Key West

I spent last week in Key West.  And there's one main reason that I haven't written about it before now:  I had to determine if I actually went, or if it was only a dream.  I have decided that it's a good thing that I brought home souveniers, as physical proof that I was gone.  Else it would have felt very unreal indeed.

First:  Why did I choose to go to Key West as opposed to say, well, anywhere else in the world?  Well, my good friend, J, lives there.  We wanted to get together after not seeing each other for a very, very long time, and I told her she could come here to Cincinnati, which she was very willing to do, OR ...  I could go to Key West.  By myself.  For a week.  Sold.

I won't detail my trip.  But I am going to post some pictures (stolen from J, who took all the pictures while we were there), and give highlights.

Highlight 1:  On the plane ride there, I spoke with a fascinating woman who owns 2 cats.  Also, I saw a clearing in the forest that was shaped like a conversation bubble.

Highlight 2:  On the plane ride back, I stood up at the end of the flight and bumped my head on the overhead compartment thing.  People behind me were sympathetic, but I said, "It's okay, I'm short."  I'm only an inch or two taller than the bottom of the overhead compartments, and I tend to hit my head on them a lot--I'd say 4 out of 5 trips.

Okay, now on to the real highlights.

It was nice to be able to just chill!  I got to talk to J, think about life, sleep for 12 hours straight, and do nothing.  During the down times (and thankfully, there were a lot of down times), I looked at the ocean.  J lives 118 steps from the water's edge (I counted for Miciah), and so everyday I would look out at the ocean and I discovered that it was never the same color day to day.  Sometimes it wasn't the same color moment to moment.  Gray, gray-blue, emerald green, light blue, darker blue.  I can now no longer define the color of the ocean.

Key West is further from mainland Florida than I supposed.  And locals refer to the drive to Miami as The Drive, which cracked me up.  But makes sense, right?  Cause you can only drive out of Key West one direction.

Also cracked me up:  Key West claims to be the Southernmost Point of the continental United States.  Like someone forgot to tell them that they're an ISLAND.  ...  Key West is only 90 miles away from Cuba, and I didn't know that.  That's like Cincinnati to Columbus!  Crazy.

We decided to walk all the way around the island.  It was my idea, so I take full blame for the fact that we were worn out all the rest of the week.  But it's such a small island:  4 miles by 2 miles.  You GOTTA walk around it!  I was surprised by the fact that there are very few beaches.  Mostly it's just land and then, umm, water.  A lot of times it was road and then water.  It was very strange to me.  Here's one of the actual beaches on Key West:

Even the beaches, then, only have like 5 feet of sand.  I guess I just expected it to be beachy.

We went and saw a bunch of stuff.  There's a treasure museum that we went to which sings praises to Mel Fisher.  Mel Fisher was crazy and a treasure-hunter, and even though he lost his son and daughter-in-law during the searching process (and as a result of it), he kept searching and eventually found his El Dorado:  2 sunken 1620's Spanish ships with immense amounts of gold, silver, and other unimportant things of historical significance.  You can see lots of those things on display in the museum and you can even purchase some of them in the gift shop (like the gold snuff box we saw, yours for the low low price of $65,000), which only goes to show that Mel Fisher is still racking up cash.  He was kind enough, though, to let us lift this real gold bar without paying extra.  The markings on it--the stamps--were very cool:

Mallory Square at sunset was awesome.  Locals come and give performances and then guilt tourists into giving them tips.  We were not conned by their "give me money because I just entertained you" act because I did a quick calculation and realized that the good ones are making more money than I do.  The good one we saw was juggling fire sticks while standing on a 10-foot unicycle.

One of the bad ones was strumming an acoustic guitar, butchering American Pie, and standing right behind us as we watched the sunset.  For half an hour.  It was torturous.  But the sunset was beautiful.  Check it out:

and:

While watching the sunset from the shore, we decided that we NEEDED to get on a sunset cruise.  Boats go out about an hour before sunset and arrive back at shore about an hour after sunset.  This was, hands down, the best thing we did.  (Right here I have to put in my plug for traveling sans kids.  A $40 sunset cruise is MUCH more manageable when you're only paying for 1 person.)  For so many reasons.
Neither J nor I had ever been on a boat on the ocean.  So here's for firsts!
The sunset was gorgeous:

We also got to watch a couple get fantastically drunk.  They were old enough to be our parents (I'm guessing they were in their early 50's).  She was dressed in a cute black evening dress, and he was in khaki shorts and a floral print button-up shirt.  He started the trip by saying, "Will we have to duck under the sail?  Because my reaction time is a little slow right now."  Right.  By the end of the night they were "dancing" on the "dance floor."  They were the ONLY ones dancing.  He had his shirt unbuttoned (For the love of all that's holy, WHY?) and she was touching him all over while they -puke- danced.  Gross.  I wished I had video taped the whole thing so that I could show them the next day how RIDICULOUS they looked.  Be glad you didn't see it.

Despite the fact that this Plastered Couple almost made me hurl, the sunset cruise was fabulous.  We got to talk to the captain of the boat, and that was fascinating.  He's been in Key West for 16 years, minus the year he moved with his young family to Wisconsin to try to make it there, in a more family-friendly environment.  Shockingly, there is little need in Wisconsin for sailboat captains.  One of my favorite nuggets from Captain was the fact that it can get cold on the ocean over the "winter."  As he said, "I have to wear a sweatshirt and wind breaker.  And sometimes, even socks and shoes."  The pinnacle of cold in Key West:  Needing to wear socks and shoes.

I asked lots of questions about the Keys, because the history--both human and geological--is fascinating.  For instance, Key Deer.  A subspecies of the white-tailed deer, they only exist on the Keys.  But how did they GET there?  ...  I mean, doesn't it make you curious?  ...  Well, turns out that the ocean used to be 50 feet higher than it is currently.  Then it dropped to 300 feet LOWER than it is now.  What had formally been the original reef became the Keys.  All kinds of animal life went down the new, now-connected land mass.  Then, as the water levels rose again, the animals fled back to the mainland, but some of them got trapped, and there you have the Key Deer.  Neat, huh?

As for human history, the fact that the Keys exist as a tourism location is amazing to me.  In the 1800's, a guy decided to build a railroad line all the way from Miami to Key West and everyone thought he was crazy.  But he was rich, so he did it anyway, and it totally worked.  Eventually they paved it over to allow for car travel.  Fortunately, parts of the old bridge were destroyed during a hurricane, so they updated it with a bridge that's much wider.  You can see parts of the old bridge, and it's so narrow that it makes me nervous just THINKING about driving across it.

Oh yeah, plus the crackpot Hemmingway lived in Key West.  And Pres. Truman loved it, too.  And that's that.

So, all in all, a great trip.  I learned that people go to Key West to get fabulously drunk, and I hadn't known that before, so I feel less ... naive now.  I learned that the ocean is beautiful, no matter what color it is.  And I learned that Cincinnati is also beautiful, just different.  When the plane got below the cloud line, and the rolling hills of Cincinnati came into view, the trees exploding with fall colors, ...  I was home again.  Hurray for vacations.  And hurray for coming home.