Key West or Bust, Day 8

Okeechobee Blues
Sunday May 18, 2008

As I uncover the bike and trailer, it reminds me of a sleeping creature just waking to face the day. Covered, there’s no telling what lies beneath. But as soon as the cover comes off and those radio and CB antennas are raised, I always think “Ah, now there’s a motorcycle!”

By 8:30 AM we’ve had breakfast at Paradise Café and are on the road. I’m a bit melancholy to be leaving Mile Marker 0, because our time there was so short and I so enjoy this land of sun and water and palm trees. We’ve discovered that destinations are cool, too. I learned quickly what to do with one.

Today is a slow rewind of the outbound trip, the names of the Keys appearing in reverse order on the GPS. The vistas are just as spectacular heading back to the mainland. We talk about Mile Marker 0 and Kitty reiterates that there are just too many people for her taste. Enjoyable for a short time but now she’s ready for some country riding.

Today is our hottest day, starting out at 87F and growing warmer, until the fairing thermometer reads 94F at Homestead. Kitty usually doesn’t do well in hot weather, and for this very reason I planned some short-mileage days such as this one. We have two days to run from Key West to Orlando, a distance of just under 400 miles and a something we’d often cover in a day. But I scripted this into a two-day ride, and today I imagine we’ll ride to the Lake Okeechobee area. Last night I’d called a hotel there to find out if there are any fire-related problems that would keep us away. The report came back that although there are fires in the area, there are not likely to be travel problems.

Once more we take Rt. 997 (northward this time) through the Redland district , Florida’s nursery, while Miami, Hollywood, and Fort Lauderdale all slide by on the GPS less than 20 miles to the east, alarmingly close for Kitty. But there’s no evidence here that major east-coast cities are so close. Rt. 997 intersects US 27 northwest of Hialeah, and we run the four-lane north and west to the Lake Okeechobee area.

Lake Okeechobee is the second-largest lake in the lower 48 United States. You can read about it at www.lakeokeechobee.org for a lesson in how grandiose schemes to drain the Everglades have wreaked havoc on this incomparable but delicate ecosystem for generations to come, and how the complex system of canals and locks that now crisscrosses southern Florida is necessary to correct the imbalances created by these schemes and yet supply the cities along the Florida coast. And since the water levels of Okeechobee have been kept artificially higher than the surrounding lands, 40,000 people are now at risk should there be a rupture of the dike. In 1926, a hurricane spilled over the levee and destroyed 13,000 homes. In the hurricane and rainy season of 1947-1948, millions of acres of surrounding land were under water for six months. As US 27 turns toward the central part of the state, we ride past miles and miles of dead cypress trees, millions of naked soldiers standing white and silent in the sun, whatever mission they had in life accomplished, still waiting for the next command. I haven’t done the research, but I suspect these are casualties of the Everglades drainage projects.

After crossing I-75 on our trek northward, the land becomes less swampy, probably thanks to these same drainage projects, and we ride past a number of huge sand and gravel excavation operations. This arable land is mostly planted in sugar cane (Florida is the largest producer of sugar cane in the US), but we also see some large green expanses of turf farms. We smell occasional whiffs of wildfire smoke and see some dark smoke clouds in the distance but not close to where we’re making our best time in the fierce west-to-east wind that catches us broadside and whips the flags on my antennas into a frenzy.

At Belle Glade we decide to ride on to Clewiston where, at the astonishingly early time of 3:30 PM, we decide to stop pushing through the heat and take a break for the day. We find a brand-new Holiday Inn Express that is too new to be in GPS database. This turns out to be one of the nicest properties we’ve found on this trip. We spend some time by the pool like normal travelers, talk to the local people about the fires, and try to find out what to expect tomorrow.

Walking back from Beef O’Grady’s, a sports-bar kind of restaurant the hotel manager had recommended, we see a huge new plume of smoke to the northwest, in the vicinity of where we will be traveling tomorrow. We ask about this and learn that the water level of Lake Okeechobee is currently quite low and it’s actually the dry lake bed that’s burning. Earlier this week, there was a huge multi-vehicle crash on Rt. 27 because of the smoke. The locals say there will be no travel problems except possibly smoke obscuring the roadway. Tonight the wind is blowing from west to east and thus blowing the smoke out across the large lake and away from the roads on the west side, but if the wind shifts to the west tomorrow it could affect our route. Mom, we’ll be careful!

We’ve traveled a modest 234 miles today, 1,631 miles for the trip. This continues to be one of our lowest-mileage rides ever, but as always, each ride takes on its own personality. This one seems to have a low-mileage personality disorder but it’s working for us!