Key West or Bust, Day 10

Mickey

Tuesday May 20, 2008

By 8:20 AM I have donned my favorite vacation T-shirt, we have boarded the Disney bus, and are waiting for the Animal Kingdom to open. This may be the first time ever that I've been early for a morning event. Oh, the T-shirt? "Temporarily Out of Service."

We opt for the Kilamanjaro Safari for our first ride, thinking the animals might be more active earlier in the day. It pays off and the exotic animals are either actively moving around or resting in plain view.

Then it's off to see "Finding Nemo - The Musical" but we're too early, so we decide on the Everest Expedition roller-coaster where we are quite surprised by a brisk backward ride in total darkness. After wandering around some more, we see "Finding Nemo" and smile at the whimsical puppet/actor characters.

On our way out of the Animal Kingdom, we stop in to see "It's Tough to Be a Bug", a 3-D frolic with a few multi-sensory surprises in store.

We're off to Epcot using our "park-hopper" ticket, and by this time it's after 3:00 PM so we find something to eat in the Chinese pavilion. We visit the various pavilions and decide to eat in the Biergarten but they are booked. It's ok, because German food we know, having grown up in Pennsylvania Dutch and Amish country of Pennsylvania. We decide on a food we don't know: Morrocan.

After making reservations at the Marrakesh restaurant in the Morocco pavilion, we wander to "The Land" and stand in line for an hour for the ride "Soarin'." This is a spectacular ride combining the effects of IMAX huge-screen and flight simulator technology. It's breathtaking and you never leave the building. Fantastic technology!

By now it's time to meander back to Marrakesh for dinner where we have the "Morrocan national dish," couscous, Kitty with chicken, I with a roasted shank of lamb, to the accompaniment of a Moroccan rhythm and string combo. Fantastic! I have to admit I couldn't help but notice the belly dancer who showed up for a while!

After finding a place along the lagoon, we watch "Illumination," a dazzling laser/fireworks/multimedia show that's made all the more amazing because the buildings all around the lagoon participate with lighting effects, lasers, and sparkly things. What a great show! Disney does just about everything with first-class production values, and it shows (pardon the pun).

And we're tired. After a full day with Mickey, we need a vacation day! We'd planned several fairly rigorous riding days for the next two days, but with the heat and the fact that we're pretty tired this evening, we'll sleep in tomorrow and make our way northward when we're rested. We have a number of options including cutting out part of the scheduled ride, spending more time on Interstates, or arriving home one day later.

Once we have a plan, I'll let you know, but I'm pretty sure the plan I've sketched out is out. Out the window, that is.

Our friend Karen has a sign in her office: Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape. We're all about flexibility.

Key West or Bust, Day 9

Where There’s Smoke… Don’t
Monday May 19, 2008

When Kitty and I were discussing this trip and talked about riding south along the Gulf coast and then returning through central Florida, she said “Orlando is in central Florida, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s about as central as it gets,” I responded.

“Could we go to Disney World?” she asked with impish grin.

“Yes we could,” I answered.

And so I booked the tickets and the hotel. Two nights in the hotel, one day at the park. So once again we have a destination. I have double- and triple-checked over the past week to make sure we are on schedule and that I haven’t somehow booked the rooms a day early or late! That’s one of my worst fears when we have “hard points” in a trip: That I’ll get out of synch by a day and suddenly we’ll find ourselves wandering around with plans we can’t fulfill and spent money we can't use!

It’s a short ride to the Disney Pop Century Resort Hotel where I’ve made reservations, about 150 miles from Clewiston. We laze around, pick up a few groceries at grocery store, and roll out around 9:30 AM. This morning, a gray pall of smoke hangs like a curtain to the north, but probably east of where we might be traveling. The desk clerk tells us that the route we’ll be taking was pretty smoky this morning but should be cleared by now with the winds from the west.

The first thing I want to do is backtrack to a waypoint I marked yesterday as we rode by, an “Okeechobee Scenic Loop” turnoff. The GPS routes us to the little park and we decide to start by walking up onto the levee, along the south shore of Lake Okeechobee. We immediately see smoking remains of the burning lakebed, and large plumes of dirty white smoke arising across the lake from the north shore. I’m expecting to see a very large body of water, but with the water level where it is now, we see a canal and mostly a dry and smoldering lakebed, with the water a shimmering mirage in the distance.

I’d like to ride the scenic road atop the levee, but Kitty wisely talks me out of this. “Knowing that there are fires burning, firefighters and equipment in use, do you really think we have any business taking our Gold Wing and a trailer on this narrow road into the fire area?”

I know she’s right, and so we abandon our scenic ride for the day and simply ride northward on US 27 to Orlando. It's our hottest morning to date, with the temperature at 89F at 10:00 AM. As we roll northward against a fierce quartering wind from the northwest, holding the posted speed limit of 65 mph, the sugar cane eventually gives way to miles of orange groves, which appear (for this growing season) to be nearly ready for harvest. Some orchards have large trucks already loaded with orange-filled crates. According to the GPS, our elevation has changed from at or slightly below sea level in the Everglades to around 150 feet above sea level, a tiny change but enough to make a dramatic difference in the topography. Judging by the multiple advertising signs we see using the word “Highlands”, it seems this area is thought of as the highlands.

Orange groves give way to beef farms. If I asked any 10 of you which state is the largest producer of beef in the United States, I’d get answers like, what… Texas, certainly. Oklahoma, maybe? Or the more adventurous might volunteer Colorado, or even Wyoming? Nebraska? You would all be wrong. Along with sugar cane, citrus fruits, and several other crops, Florida is also our nation’s number one beef producer!

Along the way, we can see the smoke plumes of the wildfires off to the right, north and east. Occasionally we get a whiff of smoke and once or twice we think there’s a bit of haze hovering over the road surface, but since the wind is carrying the smoke away from us we have no problems.

About 60 miles out of Orlando we begin seeing the first cloud cover since the first two days of the trip, and about 40 miles out, as I look at our GPS waypoint and compare it to the darkest heart of the clouds, I realize we’ll be in the middle of the downpour. We pull over and do the Dance of the Rainsuit amid large drops that are already splattering down. The temperature has dropped 14 degrees to about 72F. But by the time we’re back on the road, the heaviest rain has passed and we are dealt only a glancing blow. After 20 minutes of riding in what’s now bright sunshine, it’s really hot under the rainsuits and so we do the Undance of the Rainsuit. We repeat the dance once more just about 10 miles from our destination when we ride through another downpour. We get to the hotel very early, about 1:30 PM.

Our check-in hostess at the Pop Century Hotel, Sarah of Augusta, Georgia, tells us that the hotel has 2,880 rooms. All I can think is “That’s a lot of laundry!”

"Here's your parking pass," she says. I explain that we're on a motorcycle that will be completely covered and ask her for suggestions. She has none. I solve the problem by taking one of the complimentary luggage tags provided in the purchase package, cutting and folding the parking pass paper until it fits the tag, and attaching it to the tongue of the trailer. Not on the dashboard as requested, but the best I can do.

The hotel is whimsically themed for a century of popular items. It features building-sized icons of things typical during the various decades of the past century, including giant Rubik’s cubes, four-story tall 8-track tapes, a 40-foot high Big Wheel that lists the “Recommended Child Weight” as 877 pounds.

So we find our room in the 70’s building, clean and cover the bike and trailer now that it’s once again sunny, hang out by the pool for an hour and a half while doing our laundry, eat dinner from the food court, and go for a walk along the lake where a mama duck and her two very tiny ducklings walk up to within a foot of us and duck-talk to each other before wandering back down to the water.

Kitty is reading all the materials on what we might do tomorrow. Which is a good thing, because while I more or less got us here and penciled in a few recommendations from friends, I confess I haven’t spent a lot of time figuring out what to do with yet another destination.

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!

Key West or Bust, Day 7

Mile Marker 0

Saturday May 17, 2008

At Mile Marker 0, time is of a different order. In fact, time just doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot at Mile Marker 0. For us, this is juxtaposed with the fact that we have only one day here. Even so we sleep in and have a lazy breakfast at the Paradise Café, just a few blocks from the hotel. Our server is, I would guess, Slavic, judging from her accent (it’s a bit of a hobby of mine), so I ask her about why she’s in Key West. She’s Ukrainian. Close. And she loves Key West because at Mile Marker 0, time stretches out and all the things that made people uptight in New York, where she lived for six years, don’t exist here. She says she may stay here for the rest of her life.

We have only a loosely-formed plan for the day, and first we walk back to Mallory Square and book tickets on a reef cruise, one of those glass-bottomed boat affairs. We cruise seven miles south to the reef, where we float for about 40 minutes. I would have expected the rumble of the diesel engines to frighten the fish, but on the contrary, they seem quite curious and schools of brightly-colored fish, whose names I don’t remember more than 10 seconds after the guide identifies them, follow the boat. Seeing the reef underwater, it becomes evident why the sea appears mottled from above. The deeper sections of the reef are sandy, and these areas reflect more light and thus appear as the lighter green areas. The uneven coral-covered sections of the reef are darker and account for the darker turquoise seas.

I ask the tour guide about water temperatures and algae. Algae has been on the increase as water temperatures have become slightly warmer over the years, but the guide doesn’t think the algae have affected the water quality on the reefs around Key West. The water is actually rather clear, although through the glass I can’t really judge the visibility.

Returning to the dock, we have lunch at the Half Shell Oyster bar, where we are joined by a rooster and a number of pigeons. You gotta love a restaurant that features a sign as you walk in, “Don’t feed the birds.” This place has literally thousands of license plates, donated over the past 20 years, that almost completely cover all the walls.

At Mile Marker 0, there are quite a bewildering variety of available travel conveyances, from bicycles to motorized scooters to hired bicycle hacks to little four-wheeled, street-legal electric contraptions that look a lot like modified golf carts. We, being the contrarians that we are, spurn them all and decide to walk Key West. I have my little yellow eTrex loaded with waypoints and it serves us well.

We walk to Ernest Hemingway’s house for little reason other than that Hemingway was one of the first authors that helped me realize the value and the joy of literature. We learn that currently there are 47 cats on the premises, and they have the run of the place. We see several six-toed cats, which, if I’m not mistaken, is likely the result of decades of inbreeding. And we learn the story of why there are so many roosters on the island: At one time a third of the population was Cuban, a culture where cockfighting was an accepted practice. The US population took exception to this, and the city passed an ordinance that all the roosters must be freed. And they are free today. There’s a $500 fine for “harassing a rooster.” And it begs the question: Where are the hens, without which there will be no roosters?

We walk across the street to the Key West lighthouse and I climb to the top for an elevated view of Key West. In the visitor center is a first order Fresnel lens. Without going into detail, Fresnel lenses, named after their French inventor and pronounced “frey-nel”, were for several hundred years including modern times the best light-focusing device ever created. A first-order lens could be seen 20 to 30 miles at sea. This first-order lens is in pristine condition and it is the closest I’ve ever been to one. What a monster! It must be 12 feet or more high, and probably six feet across its largest diameter. Kitty opts to stay in the air-conditioned museum rather than climb the 88 steps to the top. This lighthouse has a fifth-order lens and is still lit although it has been decommissioned for some years.

And farther south still until… we can walk south no farther. It is the southernmost point on the United States, and we pose for pictures along with a dozen other visitors. At Mile Marker 0, it is literally the end of the line.

A walk back to the hotel for a shower and then back to Mallory Square for dinner and another spectacular sunset. There are thousands more people milling around than last night; my theory is that most tourists book Saturday-to-Saturday visits, so this is the first night in Key West for many of them. On a Friday night like last night, many of them would be preparing to leave town. After sunset, we seek out some Key lime pie at Meson de Pepe’s. The place is jumping with a fantastic Cuban band and has a long waiting time, but the hostess sneaks us in to the bar where we can order Key lime pie and coffee. Don’t leave Mile Marker 0 without having some Key lime pie! They do use real Key limes here!

I’ve carried my little eTrex all day, and after cutting-and-splicing the track segments so the boat tour was removed, I discover that we have walked 8.3 miles today. My feet and legs feel it!

I feel like I could live at Mile Marker 0. Maybe it’s not so bad to have a destination if the destination is Mile Marker 0. Next time, I’m ready to make this a real destination and stay a while. There’s something about the atmosphere that I find vibrant and exciting, yet peaceful and relaxing. Boats bobbing gently in the harbor, the slap of a wake against the dock pilings, the creak of the boat mooring lines, the cries of the sea birds and their graceful aerobatics, year-round open-air dining in cutoffs (even among roosters and pigeons), these things I find extraordinarily appealing. Kitty, not so much. She struggles with having so many people in close proximity. And at heart she’s not a water girl, she’s a farm girl.

But this has been fun. It’s been good. Tomorrow we revert back to being motorcyclists and turn northward. But today, we went farther south than we have ever been.

For tonight, we are at Mile Marker 0.

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.

Key West or Bust, Day 5

Gator Bait

Thursday May 15, 2008

By 8:00 AM we are making our good-byes to our friend Mary. She’s departing for an out-of-country trip. We’re southbound along Florida's Gulf Coast, Key West or Bust.

For a while, it seems like it might be bust, unless I can recover my navigating skills without the GPS. For an unknown reason, the map screen keeps locking up. The GPS seems functional in all aspects, seems to navigate just fine, but just can’t draw the screen. I’m amused at how helpless I feel without the familiar magenta route line or, even if not navigating a route, the street names displayed crisply on the map. Several time I get off route and Jill announces that I’m off route and offers to recalculate, which she does, but just can’t redraw the screen.

This problem could arise because of a corrupted map segment/file or it could be a GPS problem. I cycle it off/on many times, and eventually it gets better. It finally draws the screen properly and displays the route appropriately; I don’t dare touch the screen for fear that it will once again go into spasm. Tonight I will copy all the routes, tracks, and waypoints to my laptop and prepare to do a hard reset if necessary.

This morning, for no particular reason, we are a quiet couple. Yesterday we were very chatty, talking for hours in our headsets. About why the north Florida soil is black whereas it is sandy in South Carolina. About Kitty’s colleagues at work. About how I love my work. About speedos and Jabba the Hut. About our friends and loved ones at home and how much we appreciate all the people in our lives even while we’re running away for a brief time. About Danica and her antics.

But today, not so chatty. We roll without much talk southward along the Tamiami Trail, US 41, a hundred miles of sun-baked shopping centers, housing developments, and assisted living complexes in pastel shades of coral, peach, and sand. Cross streets and red lights abound between Sarasota and Naples. I had purposed to take the Tamiami Trail just for the sake of having ridden its length from Sarasota southward, but a dozen times I almost bail out and take the Interstate. Great place to visit, not so great for a motorcycle ride, although Kitty says she now has a great many new landscaping ideas!

From the Gulf coast, to get to the Keys you pretty much have to cross to the other side of the state by traveling eastward on Alligator Alley (I-75) or the Tamiami Trail through the Great Cypress National Preserve and the Everglades. As you might expect, I have chosen the two-lane route. So after passing through Naples we turn east and strike a mostly straight course for the 90-mile dash along the Miami Canal through the Preserve and the northern edge of the Everglades.

A series of my favorite road signs occurs in the Preserve: “Panther Crossing 5 Miles”, repeated every mile for five miles using the appropriate mileage indicator. I have traveled all over the United States and Canada and have never seen another Panther Crossing sign, and it just makes me smile. There remain only 30 of the endangered Florida panthers, and we learn at the visitor center that being hit by cars is the chief cause of fatality. Thus the 50-mph speed limit (45 at night) on a straight and deserted road that begs for 70 mph travel. Nevertheless, I hold the speed limit like a good citizen. Fortunately, I do not hit and kill a panther. Unfortunately, neither do we see one.

At the visitor center we get a few mementos and ask about where we might see alligators without taking the Wing and trailer on graveled or dusty roads. “Just walk outside to the boardwalk and I’d bet money you’ll see some. It’s mating season and they’re pretty frisky,” says the ranger.

So we walk outside and sure enough, we see upwards of eight gators, two of them quite large. They don’t seem very frisky. Actually, mostly they don’t move, simply immersing their scaly bodies in the murky water while resting their heads on a rock or the bank of the canal, eyes and nostrils just above water. One seems confused about what an alligator should do, though, as his tail is out of the water and his head is immersed. The most frisky one is swimming lazily up the canal, tail describing a slow series of graceful sinuous curves while his head remains motionless as the water gently ripples out behind him in a v-shaped wedge. The other gators pay no attention.

Minutes after leaving the visitor center and resuming our eastward trek, we both notice the acrid smell of smoke in the air. This is the first sign we’ve seen of the fearsome Florida fires. Days ago, I saw on the CNN website that the area around Naples was declared unhealthy due to wind-blown smoke from the Okeechobee fires, but it was clear today as we passed through. Now, though, the smoke becomes thicker and a ghostly pale fog envelopes the road surface and the trees in the distance. It’s eerie and makes me feel vaguely claustrophobic. It’s all-encompassing in an unsettling sort of way and there seems to be no way out. In about 20 miles the smoke lessens and in 30 miles, by the time we’re 28 miles west of Miami and turn southward onto Rt. 997, the smoke is gone.

Travel for us is so very upside down compared to what I imagine would be the case for normal travelers. When we tour on the Wing, our main purpose is to ride. We don’t do much. Our travel philosophy is really pretty basic: If you see a tour bus parked somewhere, don’t go there. And be afraid — be very afraid! — if ever you might see three of said buses at any one place. I ask Kitty several times today if she wants to do any of those Everglades things that normal people do, but she’s just not that interested and neither am I. I’d love to learn more about the environment, but those tour buses are just too daunting. I can’t make myself do it!

We roll southward on Rt. 997 through the heartland of Florida’s plant nursery. Kitty loves it, as I knew she would. There are miles of nurseries filled with exotically graceful palm trees of various kinds, whole sections filled with red bougainvillea, fields of beans and potatoes, nurseries with all types of concrete creations, potted flowering plants in profusion. It’s a veritable feast for a plant-lover. I always think that a palm tree with it's perfectly graceful fronds and the symmetrical yet asymptotic curve of its branches, is just about one of the most perfectly appealing plants God ever created!

By the time we reach Homestead and find a Comfort Inn for the night, the GPS seems to be working flawlessly again. I suspect a corrupted map segment as the cause of this morning’s problems, but still I download all the GPS information to the laptop in case I need to do a hard reset. For now, it’s all good.

Tonight is laundry night. See you tomorrow!

Key West or Bust, Day 4

Finding Love on the Interstate Wednesday May 14, 2008 Last evening the hotel valet people put us in the underground parking garage. This is always a cause for pause, because the guard gate arm doesn’t always properly sense the motorcycle and returns early to its guard position, which is especially inconvenient if the motorcycle is being followed by a little Escapade trailer, and said trailer is higher than the bar at rest. So the valet guard manually opened the gate for me as the bike passed through. This morning, I fear the same problem. Kitty goes to find the attendant while I test the exit gate. I pull up to the gate and it opens on cue. I sit there for a while and it stays up, then I back away and it closes. I decide it senses the bike and will stay retracted, so I try again and hurry through without a problem. Kitty hasn’t found the attendant, so we are on our way. This is a day of mostly Interstate travel. We have almost 400 miles from Savannah, Georgia to Sarasota, Florida where we are scheduled to meet a long-time family friend. We plan to travel I-95 into Florida, and before we get to Jacksonville, take Rt. 200 west to US 301 south and follow it until we hit I-75. It’s not a particularly long travel day for us as Interstate days go, but it is the longest day of the trip and a bit of mental positioning is in order for this day. I have stood front and center and declared my aversion to Interstates when Kitty and I are traveling together. But the day is what it is, and I can meld into the moment, so the long straight stretches become, not a boring Interstate, but a part of the biker experience. Because Interstates need love, too. So while we’re rolling down the seemingly endless four-lane highway lined with palmettos and pin oaks, let me explain a few details for the non-bikers who might be reading this. For my biker friends, you can skip this just like you would skip the Interstates we are riding today. We tow an Escapade trailer (http://www.californiasidecar.com/) that has a capacity of over 25 cubic feet, about the size of a Honda Civic trunk. Quite sufficient for Kitty’s makeup kit! (Actually, Kitty travels light — it’s all my stuff that takes up the space.) Our 1500 Gold Wing SE has adjustable air suspension, cruise control, CB radio, regular radio, and a tape deck. When we talk to people about taking long trips, I think they envision Kitty perched precariously on the back of a tiny little seat with no support, frantically clutching onto the rider for hundreds of miles on end. Actually, Kitty’s seat is as comfortable as a rocking chair, with a back support that reaches her shoulders and armrests on either side with various pockets to put stuff. We have Shoei helmets outfitted with microphones and headphones. The bike’s stereo system can be played using the on-board 4-speaker system or routed through the headsets. We always use the headsets. When a musical passage is playing and either of us talks, the music is automatically muted for the duration of the conversation, after which it returns to normal volume. My Garmin StreetPilot 2720 GPS unit is pre-loaded with maps and over six million waypoints for the entire US and Canada, and I can upload or download waypoints, routes, and tracks to and from my laptop, which always travels with me in the already-described trailer. The GPS is connected into our headset so that Jill’s voice (there are over a dozen different voices and languages) can guide us to whatever destination we have chosen. US 301 strikes an arrow into the heart of Florida until it reaches Ocala, featuring a speed limit of 65 mph except for the occasional towns along the way. In one of those towns we stop for fuel and break, and I’m reminded of a recent Sunday sermon by our son Kevin. He talked about when speedos go Star Wars. That is, the speedo wearer has the body hair of Chewbacca and the physique of Jabba the Hut. He described walking on a glorious white-sand beach and seeing such a creature. Here he was with his gorgeous wife Kristal, in the exquisite surroundings of a beautiful beach, and all he could do was stare at the speedo guy. Kevin, my son, I now understand how truly upsetting this can be! At our fuel stop, I saw a bicyclist with skinny legs that didn’t look like he could even pedal a bicycle, skin-tight speedos, and… a huge stomach that lapped way down over the speedos. I now agree: speedos should be outlawed. It may take quite a while to recover from this unsettling image. Today Kitty has discovered that she has a voice and she continues to feel better, which is a good thing because we will take the minimum number of rest breaks. Since Kitty lost 50 pounds, she is like a different traveler. Used to be we’d stop every hour or hour and a half max, and now we sometimes ride nearly tank-to-tank, or about three hours, if the weather is cool. Hot weather affects us both, and as we travel, the temperature rises from a cool 67 F to about 86 F, and we do stop oftener than planned. Still, we reach Sarasota by about 4:30 PM. Our Sarasota friend Mary had asked us to stay with her tonight, but it turns out she’s going out of the country tomorrow and I’d sent an email telling her we’ll get a hotel and just hook up for dinner. I give her a quick call my cell phone. “Hey, Mary, we’re here!” “What?!” she nearly yells into the phone. “Where are you? Why aren’t you here?” I explain and she insists that we cancel the hotel and come to her place for the night. I have a GPS waypoint for her house and Jill leads us flawlessly to her beautiful Florida home. After cleaning up in a shower filled with an alarming number of bottles, vials, sponges, and other objects that I only vaguely recognize, we head out to a local seafood restaurant, Stonewood. I order seared Ahi tuna, which turns out to be delightfully rare with a complex layer of tastes. The wasabi, though, is covered up with lettuce and comes as a complete surprise when I scoop up a mouthful with some lettuce and a piece of tuna! Mary and Kitty and I talk about old times and new, and, as is often the case with long-standing friends, about good and not-so-good times. As we’re finishing dinner, Kitty gets a call from Kristal (daughter-in-law) and Danica (granddaughter), and I get a call from our dear friend Karen with some fantastic news on their life project (http://www.updateonbabyclark.blogspot.com/). And so back to Mary’s house, where I clean and cover the bike parked in her driveway. It just goes to show that if you’re looking for love in all the right places, you can find it even on the Interstate.