Key West or Bust, Day 6

Coping With Destinations
Friday May 16, 2008

This morning is a sleep-in morning but the alarm from my wrist watch sounds at 6:30. Not because I want it to, but because after several failures I apparently got it working and now I keep forgetting to turn it off!

Yesterday in browsing through a booklet at the motel, Kitty happened to see an entry about the Redland Fruit and Spice Park, a one-of-a-kind experimental park with exotic plants from around the world. We’d decided to check it out, and it doesn’t open until 10:00 AM according to the brochure.

I make sure the GPS logs are reset for the day. The unit has four independent mileage logs. I have one set to record all miles the GPS travels, one is unused at the moment, one is for our entire Key West trip, and one is a daily log that I reset every day. The trip log reads 1,253 miles. Kitty notes this and says, “This must be a low-mileage record. I don’t remember ever being on the road for five days and traveling only 1,253 miles.” I think she’s right, and at the same time I am amused at our next-door motel neighbors who are in near disbelief first, that we would actually ride the bike to Key West instead of trailering it there, and second, that we’ve traveled the vast distance of 1,253 miles in just five days! I don’t bother to tell them that I’ve traveled farther than that in just 24 hours, or twice that in less than 50 hours.

So it’s off to the Redland Fruit and Spice Park, perhaps just to prove to ourselves that we actually can do something on a trip except ride. The GPS has a point of interest for the park, so I route to it. Jill seems to have recovered and the unit is operating normally. (I spent some time last night poking around in several GPS newsgroups that I frequent, and it seems there was some unusual sunspot activity plus the sun and satellite positions were in an unusual array, so I now postulate that the weird behavior I saw yesterday morning may well have been to do sunspot and satellite anomalies.)

Arriving at the Redland Fruit and Spice Park, we find we have stumbled into the middle of the International Orchid Festival. People from all over the world come to this thing. Who knew there was so much to know and so much to-do about orchids? It is quite amazing. We see a hundred different types of orchids, none of which I would have recognized as an orchid. We walk around among the various exotic trees from around the world and marvel at some of the strange fruits they bear!

Sometime after 11:00 AM we head southward on US 1 toward Key West, some 125 miles and about three hours away. Traffic is moderate but moving at least at the speed limit, which is generally 45 with occasional stretches of 50 or 55 mph speed limits. The Overseas Highway in Key Largo starts out as a nondescript tree-lined, two-lane road with heavy traffic, but the scenery improves as we travel toward Key West. Kitty marvels at the mottled hues of the turquoise waters of the Atlantic Ocean on the left and the Gulf of Mexico on the right. Dark green islands in the distance appear to be floating on a paler sea of green. The elevated bridges offer spectacular panoramic views of the green water on which sails of ships large and small can be seen silhouetted against the blue sky.

And thus to Key West, Milepost 0 by any standard. We have reached our destination under cloudless skies and moderate temperatures of about 86 F. And it is strange, because we are not destination travelers. We are in it for the travel, hardly ever for the destination. But here we are, and we have to figure out how to cope with a destination. What does anyone do with a destination? What do we do with one?

Once again feeling very conspicuous in our long jeans and motorcycle boots (the desk clerk says "It's Ok -- we can tell you're on a motorcycle"), we check into the Eden House hotel where I've made reservations weeks ago (www.edenhouse.com). This is a cleverly restored 1920's era hotel set in a miniature tropical paradise mid-town. Most of the smallish rooms have a little porch with a hammock, and there are swings and hammocks set throughout the property amid the lush palm trees and tropical plants. It's perfect for the social, cutoffs-and-flip-flops atmosphere of Key West.

We decide to walk the half-mile or so to Mallory Square for dinner and to see the fabled Key West sunset. We settle for a supposedly authentic Cuban restaurant, Meson de Pepe (I’m pretty good with Spanish but had to look up the fact that “meson” means “inn”), where we are serenaded by a colorful rooster that wonders in an out among the diners on the outdoor patio. After dinner we wonder off to see the spectacular sunset, which happens exactly as predicted, at 8:04 PM. Wow, it is no wonder that thousands of people gather here every evening to watch the sunset at the southernmost point of the United States! I’ve never seen a sub-tropical sunset, and it’s shocking to see how rapidly the sun descends behind the outlying islands. I take about 30 photographs, not knowing when I’ll get the chance again. It is truly a spectacular phenomenon!

Afterwards we watch some amazing street theater performances for a while and then wonder off to walk along Duval Street where various assorted weirdness is likely to assert itself at any moment.

Tomorrow is a zero-mile day. The bike is covered and in a special parking place where the hotel manager told me it could stay for the duration.

Tomorrow we will discover more about destinations.