Our Key West Trip - The Trip Down (Days 1, 2, and 3)
So, I finally got around to getting all the pics off our collective cameras and all in one place and uploaded online so that I can now link to them. Half of them are of food. That should say something about how we vacation. More on that later.
If you just want to see the pics, they're all here. I tried to be somewhat narrative about the descriptions on them.
The whole reason we went on this trip is because Chris' parents wanted to take Jonah for a week so he could go to VBS at their church. We did it last year and he really loved it and we got a week to ourselves. But we didn't really do anything last year during that week. I guess we sort of had a staycation or something. But this year, we thought we should do something big since we haven't been on a trip longer than a weekend without a kid since we had a kid. We looked at airfare to all sorts of places and then settled on "let's just freakin' drive to the Keys." I've wanted to go to the Caribbean for a very long time and this was the next best thing, because we just really couldn't afford airfare right now. It's crazy expensive. Even trips to Denver, for which we used to be able to spot deals on Southwest for like $50 one way, are now over $100 one way. It is cheaper to drive our gas guzzling truck to these places. Seriously. It's why we drove to Disney in February instead of flying.
But anyway, we headed down to Huntsville to drop Jonah off with his grandparents on Saturday and spent the night with them. We drove around Huntsville trying to purchase some Monkeynaught IPA in cans from Straight to Ale Brewery down there (run by one of our friends and fellow homebrewers we used to be in Rocket City Brewers with who has now gone pro) but every freakin' store was sold out. We found this to be the case on our way back through the following weekend, too. Good for Dan, that he can't keep up with demand, but damn! Oh well, we stopped by the brewery for a pint, and ran into another friend of ours, Travis. We used to go to shows and festivals with him and his wife and I think they still keep in touch with my brother. Huntsville is a small town. I'm reminded of this every time we're there and randomly run into people we know while we're out. Chatted with Travis for a bit and he gave us some pointers about Key West (as in, taking bikes to get around on the island was an absolutely smart move) then headed back to have dinner with my dad and Chris' parents.
We got up reasonably early Sunday morning, had breakfast and hit the road. We took the route over Sand Mountain (where the snake handlers and KKK live, but that's another story) toward Atlanta and remembered how much we loved the area to the East of Huntsville. The hills there seem bigger than the hills in Middle Tennessee. Maybe it's because the big expanses of valleys between them, I don't know. But Paint Rock, AL will always have a special place in my heart. It's just really pretty. I also spotted the sweetest elderly couple holding hands in their bathrobes and nightgowns on their front porch in Henegar, AL. It was the sweetest sight. You can still see the path of the tornadoes that tore through that area in April of 2011 though. Trees are still splintered, the ones that are still standing. All the homes and buildings are new. There was a church in a barn, though I think it was a cowboy church. Because that's a thing, if you've not heard of it before. You come out of the mountains and get dumped out on I-75 in Adairsville, GA just north of Atlanta. I saw this hilarious sign in a gas station bathroom in Adairsville:
We pulled into Atlanta a little before noon, thinking that HopCity (our new favorite beer store there) opened then. It opened at 12:30. We glanced at the coffee shop across the street, but wound up ducking in out of the drizzling rain into 5 Seasons Brewpub next door for a pint to pass the time instead. I wish we had time to eat there. I love that place, but I hadn't been to the Midtown location before. I had a delicious Belgian Witbier which wasn't very white at all, but still good.
We both regretted not having the time to try some of their higher gravity special taps. They sounded delicious! Some time, we really need to go to Atlanta just to go to Atlanta, instead of passing through or for a convention when we don't have time for this sort of thing. We spent too much money on sour beers for the cellar and canned beers for the trip, but it was all worth it. Then we headed to a place we found on roadfood.com (which is pretty awesome for finding really bad for you food that's not a chain while you're traveling), Delia's Chicken Sausage Shack. It's rather quite tasty, though extremely messy depending on what you order. So, I wouldn't suggest getting it to go. There are a few picnic tables out front or there's a tiny little bar inside. Here's their menu:
And what we had:
The chili with what I'm assuming is their chicken meatballs in it was delicious!
Fully refreshed, we hit the road and didn't really stop again until it was time to find a place to sleep. And let me tell you, smart phones are awesome while you're traveling and not sure where you'll land. I was able to pull up the Hotels.com app as well as Google Local (used to be Places) and figure out that the hotels in Port St. Lucie were largely more expensive than the ones in neighboring Fort Pierce. As in, I was able to book a nice, clean, relatively empty Holiday Inn Express for about $45. The one in Port St. Lucie was $109. And I did it like an hour before we checked in to get that price.
We had been looking at all these places to go for dinner, but we were having trouble finding places that were open and close to where we stayed (probably because everything was in Port St. Lucie and that's probably why the hotels are a little more expensive) and our energy for such things was waning quickly. We wound up going to a Steak 'n' Shake right next to the hotel. Then Chris had the bright idea to go for a run on the treadmill in the hotel's exercise room which smelled like tires and he dragged me down there with him. Neither of us have run on a treadmill before. It took some getting used to and then when we got off of them, we were both really dizzy and disoriented like when you get off the moving sidewalk at Space Mountain. I slowed down for longer and to a slower speed than Chris did because I was expecting some of that. But he was bad off for a bit. We then showered and fell into bed and set the alarm.
Monday morning, we awoke, found a Nissan dealership to get our oil changed (because we just missed the one up here closing on Saturday before we left town and Chris basically got the service plan for free when he bought the truck). Then Chris was trying to convince me to go into Little Havana in Miami and quickly learn a Spanish phrase that according to a Yelp user would get an authentic Cuban pork sandwich. I had more than a little trepidation about going into a place where no employees spoke English and trusting a random Yelp user to not pass on a phrase that might be telling these people, "I'm a huge dingleberry" or something instead of "I want a pork sandwhich". Also, it's Little Havana. And we had two bikes in the back of the truck which were only secured by a ratchet strap. And one of the bikes was borrowed and I'm not about to let a borrowed bike get stolen. Not only that, we weren't even ready to eat by then. So we headed on, cheering ourselves up with the fact that we could catch something in Key Largo or something, since we likely wouldn't make our way back up to the Upper Keys until we were headed out of town.
We wound up passing right by Alabama Jacks, which we just saw the other night featured on some show about the manliest restaurants in America. Chris is lamenting that we didn't stop there now. It was in the running for lunch at one point, but we decided instead to plug on to Marathon, which is about the halfway point from the mainland to Key West. We had a list of about five restaurants we really wanted to try while we were down there and one of them was in Marathon. It's a little dive of a restaurant, motel, fish market and I don't even know what else called Fish Tales Seafood Market and it's run by the cutest little Bavarian woman and it is delicious! The German beer was fresh and refreshing and delicious (Spaten Oktoberfest on tap, we were both amazed at how fresh it was, still had that Grapico flavor from fresh Munich malt). And we both got one of their specialties, the Bavarian fish sandwich, which has nothing to do with Bavaria, really. It was grilled mahi mahi smothered in sauteed onions and mushrooms, topped with melted Swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato and house made tartar sauce served on a pretzel roll. But a picture speaks a thousand words, excpet this one: messy. seriously, nearly impossible to eat without a fork, but oh so freakin' good!
Many times we laughed at ourselves for how much focus we put on food, especially while we're traveling. I mean, I spent days on Urban Spoon before we even left reading reviews and comparing them to Yelp reviews and stuff trying to search out the absolute best places. Then in the car, we'd spend half the driving time looking at the Urban Spoon and Yelp apps to find stuff on the way down. It was time well spent, because overall, I'd say about 50% of our meals were amazing and the rest were at least good or okay. Food is important to us. It seems stupid, I know. But, really, life is too short to eat shitty food. It just makes it a little harder to travel because we kind of hate most all fast food and that's what there is to grab on the road a lot of times. We've been known to pack our own sandwich stuff before and I'll make lunch in the backseat while Chris fills up the tank at a gas station or something. It's how we did our entire fifteen days on the road out west in 2005. We had a huge container of homemade salsa and another huge container of pasta salad and yet a third of chicken salad that we put in tortillas for wraps so they'd travel well. We did the same thing on the way down to Disney. I made turkey wraps in the bed of the truck at a gas station on the way down and we took a bunch of trail mixes and granola bars and stuff to snack on.
And that's the story of why half of our vacation pictures are of food. Because that's as much a part of visiting a new place for us as seeing the flora and fauna and lay of the land. Food is culture, really, if you want to get down to it. You can learn a lot about a place from their food and their music. Jimmy Buffet, notwithstanding.
After that, we set our sites on our final destination, our little tropical bungalow which we were to call home for the rest of the week. Again, pictures speak more words:
That's a huge gumbo limbo tree over the jacuzzi draped with philodendron vines. The owner has landscaped with all these tropicals that you find in the houseplant sections of garden centers. In fact, I used to grow many of them in the little potted jungle I kept behind the couch in the den. And there were anoles (lizards) everywhere. Literally, everywhere I looked there was a little lizard hopping around through the leaves. The table and benches were handcarved Balinese pieces made from mahogany.
Also, there's a reason you won't find any pictures of the interior of the place. For one, I think I'd need a fisheye lens just to get a shot of it. For two, it's just nothing to write home about. It was cute and cozy and welcoming and clean, but it was smaller than our first one bedroom apartment together. But we didn't feel cramped, except in the kitchen and bathroom for the most part. And the bed was super comfy, there wasn't a single night that I didn't sleep wonderfully, even with mild sunburn. And we didn't spend a whole lot of time inside anyway. If it had rained all week, though, this place would have sucked and we probably would have argued a lot. But we didn't get a drop until the day we left, so hurray for good weather luck!
After we unloaded and Chris got the tires back on the bikes, we changed clothes and rode around a bit. I had a little bit of anxiety about getting on a bike for the first time in, oh, seventeen years or so. Seriously, I think I've only ridden a bicycle once since I got my driver's license when I turned 16. It turns out that riding a bike is just like riding a bike. It took me about 30 seconds to get the feel for it again. But my butt did not get used to it so easily. For the first night, I was fine, but Tuesday and Wednesday were extremely uncomfortable. After that, I felt better and by Friday, I was totally fine. But the two pelvic bones that yoga instructors like to call "sit bones" when you're leaning back in boat pose just felt bruised. I'm sure the seat of the borrowed bike I had wasn't the greatest in the world, but it wasn't that bad. But I'm still so, so glad we had the bikes. Truly that is the best way to get around the island. I can imagine parking is a nightmare and in a lot of places you have to pay to park and there are bike and moped rentals everywhere. It's definitely the thing to do. And most people are pretty respectful of cyclists. But a couple of times I got a taste of why cyclists often hate motorists so much.
We rode southwest, down around the Naval Air Station near Fort Zachary Taylor State Park. We rode past these bunkers that reminded me of the tombs in Rohan and even had little white flowers growing on them that I didn't really see anywhere else. "Simbelmyne. Ever has it grown on the tombs of my forebearers..."
That was right around the corner from the big Southernmost Point of the Continental United States marker and also, essentially, in the Key West ghetto where what looks like old Naval housing has become low income housing. There was an obscenely long line of people wanting their pictures taken at the Southernmost Point. We probably photobombed a few of them as we rode up to the pier behind it and kept going on our merry way. Chris and I debated the validity of whether or not they could even claim that as a thing. His point was that the Keys are outlying islands so they shouldn't count as part of the Continental United States. My point is that it's not like they're Hawaii or something and they're part of a state which is in the Continental United States, so they should be considered as such. I think at one point, I devolved into, "just let them have their moment, okay?!" It was a frequent discussion because everything was named Southernmost whatever, especially in that little corner of the island.
While riding through various little areas just exploring and taking things in, as you really only can on a bike, I couldn't help but become a little enamored with the place. I mean all the non-touristy parts anyway. The houses and such. It's like if you took East Nashville, aged it about a hundred years and stuck it in tropical flora then blasted every surface with salt spray, you'd almost be there. But there's some intangible charm going on here. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's just in the way the paint peels from the wood or the way everything seems to be draped in vines and how amazingly gorgeous tropical blooms spring out of the most unlikely places. The juxtaposition of the beautiful blooms of paradise with crumbling brick sidewalks and houses with shutters falling off. But it's still got an overwhelmingly Southern feel. Very welcoming and hospitable and not the least bit pretentious. In fact, just the opposite. Most of the greatest places we went seemed to be held together by shear force of will of their owners more so than nails or screws. Mere shacks and dive bars and disheveled little places. And I felt very at home there, almost instantly comfortable, even in the stifling heat and humidity. The very breeze was so thick, it felt as though it embraced you. It reminded me of how New Orleans feels to me but without the menace. Like New Orleans with the innocence of a child. A child with a history of piracy. Or wrecking. Right, "wrecking".
After that we made our way to Duval Street, which is, as Chris put it, "like Bourbon Street if it were run by Ned Flanders." Seriously, there's even a Fat Tuesday. But it doesn't smell as bad as Bourbon Street. You could also compare it to Nashville's 2nd & Broadway. Or Memphis' Beale Street. It's the same sort of deal, but with that old Florida feel. It's kind of the antithesis of what I described in the last paragraph and we tried to limit our time there as much as possible during the rest of the week. We rode up most of the length of Duval until we found an Irish pub. I know, we're in the subtropics and we walk into an Irish pub. Sounds like the start of a bad joke (a German/French/Jew and a German/Irish/Scott walk into an Irish pub in the subtropics...) But we walk in, order a Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA and the guy playing guitar is heckling some dude in front of the stage calling him Frodo Baggins and making him take Jagermeister shots with him because, "we have to get Frodo back to Middle Earth" or something. I don't even know. We definitely walked into the end of the joke, so it didn't make much sense. I just thought it was hilarious that of all the places we walked into, there was some dude making Lord of the Rings jokes and I happened to be wearing my Baggins' Pawn Shop shirt. It amused me how many middle-aged people were drunk at 5pm. Like every time you're on Duval, you could spot them and you'd just know they'd be passed out in their golf shirts and khakis and sandals with socks by nine.
He finished playing and heckling and we finished our pints and then walked down the street to another bar, because that's kind of all there is to do on Duval unless you're interested in unfunny, moderately obscene t-shirts or really bad, not-Cuban cigars (we fell for that one on the last night). This time, we opted for mojitos, because they were 2 for $12 and this place had like 48 different flavors of them (though, overwhelmed by options, we ordered the classic). The mojitos were watered down and not so great. Everyone down there puts the mint in the cup, I didn't see a single muddler. Heresy! But there was a stalk of sugarcane sticking out of it that was delicious. And now I want to grow sugar cane and get a lime tree because we already grow peppermint. And mojitos will be the official drink of the tiny nation that is my backyard. I call it Melasia.
After that, we started walking back to our bikes, but I spotted a sign that said "craft beer" and I automatically started walking in the direction of the arrow on the sign. What a little gem we found! It's called Krawl Off Duval and it reminds me a bit of the Tavern Under the Square that used to be in Huntsville... except less dank. I guess I just mean in the sense that you feel like people are walking on your head, because they absolutely are. Low ceilings in a small, cavernous, basement feeling room with the loud creaking of steps on the floor above you. They had about 12 taps, all good stuff, but they seem to only get 5 gallon kegs, so they change constantly. As it was, he poured me short on a Deviant Dale's because I got the last of it. As an added bonus, the owner of the place was there, as well as all six of her employees. It's that kind of place, where even when you're not on shift, you come hang out. She was pouring them shots of Jameson. And they had a mix of the most awesome 90s grunge playing. I think they had at least three of Tool's best albums in the disk changer plus some Jane's Addiction from when Perry Farrell was still addicted. No junk, no soul. Somehow, after two beers each there, we walked out way too drunk and with like a $30 tab. We have no idea how that happened. But those are the breaks sometimes. And other times, "the breaks" refer to waves.
So we stumbled across the street to a pizza joint to get a slice before attempting to ride bicycles while intoxicated and trying to find our way back to our house in the dark in a town we were only vaguely acquainted with thus far. That was an adventure, let me tell you. I stopped following Chris after the third wrong turn when he took us into a trailer park with a dead end. I found a shorter way out of the trailer park and stopped in front of it to pull out my phone and look at a map. About that time, he came up behind me and promptly ran into a fire hydrant. Don't ride bicycles while drunk, m'kay?
We made it back to our home away from home, but not before I rode the streets trying to solicit people to join our "DRUNKEN BICYCLE TOURS $5!" at the top of my lungs with Chris following me laughing and telling me to shut up without much conviction. Good times. We probably pissed off the neighbor in the other half of our little duplex that night (that's what the house was, a 1 bedroom, 1 bath half of a duplex) because we were not the least bit quiet and we spent like 3 hours in the hot tub that night. But to be fair, he listened to his television so loud, it's likely we didn't disturb him in the least.
And I think that's a good place to cut it for now. In the next installment: "HOLY FUCK THAT'S A BARRACUDA!" or adventures while snorkeling; sea legs; more food; the establishment of my mantra "I'm on vacation, damn it!"; a couple of sunsets; and a touch more responsibility. Just a touch.
If you just want to see the pics, they're all here. I tried to be somewhat narrative about the descriptions on them.
The whole reason we went on this trip is because Chris' parents wanted to take Jonah for a week so he could go to VBS at their church. We did it last year and he really loved it and we got a week to ourselves. But we didn't really do anything last year during that week. I guess we sort of had a staycation or something. But this year, we thought we should do something big since we haven't been on a trip longer than a weekend without a kid since we had a kid. We looked at airfare to all sorts of places and then settled on "let's just freakin' drive to the Keys." I've wanted to go to the Caribbean for a very long time and this was the next best thing, because we just really couldn't afford airfare right now. It's crazy expensive. Even trips to Denver, for which we used to be able to spot deals on Southwest for like $50 one way, are now over $100 one way. It is cheaper to drive our gas guzzling truck to these places. Seriously. It's why we drove to Disney in February instead of flying.
But anyway, we headed down to Huntsville to drop Jonah off with his grandparents on Saturday and spent the night with them. We drove around Huntsville trying to purchase some Monkeynaught IPA in cans from Straight to Ale Brewery down there (run by one of our friends and fellow homebrewers we used to be in Rocket City Brewers with who has now gone pro) but every freakin' store was sold out. We found this to be the case on our way back through the following weekend, too. Good for Dan, that he can't keep up with demand, but damn! Oh well, we stopped by the brewery for a pint, and ran into another friend of ours, Travis. We used to go to shows and festivals with him and his wife and I think they still keep in touch with my brother. Huntsville is a small town. I'm reminded of this every time we're there and randomly run into people we know while we're out. Chatted with Travis for a bit and he gave us some pointers about Key West (as in, taking bikes to get around on the island was an absolutely smart move) then headed back to have dinner with my dad and Chris' parents.
We got up reasonably early Sunday morning, had breakfast and hit the road. We took the route over Sand Mountain (where the snake handlers and KKK live, but that's another story) toward Atlanta and remembered how much we loved the area to the East of Huntsville. The hills there seem bigger than the hills in Middle Tennessee. Maybe it's because the big expanses of valleys between them, I don't know. But Paint Rock, AL will always have a special place in my heart. It's just really pretty. I also spotted the sweetest elderly couple holding hands in their bathrobes and nightgowns on their front porch in Henegar, AL. It was the sweetest sight. You can still see the path of the tornadoes that tore through that area in April of 2011 though. Trees are still splintered, the ones that are still standing. All the homes and buildings are new. There was a church in a barn, though I think it was a cowboy church. Because that's a thing, if you've not heard of it before. You come out of the mountains and get dumped out on I-75 in Adairsville, GA just north of Atlanta. I saw this hilarious sign in a gas station bathroom in Adairsville:
We pulled into Atlanta a little before noon, thinking that HopCity (our new favorite beer store there) opened then. It opened at 12:30. We glanced at the coffee shop across the street, but wound up ducking in out of the drizzling rain into 5 Seasons Brewpub next door for a pint to pass the time instead. I wish we had time to eat there. I love that place, but I hadn't been to the Midtown location before. I had a delicious Belgian Witbier which wasn't very white at all, but still good.
We both regretted not having the time to try some of their higher gravity special taps. They sounded delicious! Some time, we really need to go to Atlanta just to go to Atlanta, instead of passing through or for a convention when we don't have time for this sort of thing. We spent too much money on sour beers for the cellar and canned beers for the trip, but it was all worth it. Then we headed to a place we found on roadfood.com (which is pretty awesome for finding really bad for you food that's not a chain while you're traveling), Delia's Chicken Sausage Shack. It's rather quite tasty, though extremely messy depending on what you order. So, I wouldn't suggest getting it to go. There are a few picnic tables out front or there's a tiny little bar inside. Here's their menu:
And what we had:
The chili with what I'm assuming is their chicken meatballs in it was delicious!
Fully refreshed, we hit the road and didn't really stop again until it was time to find a place to sleep. And let me tell you, smart phones are awesome while you're traveling and not sure where you'll land. I was able to pull up the Hotels.com app as well as Google Local (used to be Places) and figure out that the hotels in Port St. Lucie were largely more expensive than the ones in neighboring Fort Pierce. As in, I was able to book a nice, clean, relatively empty Holiday Inn Express for about $45. The one in Port St. Lucie was $109. And I did it like an hour before we checked in to get that price.
We had been looking at all these places to go for dinner, but we were having trouble finding places that were open and close to where we stayed (probably because everything was in Port St. Lucie and that's probably why the hotels are a little more expensive) and our energy for such things was waning quickly. We wound up going to a Steak 'n' Shake right next to the hotel. Then Chris had the bright idea to go for a run on the treadmill in the hotel's exercise room which smelled like tires and he dragged me down there with him. Neither of us have run on a treadmill before. It took some getting used to and then when we got off of them, we were both really dizzy and disoriented like when you get off the moving sidewalk at Space Mountain. I slowed down for longer and to a slower speed than Chris did because I was expecting some of that. But he was bad off for a bit. We then showered and fell into bed and set the alarm.
Monday morning, we awoke, found a Nissan dealership to get our oil changed (because we just missed the one up here closing on Saturday before we left town and Chris basically got the service plan for free when he bought the truck). Then Chris was trying to convince me to go into Little Havana in Miami and quickly learn a Spanish phrase that according to a Yelp user would get an authentic Cuban pork sandwich. I had more than a little trepidation about going into a place where no employees spoke English and trusting a random Yelp user to not pass on a phrase that might be telling these people, "I'm a huge dingleberry" or something instead of "I want a pork sandwhich". Also, it's Little Havana. And we had two bikes in the back of the truck which were only secured by a ratchet strap. And one of the bikes was borrowed and I'm not about to let a borrowed bike get stolen. Not only that, we weren't even ready to eat by then. So we headed on, cheering ourselves up with the fact that we could catch something in Key Largo or something, since we likely wouldn't make our way back up to the Upper Keys until we were headed out of town.
We wound up passing right by Alabama Jacks, which we just saw the other night featured on some show about the manliest restaurants in America. Chris is lamenting that we didn't stop there now. It was in the running for lunch at one point, but we decided instead to plug on to Marathon, which is about the halfway point from the mainland to Key West. We had a list of about five restaurants we really wanted to try while we were down there and one of them was in Marathon. It's a little dive of a restaurant, motel, fish market and I don't even know what else called Fish Tales Seafood Market and it's run by the cutest little Bavarian woman and it is delicious! The German beer was fresh and refreshing and delicious (Spaten Oktoberfest on tap, we were both amazed at how fresh it was, still had that Grapico flavor from fresh Munich malt). And we both got one of their specialties, the Bavarian fish sandwich, which has nothing to do with Bavaria, really. It was grilled mahi mahi smothered in sauteed onions and mushrooms, topped with melted Swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato and house made tartar sauce served on a pretzel roll. But a picture speaks a thousand words, excpet this one: messy. seriously, nearly impossible to eat without a fork, but oh so freakin' good!
Many times we laughed at ourselves for how much focus we put on food, especially while we're traveling. I mean, I spent days on Urban Spoon before we even left reading reviews and comparing them to Yelp reviews and stuff trying to search out the absolute best places. Then in the car, we'd spend half the driving time looking at the Urban Spoon and Yelp apps to find stuff on the way down. It was time well spent, because overall, I'd say about 50% of our meals were amazing and the rest were at least good or okay. Food is important to us. It seems stupid, I know. But, really, life is too short to eat shitty food. It just makes it a little harder to travel because we kind of hate most all fast food and that's what there is to grab on the road a lot of times. We've been known to pack our own sandwich stuff before and I'll make lunch in the backseat while Chris fills up the tank at a gas station or something. It's how we did our entire fifteen days on the road out west in 2005. We had a huge container of homemade salsa and another huge container of pasta salad and yet a third of chicken salad that we put in tortillas for wraps so they'd travel well. We did the same thing on the way down to Disney. I made turkey wraps in the bed of the truck at a gas station on the way down and we took a bunch of trail mixes and granola bars and stuff to snack on.
And that's the story of why half of our vacation pictures are of food. Because that's as much a part of visiting a new place for us as seeing the flora and fauna and lay of the land. Food is culture, really, if you want to get down to it. You can learn a lot about a place from their food and their music. Jimmy Buffet, notwithstanding.
After that, we set our sites on our final destination, our little tropical bungalow which we were to call home for the rest of the week. Again, pictures speak more words:
That's a huge gumbo limbo tree over the jacuzzi draped with philodendron vines. The owner has landscaped with all these tropicals that you find in the houseplant sections of garden centers. In fact, I used to grow many of them in the little potted jungle I kept behind the couch in the den. And there were anoles (lizards) everywhere. Literally, everywhere I looked there was a little lizard hopping around through the leaves. The table and benches were handcarved Balinese pieces made from mahogany.
Also, there's a reason you won't find any pictures of the interior of the place. For one, I think I'd need a fisheye lens just to get a shot of it. For two, it's just nothing to write home about. It was cute and cozy and welcoming and clean, but it was smaller than our first one bedroom apartment together. But we didn't feel cramped, except in the kitchen and bathroom for the most part. And the bed was super comfy, there wasn't a single night that I didn't sleep wonderfully, even with mild sunburn. And we didn't spend a whole lot of time inside anyway. If it had rained all week, though, this place would have sucked and we probably would have argued a lot. But we didn't get a drop until the day we left, so hurray for good weather luck!
After we unloaded and Chris got the tires back on the bikes, we changed clothes and rode around a bit. I had a little bit of anxiety about getting on a bike for the first time in, oh, seventeen years or so. Seriously, I think I've only ridden a bicycle once since I got my driver's license when I turned 16. It turns out that riding a bike is just like riding a bike. It took me about 30 seconds to get the feel for it again. But my butt did not get used to it so easily. For the first night, I was fine, but Tuesday and Wednesday were extremely uncomfortable. After that, I felt better and by Friday, I was totally fine. But the two pelvic bones that yoga instructors like to call "sit bones" when you're leaning back in boat pose just felt bruised. I'm sure the seat of the borrowed bike I had wasn't the greatest in the world, but it wasn't that bad. But I'm still so, so glad we had the bikes. Truly that is the best way to get around the island. I can imagine parking is a nightmare and in a lot of places you have to pay to park and there are bike and moped rentals everywhere. It's definitely the thing to do. And most people are pretty respectful of cyclists. But a couple of times I got a taste of why cyclists often hate motorists so much.
We rode southwest, down around the Naval Air Station near Fort Zachary Taylor State Park. We rode past these bunkers that reminded me of the tombs in Rohan and even had little white flowers growing on them that I didn't really see anywhere else. "Simbelmyne. Ever has it grown on the tombs of my forebearers..."
That was right around the corner from the big Southernmost Point of the Continental United States marker and also, essentially, in the Key West ghetto where what looks like old Naval housing has become low income housing. There was an obscenely long line of people wanting their pictures taken at the Southernmost Point. We probably photobombed a few of them as we rode up to the pier behind it and kept going on our merry way. Chris and I debated the validity of whether or not they could even claim that as a thing. His point was that the Keys are outlying islands so they shouldn't count as part of the Continental United States. My point is that it's not like they're Hawaii or something and they're part of a state which is in the Continental United States, so they should be considered as such. I think at one point, I devolved into, "just let them have their moment, okay?!" It was a frequent discussion because everything was named Southernmost whatever, especially in that little corner of the island.
While riding through various little areas just exploring and taking things in, as you really only can on a bike, I couldn't help but become a little enamored with the place. I mean all the non-touristy parts anyway. The houses and such. It's like if you took East Nashville, aged it about a hundred years and stuck it in tropical flora then blasted every surface with salt spray, you'd almost be there. But there's some intangible charm going on here. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's just in the way the paint peels from the wood or the way everything seems to be draped in vines and how amazingly gorgeous tropical blooms spring out of the most unlikely places. The juxtaposition of the beautiful blooms of paradise with crumbling brick sidewalks and houses with shutters falling off. But it's still got an overwhelmingly Southern feel. Very welcoming and hospitable and not the least bit pretentious. In fact, just the opposite. Most of the greatest places we went seemed to be held together by shear force of will of their owners more so than nails or screws. Mere shacks and dive bars and disheveled little places. And I felt very at home there, almost instantly comfortable, even in the stifling heat and humidity. The very breeze was so thick, it felt as though it embraced you. It reminded me of how New Orleans feels to me but without the menace. Like New Orleans with the innocence of a child. A child with a history of piracy. Or wrecking. Right, "wrecking".
After that we made our way to Duval Street, which is, as Chris put it, "like Bourbon Street if it were run by Ned Flanders." Seriously, there's even a Fat Tuesday. But it doesn't smell as bad as Bourbon Street. You could also compare it to Nashville's 2nd & Broadway. Or Memphis' Beale Street. It's the same sort of deal, but with that old Florida feel. It's kind of the antithesis of what I described in the last paragraph and we tried to limit our time there as much as possible during the rest of the week. We rode up most of the length of Duval until we found an Irish pub. I know, we're in the subtropics and we walk into an Irish pub. Sounds like the start of a bad joke (a German/French/Jew and a German/Irish/Scott walk into an Irish pub in the subtropics...) But we walk in, order a Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA and the guy playing guitar is heckling some dude in front of the stage calling him Frodo Baggins and making him take Jagermeister shots with him because, "we have to get Frodo back to Middle Earth" or something. I don't even know. We definitely walked into the end of the joke, so it didn't make much sense. I just thought it was hilarious that of all the places we walked into, there was some dude making Lord of the Rings jokes and I happened to be wearing my Baggins' Pawn Shop shirt. It amused me how many middle-aged people were drunk at 5pm. Like every time you're on Duval, you could spot them and you'd just know they'd be passed out in their golf shirts and khakis and sandals with socks by nine.
He finished playing and heckling and we finished our pints and then walked down the street to another bar, because that's kind of all there is to do on Duval unless you're interested in unfunny, moderately obscene t-shirts or really bad, not-Cuban cigars (we fell for that one on the last night). This time, we opted for mojitos, because they were 2 for $12 and this place had like 48 different flavors of them (though, overwhelmed by options, we ordered the classic). The mojitos were watered down and not so great. Everyone down there puts the mint in the cup, I didn't see a single muddler. Heresy! But there was a stalk of sugarcane sticking out of it that was delicious. And now I want to grow sugar cane and get a lime tree because we already grow peppermint. And mojitos will be the official drink of the tiny nation that is my backyard. I call it Melasia.
After that, we started walking back to our bikes, but I spotted a sign that said "craft beer" and I automatically started walking in the direction of the arrow on the sign. What a little gem we found! It's called Krawl Off Duval and it reminds me a bit of the Tavern Under the Square that used to be in Huntsville... except less dank. I guess I just mean in the sense that you feel like people are walking on your head, because they absolutely are. Low ceilings in a small, cavernous, basement feeling room with the loud creaking of steps on the floor above you. They had about 12 taps, all good stuff, but they seem to only get 5 gallon kegs, so they change constantly. As it was, he poured me short on a Deviant Dale's because I got the last of it. As an added bonus, the owner of the place was there, as well as all six of her employees. It's that kind of place, where even when you're not on shift, you come hang out. She was pouring them shots of Jameson. And they had a mix of the most awesome 90s grunge playing. I think they had at least three of Tool's best albums in the disk changer plus some Jane's Addiction from when Perry Farrell was still addicted. No junk, no soul. Somehow, after two beers each there, we walked out way too drunk and with like a $30 tab. We have no idea how that happened. But those are the breaks sometimes. And other times, "the breaks" refer to waves.
So we stumbled across the street to a pizza joint to get a slice before attempting to ride bicycles while intoxicated and trying to find our way back to our house in the dark in a town we were only vaguely acquainted with thus far. That was an adventure, let me tell you. I stopped following Chris after the third wrong turn when he took us into a trailer park with a dead end. I found a shorter way out of the trailer park and stopped in front of it to pull out my phone and look at a map. About that time, he came up behind me and promptly ran into a fire hydrant. Don't ride bicycles while drunk, m'kay?
We made it back to our home away from home, but not before I rode the streets trying to solicit people to join our "DRUNKEN BICYCLE TOURS $5!" at the top of my lungs with Chris following me laughing and telling me to shut up without much conviction. Good times. We probably pissed off the neighbor in the other half of our little duplex that night (that's what the house was, a 1 bedroom, 1 bath half of a duplex) because we were not the least bit quiet and we spent like 3 hours in the hot tub that night. But to be fair, he listened to his television so loud, it's likely we didn't disturb him in the least.
And I think that's a good place to cut it for now. In the next installment: "HOLY FUCK THAT'S A BARRACUDA!" or adventures while snorkeling; sea legs; more food; the establishment of my mantra "I'm on vacation, damn it!"; a couple of sunsets; and a touch more responsibility. Just a touch.