Key West

Today was a much more laid back day than we have had on this trip. We awoke at 5:30 but did things around the house until after 10 am. Cindy had to send several emails for her volunteer work with a nonprofit group in Oregon. We were happy to have some down time and walked around the property here at Pelico Paradise. Mark and I decided that the alarm for the night before was a pump for the sewer system. There hadn’t been a problem since, so we didn’t do anything with it.

We took two cars into Key West on the 30 minutes drive and found a parking space on the small island. We were able to get a spot not far from Duval Street for four hours, giving us all the time we thought we would need to visit the tourist area. We walked along Duval Street and it didn’t take long to get enough of the shops with cheap souvenirs, loud bars and strip joints, so we detoured by Mallory Square then to Whitehead and Truman Streets where Ernest Hemingway’s house stood. Mary and I had taken the tour when we were in Key West in 2013 and found the most interesting part to be the polydactyl cats, so we opted to pass on the tour.

While Mark and Cindy did the tour, we walked around town and met a guy from Ironton, Ohio and someone from Cabin Creek, WV. We stopped at the Mile 0 marker for US 1, then went to the CVS on Duval Street to buy postcards for the Koehler boys and Gran. We were leaving the Key West post office when Cindy called to tell us that they had finished the tour. We returned to the cars and drove the short distance to Higgs Beach to walk out the White Street Pier. We chatted with a family whose daughter attended Marshall and looked around, enjoying the beautiful warm day. A fisherman on the pier was feeding the small fish he caught to a great egret named George.

We left Key West heading to Castaways Restaurant on Marathon Key to meet Steve Minor for dinner. Steve arrived before us and said that Castaways was closed, so we opted to try Seven Mile Grill at the northern base of the Seven Mile Bridge on Marathon Key. We all enjoyed our meals, with most of us having local seafood. It was great to see Steve. He returned to Pelico Paradise with us, where we chatted until 10 pm while Mary, Cindy and Jodie finished the Phase 10 game then played Skip-Bo. We packed for our trip to Dry Tortugas National Park tomorrow.