No Plans to Mile Zero, Day 2

The Last Mile Marker

Sat, Apr 14, 2012

Copyright (c) 2012, Jim Beachy

By 8:00 AM I’ve eaten breakfast and am rolling toward Key West on I-95.  Unlike yesterday’s 39-degree temperature, my Kriss Amp-U-Tron shows 68 degrees as I pass south of Daytona Beach.  It’s a great riding morning, with the day’s warmth creeping around the edges of a cool night under brilliant blue skies.  Only the strong crosswind coming off the ocean to the east, on my left, renders the day less than perfect.  On each of my antennas I have a small flag – a US flag on the right and a Wings On the Internet (WOTI) flag on the left.  The wind whips them into a frenzy, wrapping them both around the antennas so tightly they don’t even resemble flags.  I noticed last night that the US flag is getting rather worn and tattered; soon it will be time to retire it and place it carefully with my collection of other flags with the remembered stories of where we’ve been together.  I buy my flags from The Flag People in Ocala, Florida.

Several hours and a fuel stop later, the onshore east wind (how does it happen that the wind off the sea is from the east when the weather moves west to east?) has driven a rain front over the Atlantic coast of Florida.  Enough rain drops splatter on the big Tulsa windshield so they begin to describe graceful curved exit lines as they are blown off the surface.  It always reminds me of a palm’s elegant fronds, or maybe a peacock’s tail in full display, these lines on the windshield drawn by moving water droplets on an aerodynamic surface.  It’s a little mystical.  Solo Guy finds many small things to occupy his attention.

In some ways, Florida reminds me of Texas – there’s a favorable people-per-square-mile ratio that leads to wide open spaces.  It also leads to long, straight Interstates, one of which I am traveling today.   To many it could become boring - but Solo Guy absorbs the moment, becomes part of the landscape.  He takes what the environment offers.  His needs are simple; his wants, few.  A few white ibises with their long orange beaks grace the swamplands on my right, and a nesting bald eagle perches high atop his aerie, each of us perhaps marveling at the other.

Nearing Miami, American Jill instructs me to take an exit that appears to simply loop around to the right and rejoin I-95.  “Curious!  Must be a mapping anomaly,” I think, and ignore the routing instructions.  About three minutes later I realize Jill was smarter than I – I’d missed the exit to Florida’s Turnpike, which parallels I-95 so closely for several miles that it appears to be the same road on the GPS.  Undeterred, I take the next exit and make my way several miles west to recapture Florida’s Turnpike.  This road runs north-and-south, west of the city, and through expanses of marshes and palmettos – a far preferable ride to I-95 through Miami.  As I dig my toll fee out of my pocket at the last toll booth, the attendant explains that I’ll soon hit the Sawgrass Parkway, where no cash is accepted:  It’s either SunPass or “Toll by Plate.”  In Toll by Plate, a camera takes a picture of your license plate when you enter, another picture when you exit, and the friendly state of Florida will mail your toll to you.  For an extra fee, of course, compared to SunPass.  But it’s a painless way to travel a toll road.

At the town of Homestead I ride past the Homestead-Miami Speedway and catch US Route 1 for the final segment to Key West.  The wind is still whipping my flags as I ride south across the narrow gateway to Key Largo, past the “Crocodile Crossing” sign (yes, there are crocodiles as well as alligators here), and around the right turn where the road turns west toward the Keys.

I’ve routed the GPS to a fuel stop here, for which I need to make a U-turn in the special U-turn intersection and head back to the west several hundred yards.  It’s a tight, technical turn on a banked surface; I prepare mentally for a throttle-and-brake ride through the corner, while at the same time studying a white Toyota ready to pull out of a side street to the left.  I’m trying to decide whether he will come straight into the intersection, in which case I can make the turn without stopping, or whether he will turn back into my lane of traffic and I will need to bring the bike to a full stop.  He pulls out of his intersection straight ahead, leaving my turn clear, and I start to make my tight turn when suddenly I realize this isn’t a red light - it’s a blinking yellow light and I haven’t checked for oncoming traffic!  I bring the big bike to a stop before entering the oncoming lanes, just as the flash of a westbound vehicle crosses my vision where I would have been had I not stopped.  It’s a very sobering moment.  I’ve narrowly missed hitting a huge buck that jumped across my fairing just a mile from home; in California I’ve stared into the eyes of a doe standing on a bank as my helmet passed not five feet from her face; in a remote stretch of land way down on the Louisiana-Texas border, Kitty and I were rear-ended by a drug-crazed kid in a stolen truck (it destroyed our trailer, which absorbed the impact and probably saved both our lives).  I’ve ridden close to half a million miles on motorcycles without an accident except that rear-end incident.  But to my knowledge I’ve never come this close to a miscue of my own making.  I cannot explain how or why this could happen except that I was overly focused on the rather technical turn I would need to make while trying to decide if I needed to stop or could power through the curve; and when the Toyota crossed the oncoming lanes of traffic, subconsciously I must have presumed those lanes were clear.  Whatever, it’s a heart-stopping lesson never to take myself, my experience, or my presumed skills too seriously.

The 106 miles from Key Largo to Key West are much slower riding than one would think – much of the speed limit is 45 m.p.h. and every time I’ve been here there’s been traffic to slow things down even more.  Only after passing through the first 30 miles or so of strip malls, boat shops, hotels, and condominiums are the first breathtaking vistas of the turquoise waters of the Gulf of Mexico visible.  And those views are spectacular, where outlying islands appear to float on a mottled green sea.  Pelicans and cormorants abound on the older retired bridge spans or sitting on the guardrails of the Seven-Mile Bridge.  I am always fascinated with pelicans as they dive or skim the water for fish: I’ve never seen one come up empty.  The wind is now roughly at my back, so it’s smooth riding.  Once again clouds threaten; all day I’ve been riding highways with evidence of recent rain, but only a few drops have splattered on the windshield and the pavement has been dry.

 

And so to Key West, the last mile marker, Mile Marker 0, where Solo guy has made an exception to his hotel reservation rule.  Since this is a destination where I actually plan to stay for a night, yesterday I booked a room at Eden House, where Kitty and I have stayed before. (http://www.edenhouse.com)    It’s a small quaint inn in the quiet part of Old Town Key West, within easy walking distance of Mallory Square and Duval Street.  I park the bike in a space only a bike could love and smile in amusement as I walk in and see the clock in the office.  It’s something Kitty and I had noticed on our last trip here together.  The clock runs backward, and all the numerals are correspondingly positioned.  Key West time, I suppose.

 

It’s about 82F, and after cleaning and covering the bike I’m feeling a little grungy from the day’s 9 hour ride, so I take a quick shower and get into clean clothes.  I haven’t brought walking shorts and I ask the desk attendant if it’s legal to wear long pants in Key West.

I join hundreds of other people walking toward Mallory Square, where sunset is scheduled for 7:40 tonight.  Unfortunately there is significant cloud cover so there’s no visible sunset, which allows all the inherent Key West craziness to have full sway, undistracted by a beautiful sunset.  Some of the performers are the same as several years before when Kitty and I were here – the tightrope walker, the juggler, the motionless guy painted silver (this time there were two), the troupe doing amazingly long somersault leaps over bicycles and other objects.  Kitty and I were here together on the last trip to Key West, and I’m missing her as I think of the spectacular sunsets we witnessed here. 

Just off Mallory Square is the Cuban restaurant El Meson de Pepe, jam-packed and rocking with a top-notch Mariachi band.  The hostess finds the very last table and I order an excellent dinner – Combinacion de Mariscos - while I sit for an hour listening to the mariachi band.  The couple at the table next to me hears me joking with the waiter, who turns out to be the owner (“What, you’re Pepe!?” I said) and eventually we strike up a conversation.  They’re from Long Island but without the New York accent.  We talk about vacationing and winter homes in Florida and motorcycling and Solo Guy and how it works for Kitty to stay home while Solo Guy roams around the country.  Eventually we get around to this blog and I give them the blog address, telling them I haven’t blogged this trip yet but I will.  So if you are reading this, my new friends from Long Island, it was great chatting during our chance encounter!

I close out my evening with a slow 90-minute stroll among the revelry and the shops of Duval Street where Key West insanity is always in plentiful supply, the doors are open, the bands are good, and the music is very loud.

GPS Statistics:

Overall speed 55.7 mph; Moving speed 62.5 mph
Overall time 8:57; Moving time 7:58
Distance 499 miles

GPS Track, Day 2