Hi there, kids. I hope you had great weekends and as good a Monday as possible. Before I get going on our awesome anniversary trip, I'll give you a super quick rundown of last week.
Monday as usual was about regrouping from the weekend and catching up on grocery shopping, the gym and laundry. Yeah, exciting.
Tuesday (and usually Thursdays too) is my long day(s) at the gym. I start classes at 7 a.m. then leave at 10 a.m. I also got in a bit of swimming and picked out a new yoga mat (remember some dirty bitch stole mine from the locker room --- boo. Hope karma smacks her around).
Wednesday I hit up the gym and ventured down to the Shops at Sunset (Coral Gables) to check out some shoes/clothes. It's like a block from the U so it's all college-y ... Forever 21, Hollister, Love and Culture. I got some shoes (black boots) that I later determined were WAY too young for me.
Thursday I started feeling a bit puny so skipped the workout. But I did clean, pack and returned the aforementioned black boots. The place only lets you exchange (all the stores had this policy, guess they have a problem with youngsters wearing clothes out and taking them back?). SO I got two more age-appropriate pairs in exchange for the one ; )
Friday was the day we were heading down to the Keys. I got up early (feeling better) and squeezed in a quick three mile run while Josh slept-in. So glad I went because I got this amazing shot of the sunrise over Brickell Key (not to be confused with the actual Keys, the ones we were traveling through/to).
One of my favorite pics I've taken here
I also took this one of our hood from Brickell Key, which is directly across the water from us. I've never seen our building from this direction. Ours is the one with the blue and white diagonal stripe.
We got into town 2 p.m. but drove around for a while trying to find our cottage. The island is TEENY so all of these little houses are basically stacked on-top of each other in little alleyways. After nearly an hour of driving around in circles, narrowly avoiding drunken pedestrians, we finally managed to pin-down our place, which was hiding at the back of an alley. That was around 3 p.m., which was check-in time and actually worked out really well.
The place is so cute - all brightly colored albeit tiny (750 square feet?) - with lots of tropical plants surrounding the pool. It's isolated with a key code and wall (important to keep out all the drunks).
Once we got the pups settled, we went out to explore. We were only a block from Duvel St., which is THE place to be. It's like a miniature Bourbon St. It's not very long but what it lacks in distance it make up for in ... um, lasciviousness. It's got 80 bars (all of which were pretty much full the entire time we were there), lots of restaurants ... and of course, your standard body painting establishments.
But before we got into Duvel ... we walked through the Goombay Street Festival in the Bahama Village. Part of the Fantasy Fest events, vendors line the street to sell everything from sausages on sticks to voodoo dolls.
Of course, people were already pretty wasted face. We saw one extremely inebriated fellow having a conversation with a cop, which went like this:
Cop: Hey sir, you need to move your bike (it was in the middle of the road blocking a car).
Drunk guy: (Slurring real bad) Hey ... hey how you doin?
Cop: Laughs
Cop: Come on, man. You wanna go to jail or you wanna go home?
Drunk guy: (Thinking) Oh I wanna go home.
This was at 4 p.m.
So we decided it was time to have "a rinse" ourselves. We stopped in at Blue Heaven for a drink. We opted for the Key West (amber ale). We've tried it before but having it there made it cooler.
We also went to catch the Sunset Festival in Mallery Square. I thought it was going to have a tribal feel (just judging by the name) but no. It was more like a freak show. All of these "performers" (Read: White drug addicts looking for money) were eating fire and escaping from straight jackets. Of course, we stayed to watch ... convinced someone was going to have a mishap. Sadly, they did not.
After exploring, we headed back to take the puppers and to get ready for the evening. We had dinner (a disappointing veggie burger for me) and ended the evening at Capt. Tony's where they built the bar around the old hanging tree (I read about that before we left ... creepy!)
We headed home pretty late but found a way to squeeze in swim before bed.
The next day, the first thing I had to do was give a shout out to Ineke via Facebook. It was our (hers and mine) anniversary. We met them a year ago - Oct. 19 - in the Dominican. It's insane, it seems so much longer. But since then, we've been to four countries together (it will be five next month). Ineke and I have also exchanged - wait for it - more than 17,500 FB messages since we met. Then, of course, there are Skype sessions and emails.
Other than Josh, she's the only person I talk to every single day. So it was important to me to mark the occasion. Just love her and I can't wait until they come to spend Thanksgiving with us next month.
But back to the weekend. So we got up, tended to the dogs and headed out to breakfast. We ate at the Southernmost Beach Café (the food and service was OUTSTANDING). As that title suggests, it was on the Southernmost point of the island and on a beach frequented by one of my favorite playwrights, Tennessee Williams.
Such a pretty area.
After a delicious breakfast (and mimosa for me), we bought tickets for a hop-on-hop-off trolley tour. We hopped off at the only site I HAD to see - Ernest Hemingway's house.
Josh wasn't too keen on paying $13 per person to go inside but I really wanted to ... I wanted to see where this literary giant wrote nearly 20 novels (hoping some of that talented juju would rub off on me). Oh and the cats. He had lots of polydactyl (meaning many digits) cats when he lived there in the 1930s. All of the cats there today are directly descended from his.
Here's your dose of daily trivia: Regular kitties have five toes on each of their front paws and four on their back feet, for a total of 18 toes. Polydactyl cats typically have an extra toe on each of their front mittens, giving them six on the front paws and 20 overall.
That's why, today, they are known as Hemingway cats, because of all the cats Polydactyl cats he had at his home in Key West. This little guy was too sweet.
From there, we hopped back on the tour bus and rode around the island. Here's some of the things we saw:
The official and oft-stolen mile 0 sign.
The end of the road (literally) in the USA
The official Southernmost point of the island ... 90 miles to Cuba
we were closer to Cuba than to the continental US
The Bull, the Whistle and the Garden of Eden rooftop bar
(the Garden of Eden is a clothing optional bar
... and yes we went ...
and NO we weren't naked)
Jimmy Buffett's "top secret," indiscreet recording studio that everyone knows about
Lots of gay pride
Jimmy Buffet's original Margaritaville
After the tour, we headed home to take care of the dogs and get ready to watch Auburn play Texas A and M. Yep, that's what you get for getting married during football season. It's going to figure into your anniversary plans for the rest of your life. But that's OK. I love football, especially when it turns out as well as it did for us on Saturday.
We went to a place called Jack Flats, a great sports bar with yummy food and good service.
It was a great first half but we wanted to go chill with the kids for a bit so we headed home. AND AUBURN WON. Knocking off number 7. Such an awesome day.
We decided that was the time to pop the champagne (actually Cava, but you know)
After that, we took our game day high out to the street. We shopped at a popular store called Kermit's, where everything is Key Lime flavored, and went to dinner at the Conch Republic.
The food was great ... the service not so much. The guy basically threw the bill at us when we asked for it. AND he charged us $0.50 for Josh's cocktail sauce ... yet he got tartar for free? So J called him out on it. He blamed management, of course, but he took it off tab. Seriously. It wasn't about the $0.50 ... it was about it being so f-ing ridiculous. Yelp will hear of this.
We left there and hit up one of the most famous bars in Key West - Sloppy Joe's. Hemingway drank there (and, boy howdy, do they like to exploit it - his pictures are everywhere). Of course, Hemingway probably drank at every bar that was standing in the '30s (and a good many of them are still standing).
They had an awesome band and most people were in costume. Interesting costumes, not to mention chicks wearing nothing up top but body paint.
And, though the theme of Fantasy Fest was Heroes and Villains, anything (and everything) went.
I had to get a photo with this guy. It's a creative take on a swat team, eh? Oh and note his lace boxer briefs. Nice.
When we left Sloppy Joe's, we ran into these guys. This is the costume we should have chosen (we had ours - characters from Pulp Fiction - but decided it was too hot for it) ... it's Daenerys and Drogo. Oh and some chick who did a topless take on the girl from Black Swan. I was seriously so excited to get a pic with Danny and Drogo that I didn't notice she was in it. I didn't even realize that those were her boobs until I posted it on Facebook (and promptly took it down) after Sarah pointed it out. I guess you become desensitized after seeing it all day.
On our way home, we decided that we simply couldn't live with ourselves unless we saw the Garden of Eden. I mean, really. When will we have another opportunity for this? How often do you get to go to a place where inhibitions and clothing are checked at the door?
But the real reason I wanted to check it -- Josh didn't think anyone would actually be naked.
He was wrong. Guys. Girls. Young. Old. Hot. Not.
All nakey, nakey, nakey.
There were a lot of curious onlookers like us too. But we had a blast there. We danced, drank and withheld judgment. The only thing you really had to do was mind where your hands (and other parts) were. You didn't want to brush up against anything surprising.
There are a few things that I didn't get about it (other than WHY IN THE WORLD you'd want to be completely naked in front of a bar full of strangers). I don't know how they get around the health code violations. I also don't know how they get naked, like I never saw a clothing check but I'm assuming there has to be one. So how do you get in before you strip down? No idea.
Clearly, that was all the excitement we could handle so we headed home. It was a unique experience to say the least.
Sunday (our actual anniversary) we had to be out by 11 a.m. (sucked) and headed home, stopping to grab a bite on the way out. It was another beautiful ride.
But we were all beat.
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