Category: Driving

Categories
Annoyances Driving Food History Shopping Weather

Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts

Here’s what’s on my mind on this Tuesday night:

1.  I just returned home from Publix at the Oasis Plaza in Homestead. It’s where shopping is a pleasure. It would have been more of a pleasure if there were less people there. That joint was jumpin’. There is no recession in effect at Publix.

2.  Traffic in and around Homestead has been extra nightmarish lately with all of the tourists mixing in with all of the snowbirds from Quebec mixing in with us natives of the land. I’ve been averaging at least a couple of near-death experiences on the roads per each mile traveled.

3.  I just turned on the A.C. in my home for the first time in two weeks. It was approaching the 80°F mark in my living room. Our next frigid outbreak is still on track to arrive during the day on Friday. On Saturday we may actually struggle to reach 60°F all day long !  Are you paying attention Kelly J. ?

4.  The hot new Burger King on Speedway Boulevard just north of Biscayne Drive (in front of the Home Depot) is now open for business – and half of the base clogged up their parking lot – and their arteries !  That’s 4 Burger Kings around Homestead – but not in Homestead.

5.  There’s a really cool video on You Tube of a dude who is a passenger of a vehicle that’s driving all around the Homestead Air Force Base that once existed in 1989. He’s using his camcorder to record the drive all throughout our absolutely gorgeous and totally vibrant base at the time. He probably sent it home for his family to watch way back then. The video brought tears to my ears. Our current Air Reserve Base is merely a shell of what it once was, but I must admit that we have made substantial progress since Hurricane Andrew destroyed everything that we had nearly 17 years ago.

Thank You for sharing your time with me by reading these thoughts o’ mine.

Categories
Animals Driving History Home Life Music Radio

Saturday Night Retro

1998 – What a crazy year it was (for me anyway). It was a party year. It’s the year that I went from 30 to 31-years-old. I was living in my current home. I was working at the place that I still work at today. I had my young and healthy feline buddy Boots running energetically all throughout my home. When I wasn’t at home or at work I was probably driving around in my dark green 1997 Saturn SL1 that looked just like this:

1997 Saturn SL1
1997 Saturn SL1

I was a loyal Y-100 listener in 1998, and some of the hottest pop and rock bands on the radio back then included ‘N Sync, Fastball, Matchbox Twenty, The Goo Goo Dolls, and Aerosmith.

Here’s a track that was particularly big all around the world (aside from here in the U.S.). It’s a modern 1998 Eurodance update to a 1974 U.S. Disco smash. You probably know the original version, and some of you can even perform the dance moves to it as well. It’s “Kung Fu Fighting”, and Carl Douglas performed it originally while the British dance crew Bus Stop modernized it in 1998. It went a little something like this:

Categories
Driving Money Radio Shopping Travel

Monday Night Countdown

Bright and early this Wednesday morning I’ll be jumping aboard the Miami-Dade Metrorail system for the first time in perhaps a decade.

Here are the TOP 5 things I’m looking forward to about that:

5.  I get the coolest non-Google Street View view of overly-congested Useless-One (South Dixie Parking Lot) – from about 25 feet up in the air.

4.  I’m on a never-ending fact-finding mission to see if any new and exciting shopping center districts are currently under construction or open for business along Useless-One. Hey – it’s how I discovered The Shops At Sunset Place (my former playground) back in 1999 !

3.  I’m yearning to know if that train is still leaving on Track 5 … for Anaheim, Azusa, and Cuc … amonga. (This is an old radio reference to ‘The Jack Benny Program’ circa 1949. If you have no clue what this means then you are simply a young buck. Get it ? – Buck ? – Buck Benny ? – Oh never mind.)

2.  I enjoy visiting the only place on Earth that accepts as fare every single U.S. dollar coin ever minted since the Declaration Of Independence was ratified.

1.  I don’t have to deal with three very scary Expressways that always make me nervous and sweat – the Don Shula, the Palmetto, and the Dolphin. I’ve had many near-death experiences on all three of these highways over the past 20 years.

Categories
Driving History Life Music Radio Travel

Saturday Night Retro

1989 – I started off the year in January by buying a brand new car for the first time in my entire life. I was tired of riding my 10-speed bike all over Homestead Air Force Base, so I bought a bright and shiny new red 1989 Geo Spectrum. It would go on to become my longest-tenure car. I had it for over 8 years – driving it for 96,745 miles. Since the purchase of that first car exactly 20 years ago this weekend I’ve driven just over 230,000 miles !  That’s an overall average of exactly 11,500 miles per year – just below the national driving average.

I bought that car when I was 21-years-old and living in one of the many dormitories on base. That car gave me the freedom that I wanted at the time to explore the South Florida all around me. It took me through 8 crazy years of my life – through the remainder of my turbulent 20s. It took me on countless road trips up north. It sat idle for a couple of months while I was in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. It survived the Category 4 hurricane winds of Andrew on the morning of August 24TH 1992. It moved me back up to the Washington D.C. area a week after the hurricane destroyed Homestead, and it returned me back to (Central) Florida about 6 months later. It eventually brought me back down to Homestead and the air base in March of 1994. It moved a lot of my possessions to my current home here in Homestead in June of 1995 – including my little feline buddy Boots.

What a cool little car that was – chock-full of a lot of great memories of my life at the time. No other Saturn since then has even come close.

This song reminds me so much of that year of 1989. I bought it on cassette single (that was the hot music medium at the time), and I played it over and over again. This is one of those few songs that I consider to be a pivotal theme song of the autobiographical soundtrack of my life. It’s from the legendary rock band Poco. They’ve been in existence as a group for the past 40 years – virtually my entire life !  Here’s their huge pop radio smash from 1989 – “Call It Love”: