliant room in the back I can stay in. We went to Oasis on White Street for dinner. 

Just like Peru we had boxes to go. I enjoyed the Key West stories from these two who have made a life for themselves in a town where making it work requires more grit and diplomacy and adaptability than I possess. 

I felt like I had never left.