Corner To Corner -- To The Starting Point at Mile 0

After a late night in the pool cooling off and celebrating the successful debut concert for Tony’s “BEARatones” group in Miami, the 6:45am wake up call didn’t do its job and we were awakened by room service bringing us our breakfast a bit after 7am. We quickly ate, checked out, and took the bags down and loaded them on the bikes. It was quite warm and of course too humid even that early in the morning and the short walk to the garage got us drenched in sweat. I got rather badly sunburned bringing the bike back from the Miami dealer to the hotel, so I chose to wear a short sleeve t-shirt, and to drench myself in spray-on sun screen. I forgot how sticky that stuff makes you feel, especially when you spray it on top of a layer of sweat. The road grime sticks to it as well and after several applications throughout the day, you end up with a layer that you can peel off with the edge of a credit card like candle wax dripped on a table.

Leaving Miami proved to be a bit difficult too – given the one-way streets and the hidden ramp to the freeway, but we managed to find our way out and on to the Turnpike. Time to test out the Sun Passes. It was nice to ride through the reader lanes, and we hoped they worked. Checking the account on line tonite it doesn’t appear that they did, so we will either get multiple $100 fines mailed to us, which we can fight, or they’ll choose not to pursue it (we hope), or we can prove we bought the pass and it was their fault it didn’t deduct the toll.

The Turnpike ends at Homestead, Florida, where we picked up US-1 for the 130 mile run down the keys to Key West. This road is just like I remembered it – mile and miles along blue green water, over long bridges and short islands. Originally the highway was built mostly upon what was left of Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway which was built in 1908 and abandoned after a hurricane in 1935, The Railway sold the bridges to the state who built the original US-1 on top of it. Much of the road on the islands is still built upon the roadbed right of way. The old bridges and causeways still stand for much of the route and are now used as fishing piers.

The Key’s have interesting address systems too – by mile marker. So if an address is 45009 US 1, you know it’s just past mile marker 45. It starts at 0 in Key West and gets higher as you go North. About mile 45 is the famous Seven Mile Bridge, and midway along is a small island called Pigeon Key. This is where the railroad had a work camp for the massive bridge, and today it’s a bit of a ghost town. You can take a ferry from Vaca Key to get there. I read up extensively on the building of the railroad after the first trip down two years ago, and I wanted to see it. We need a break from the ride anyway, so we stopped at the small museum on Vaca and bought tickets and waited for the boat.

Now the fun think about Key West, and other “end of the road” towns like Provincetown, MA, and Homer, AK is that they tend to attract a lot of human flotsam and jetsam. Folks who drift or run away end up in places like this because they literally can’t get any further away. They attract all kinds of oddballs and interesting characters. Our boat captain was no exception.

He introduced himself as “Captain Billy”, and he piloted the fishing boat with Tony and myself and a newly moved to Florida retired couple from Michigan. Captain Billy is originally from Long Island he said, and started coming to the Keys on fishing trips as a kid, and as he got older each trip lasted a little longer and a little longer—first a week, then two, then a month, then two, and finally decided to not go home. It’s typical of the folks who populate ends of the road. He had that permanent Florida Key tan, was barefoot, and in shorts the whole time. He talked of fishing charters, and hurricanes that he’s ridden out, and how shallow the water was, and what it was like to live in the humid Keys. “You get used to it” he said. I suppose, but I couldn’t I’m sure.

We toured the buildings on Pigeon Key in the sweltering heat, wondering how construction workers 100 years ago could stand working there, and we climbed up on the old railroad bridge for a spectacular view down the Gulf. We could look down in the shallow waters and see Tiger Fish swimming about, and figured that Captain Billy would be the perfect model for “Crush” the Sea Turtle in the movie “Finding Nemo”. He came to pick us back up and we sailed back to Vaca key where we hopped back on the bikes for the 30 miles down to Key West. I have to say the post noon heat was excruciating. The wind was hot, and once you get away from the water you lose the cool breeze, and all you feel is the heat radiating up from the pavement, and down through that hot moist air, to where it feels like you have molten steel being poured on you. We had to stop about 5 miles from the hotel and duck into a Wendy’s for a frosty just to cool off and rest in some A/C comfort for a bit.

Key West is literally the end of the road. The road ends at a marker for the Southern Most Point in the Continental US. We posed the bikes and had our picture taken. The fact that these are our bikes – with Washington plates, and that we rode them here and will start riding them back tomorrow is what I think makes this something special and intimidating at the same time, especially when I think about the distance and exactly how far we are from Seattle. These bikes, which reside in our garage at home, are literally as far away from there as they can possibly get, and when we get home, we can look at a map and say – “we rode these guys from there!
Tomorrow the ride home officially starts. We’ll get up early, swing by and pose at sunrise at the end of the road, then turn our backs to it and start heading home.