Here are the Photos you’ve been waiting for!

October and November have come and gone, and now that Halloween, the Haunted Fort, the Vampire’s Ball, Fantasy Fest and Thanksgiving are finally behind us, things have settled down to the point that I can go through the mass of photos from this years Fantasy Fest and delete the blurry shots, the foot shots, the duplicate shots, and the just plain nasty ones. For the most part I didn’t get rid of anything you wouldn’t want to see, well.. let me rephrase that.. well.. let’s just drop that line of thought altogether.

Here are the photos for better or for worse. Once again I’ve broken them up into four separate sections; Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and the infamous Dante’s Pool Party shots. As always, if you are offended by tits and such, DON’T LOOK. You might burn your eyes out.

I discovered just recently that Picasa Web Albums pretty heavily censored the shots from the Dante’s party, essentially deleting anything that most of you perverts would care to look at, so I think what I will do is post them up on Flikr where I can assign them an “Adult Content” tag. Google has no such feature, which is kind of a head scratcher to me, but what do I know. Anyways, stay tuned for that link to update soon.

Fewer House-guests This Year

And thank god for that. We only had Josh and Trevor this year, so things were relatively quiet around the apartment. The best part is we could actually get to the damned bathroom in some timely fashion. You haven’t lived until you share your apartment with 8 hungover dudes all vying for some face time with the porcelain phone.

Thursday Josh, Trev and I wandered on down to Dante’s for the Stripper Pole party. I must be getting old, because the crowd there really got on my nerves. It was so freakin crowded, you couldn’t get to the bar, you couldn’t get to the pool.. meh. I hung out for about 30 minutes or an hour sipping a dark and stormy while Josh and Trevor vied for a decent spot in the pool. I think I left before the actual stripper pole part started.. I just wasn’t feeling it, I walked back to the Porch of Destiny and chilled out with some Bob Marley on the Sirius and some of my own rum, which was considerably cheaper and less aggravating! Josh and Trevor got a shit-ton of really, really um.. interesting photos, which is obvious by how quickly Google took that shit down. The photos from last year’s pool party are still up if that gives you any idea.

After a while, Christina got home from work, my stunt photographers returned from their hazardous duty at Dante’s and we all wandered down to Duval to see what was up there. The crowds this year were twice the size that they were last year, it was amazing how many people were out and about. We walked up and down a time or two snapping photos and sipping rum drinks, eventually winding up back on the porch around midnight I think. I think Josh and Trev went back out after Christina and I went to bed.. crazy kids.

Friday is a fun day at Fantasy Fest, especially when you apartment is on the parade route for the “locals” parade that runs all through old town. In many ways, this parade is more fun for me than the big parade on Saturday. Maybe because it’s more intimate, there aren’t any barricades, and anyone can join in and walk. The costumes are fabulous, and it seems everyone is dragging along a cooler full of drinks with their group. Some even have rolling bars that pull up and hand out jello-shots or shooters.. We spent the morning fixing up a bunch of munchies and chilling out on the porch. The parade finally started, and it just went ON and ON and ON.. the cops finally tried to bust it up after a few hours because no traffic could move anywhere.. haha. It was spectacular. As a bonus, after the roads had cleared out a bit, we had a celebrity sighting as Kid Rock walked past the Porch of Destiny with a gaggle of hookers in tow. Trevor being the aspiring paparazzo that he is, was able to snap a photo. Way to go Trev!

Saturday finally came and instead of walking in the parade this year, we were able to visit the apartment of a friend of a friend who lives on Duval. It was a second floor affair with windows overlooking the parade route! Sweet! The only drawback was an ill-placed palm tree partially blocking one of the windows.. damn. Being the ever-fearless photographer, Trevor went down to the street and bellied up to the barricade to shoot some photos of the parade, while we sat in the comfort of the AC and drank. I say “some” photos.. but that’s kind of a misnomer. I think he shot like 600 plus of the parade.. good grief!

Watching the parade from up high is a pretty trippy experience, I can imagine it could only be made more awesome by an unobstructed view and an actual balcony to sit or stand on. It was awesome nonetheless though, and the floats were amazing. I think I may have had more fun last year when I walked in the parade, so next year I plan to build a float and put our whole crew in the parade.. we’ll see how that goes!

After the parade we all went down to Schooner Wharf and continued the festivities well into the night. I woke up sunday with a huge headache and went to WORK. GAH! Back to freakin’ reality.

Well, that’s the reader’s digest condensed and family-friendly version of Fantasy Fest at chez mike this year, nothing terribly insane happened, no one threw up or wound up in jail, so maybe we are all getting a little wiser. Oh wait.. Alex wasn’t there.. that explains everything.. haha. Anyways.. enjoy the photos, and next year come see it in person!

Cheers!
Mike

How come I’ve never seen this before!

I love, love, love this guys blog. It’s what any good leave-yer-damn-job-and-move-to-the-damn-tropics blog should be like. Very much worth a read, heck.. I may even buy his book!

Anyway, reading that blog makes me want to begin paying more attention to ConchTales again. I know I keep saying that, but it will happen.. and soon. I’ve just been supra-busy lately with getting Bone Island Graphics up and running. As soon as my secret cloning device is fully operational, you will begin seeing more activity here.

So ’till I post again.. read this.

Cheers!

Mike

So I guess I’m not quite ready to pull the plug on this blog yet. I’ve been away from it for about 6 months, and I find that I miss it. There’s a certain solace in writing out your thoughts.. a chance to sort it all out on paper. Well, not paper exactly, but you get the idea.

I’ve been working night and day trying to maintain my day job while building up Bone Island Graphics (BIG) in the evenings and weekends, so I haven’t had much time for doing anything fun at all. Life has become one big blur of running from one project to another.

I remember when we moved to Key West hearing that the locals did nothing but work and had no time to enjoy the finer aspects of living here. That’s crazy, I thought.. how could you NOT enjoy all the things Key West has to offer? Well, it appears that I’ve fallen into that routine myself, and I can say with all honesty that it’s time for a break. Something has to give.

I think I’ll begin with a heavy dose of Fantasy Fest!

It’s hard to believe it’s time for all of this again. The Vampire’s Ball is this Saturday, and I’ve yet to really figure out how I’m decorating for that. I guess it’ll be seat-of-the-pants again, it seemed to work last year, so cross your fingers.

Also starting up this weekend is the Haunting of Fort Taylor. I didn’t have any time whatsoever this year to donate to that event, but from what I hear they are ramping up nicely for the first night Tomorrow Evening. I’m sure it will be fantastic as usual.

Next Wednesday or Thursday, we’ve got a few folks coming into town for the Fantasy Fest madness. It’s a smaller crew this year, which is fine by me considering last year we were crammed into the apartment like sardines. Josh, Alex, Trev, and one newbie friend of Josh’s will descend on the Porch of Destiny for 4 days and nights of excess. I’m really looking forward to just having a good time and not worrying about WORK for a few days.

I will of course post some photos so all of you who can’t be here to enjoy it can see what you’re missing (or not missing).

Speaking of photos, a few months ago I cleaned out all of my myriad google / picasa accounts. I don’t know how I managed to get so many of them, but there were too many for me to keep track of, so I consolidated them. When I did that all the links and galleries on this site went kablooey. I didn’t worry about it much at the time, because I was determined to shut this site down. Apparently that isn’t gonna happen though, so I went through and fixed all the links. Who loves ya?

Mike

I have, over the last few months toyed with the idea of taking this site down because it seems I just don’t have the time to sit down and write in it any more, and it pains me to leave it sitting here unloved. This blog began it’s life as a way for me to vent and work through the slurry of emotions I was wading through after being laid off from what I like to call corporate slavery.

I wrote under the deluded intention of keeping my family and friends abreast of my whereabouts mentally and whatnot, but really it was (and I didn’t realize this at the time) more for my own sanity. I was trying to make sense of the world after getting kicked out of my middle-american, consumerist comfort zone.

Back then it was just called “Mike needs a life” because the only thing I really did know was that I woke up one day and found myself jobless, and that I had put so much energy into my job over the years that there wasn’t much else to my life but my job. I suppose that’s a typical story. I was so busy working I didn’t have time for the things I really wanted to do.. heck, I didn’t even know there was something else that I wanted to do.

When I moved to Key West I was still jobless (and remained so for 9 months) so I changed the name of the blog to Conch Tales and decided to write about my adventures in learning what it’s like to live here. That was great fun for quite a while, and it gave me a diversion from the boredom of unemployment. I envisioned an endless amount of things to babble on about. Eventually after becoming employed and settling into a routine, life picked up much as it always does when you have to go to work every day… and I felt myself slipping back into the old comfortable routine of just working. I stopped writing in my blog, I spent more time watching TV in the evenings because after coming home from working for the MAN, my brain was shut down, I spent less time working on my sculptures even though I had the money to buy materials finally.

It’s a funny thing. But it wasn’t long before I found myself pretty unhappy with life again. How could I be living in Key West and NOT be happy! I was living in paradise after all, right? I eventually came to the realization that working for someone else just was not the answer. I have too many of my own dreams and aspirations to be toiling away building someone else’s empire for a measly 15 bucks an hour and no benefits. I’ve always shunned the idea of being an entrepreneur, I just didn’t want to deal with the stresses of being self-employed. I guess maybe it’s because I’m getting up there in years, but these days I pretty much feel like there really isn’t any other avenue for me.

So you feel like you don’t have any free time?

What do you do? Start your own business? Yep. Brilliant. That’s what I did. I called it Bone Island Graphics. I partnered up with a co-worker who has supreme framing and gallery experience, we bought a huge printer, rented a shop, and now we’re in the graphic design, fine art printing and framing business. For the time being, we both still work our full-time jobs at the gallery so at least we didn’t take the hairy jump off the cliff into the great unknown. At the time of this posting, we’ve had our doors open for a month, and we have yet to make a penny for our troubles, but damn it feels good to go to work in my own shop on my ‘weekends’.

The walls are still bare, and it’s most definitely a work-in-progress, but we are functional. Now all we need is a little bit of business so I can stop paying rent out of pocket. When that happens, I will dance a little jig and probably drink a big bottle of rum… then sober up and pray for a little more business so maybe I can some day stop working for the MAN entirely.

Along with the Bone Island Graphics venture, I’m working hurriedly to finish a couple more sculpture pieces for a Steampunk art show in Connecticut that opens in October… and trying to write and illustrate a graphic novel… oh, and trying to spend as much time on the beach with Christina as I can.

So anyway

That’s my excuse. And I’m sticking with it. If you wake up one morning and suddenly Conch Tales is gone, at least you’ll know what happened

M

I think that the answer to that question is pretty obvious; get drunk and pass out half-naked in the gutter with some beads in your mouth, but I still get asked this question pretty frequently. So after a couple long drawn-out return emails back to people with all my recommendations, I started just copying and pasting it. Man, what a pain this is! I thought to myself. Then it hit me.. why not just post it here? I mean, I’m a relatively smart guy, why not make it easy on myself.. and you. So now you can just come here, read this post, and be an instant Key West Vacation Aficionado. Birds will sing, angels will sing, drag queens will.. well.. sing.. you get the picture. Mass hysteria and all that good shit.

Of course, I’m certain that there are a great many things I’ll leave out of this list simply because I don’t know about ‘em, or have no interest in ‘em.. like fishing.. if you want fishing charter advice you came to the wrong place. I don’t know jack-squat about fishing, or where to go to get a good captain. Heck, I don’t even like to eat fish.

So the end-all, be-all guide to your Key West Vacation, this is probably not, but eating, drinking, sight-seeing, and merry-making.. I’m your man. Or I could be for the right price.

So welcome to the first post in a series of what I think you should be doing with your drunk ass when you’re in Key West. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it helps you have a better vacation!

What to do with your car when you get here.

Lots of people actually drive down. I guess you have to do it a few times; it can be pretty interesting if you’ve never done it before. Personally, I’m done with that freakin’ drive.. it’s worth every bit of the pittance it costs to fly from Orlando on Airtran to not have to make that 7+ hour drive ever again. Alternately, you can take the Key West Express from Fort Myers for like 85 bucks each way. Driving really only makes sense if you have a carload of people; if you’re coming by yourself, it’s cheaper to fly.

But if you do have your car with you, and your hotel doesn’t have a parking lot (Many of the smaller ones don’t), you can either park it at one of the city lots or go native and park it on the streets in Old Town. All of the on-street parking north of Simonton is un-metered. The only caveat is that every other space is labeled “Residential”, and unless you have a Monroe county tag, you don’t want to park in one of those spaces. You will get a ticket. Any space not labeled is fine to park in.

The meters on the streets in old town south of Simonton are like 25 cents per 10 minutes, definitely NOT cheap, and the meter maids in this city have a sixth sense when it comes to meters running out.. don’t take a chance at the meters unless you have a pocket full of quarters you don’t want, and a lot of luck on your side. You don’t want to have a run-in with one of the meter-maids, they are VERY unfriendly folk – they are perhaps the only people in Key West who are not having a good time.

There’s a city park-n-ride garage near the ferry terminal on Grinnell, and this is where I usually tell people to park. It’s like 13 bucks a day, and it’s covered. Plus, you can park and then stop by Dante’s just next door for a cold one before settling in!

There’s also a surface lot downtown next to City Hall on the corner of Simonton and Angela, I think it’s a little more expensive, but it’s certainly closer to the Duval action. They have an automated kiosk there that spits out a ticket to put on your dash. I don’t know for sure if you can long-term park there or if it’s just a daily thing. I’ll check into that and update this post when I can.

Regardless of where you park, once you find a spot, leave your car there and get a bicycle. You do not want to be driving around Key West from place to place, it’s far easier to bike, or heck.. walk even! It’s a small city, and the more energy you expend, the more you can eat and drink while you’re here!

So you parked your car. Now rent a bicycle!

Don’t be a wank and rent a scooter, they’re annoying, and the only people who rent them are fat lazy people from new york and sexually-challenged frat boys looking to make as much nuisance of themselves as possible. Plus your chances of dying in an alcohol-related crash are greatly increased on a scooter. (No, I’m not advocating drinking and biking, but we’re all adults here) Seriously.. the island is like 2 miles wide.. if you can’t get there on a bike in under 10 minutes, it’s not worth going.

If you’re absolutely against any kind of physical exercise, rent a golf cart. At least they’re electric and don’t make any noise at 2 AM when I’m trying to sleep. Plus you can take your friends with you.

When we visited KW before moving here, we always rented bikes from The Moped Hospital on the corner of Truman and Simonton, simply because it was the closest place to where we stayed. There are lots of places to rent bikes and golf carts from, and I’m pretty sure they’re all about the same price, so pick one close to where you’re staying. Here are a few off the top of my head:

Island Bikes – Love these guys, they rent Electra Coasters, the perfect island bike, and they’re super nice
Pirate Scooter – They rent golf carts and scooters too
Eaton Bikes - They pick up and deliver bikes!
Re-Cycle – They’re up in New Town if you’re too cheap to stay in Old Town

One more word about biking. And I find myself loathe to even attempt to act grown-up enough to add this, but follow the damn normal rules of traffic engagement and you’ll be fine. Start blowing through stop lights, and passing cars lined up at the lights, and you will get yourself into trouble. Key west is a VERY bike-friendly city, and the folks who live here are used to sharing the road with bikes, pedestrians, and scooters. Don’t be afraid, and don’t ride on the freakin’ sidewalk if you can help it. Gah.. my fingers feel dirty just from typing that paragraph.

Well, that pretty much sums up part one of Mike’s guide to a successful Key West Vacation.. You’re here, your car is stashed away, and you have your trusty two-wheeled steed to take you adventuring wherever your little heart may chose to go. Next we’ll talk a little about bars and food, so stay tuned!

Peace
M

We survived another New Years Eve in Key West!

We’d planned to have a pretty quiet New Years Eve this year, but my friend Alex came down for a couple days, and Christina had a few friends from O-Town show up in an RV.. so apparently the universe was having none of that plan! Well, what the hell… what’s one more weekend in a long list of crazy times since October started? We only had to make it through ONE MORE weekend of visitors.. then life could resume it’s normal island pace. How hard could that be?

Alex stayed at our place on the futon, but luckily Christina’s friends had the RV, so at least the destruction to the apartment this time was minimal.

New years eve day we spent sitting on the porch tourist-watching and sipping mimosas. Alex cooked Ropa Vieja.. one of my favorite things in the world to eat (he makes it better than anyone I know, myself included). Christina’s friends joined us for some porch-merriment and dinner in the late afternoon, followed by Moose and Danyle and their two friends around 10 P.M. Now we had ourselves a party!

We scarfed up most of the remaining Ropa, drank copious amounts of Smirnoff, Corona, Cook’s, and Dr. Mcgillicuddy’s, and headed out into the fray on Duval with our beer goggles and funny hats on. Last year we’d gone to Schooner Wharf to see the dropping of the wench, so this year I really wanted to see the drag queen in the big red shoe drop on Duval. Unfortunately fate had a different plan.

It was a madhouse.

Apparently, and I just learned this a day or so ago, New Years eve is the largest tourist draw to Key West.. who knew? I always thought it was Fantasy Fest. At any rate.. the streets were completely jammed up with people. Alex, myself, and one of Christina’s friends, Sean somehow got separated from the rest of the group, and due to a bit too much pushing, drunk-swaying, screaming crowd anxiety, we made a stumbling break for it down the alley next to the Heartbreak Hotel into my friend Eric’s old courtyard to find respite by the pool.

We were just catching our breath when we were shoo’d out by some unsociable chicks who I guess moved in after Eric left. (The nerve!) We attempted to explain our plight but they were having none of it. I’d have thought single chicks without a party to go to on new years eve would jump at a chance to party down with the svelte likes of myself and my posse, but apparently I’d been suffering under a delusion. We headed out the back gate to escape in the opposite direction of the pulsing throng of drunken madness on Duval.

I was first through the gate, so of course I was the group idiot who didn’t see the big step down right there at the transition between the yards. I went ass-over-teakettle into the lawn next door, but thankfully didn’t hurt anything but my pride and my drink.. which was this point was mostly all over my face and the surrounding grass.

By this time we’d missed the countdown and the shoe drop, and we were solidly into the new year. I guess I’ll have to try again next year to see the venerable drag queen drop!

We met up with our lost members at the Green Parrot, where the party was still in full swing. I’d just about run out of patience for the evening, so Christina and I headed home to let the younger folks chase the dragon without the encumbrance of old farts to slow them down.

Bed was very welcome…

And Then…

Saturday morning around 5:30 A.M. Christina and I woke to the sound of someone rustling around on our back porch. Luckily for Alex, he identified himself before I could load the AR-15 and blast him.. haha.

We let him in. He was wearing nothing but underwear and socks. My mind spun with visions of Alex racing down Duval in the middle of the night in nothing but his skivvies.. with pimps chasing him. I lay there in bed half awake, and all I could do was chuckle as he did the walk of shame past the bed into the living room. And while the reality of the situation isn’t quite as amusing as my imagination, it still makes for a good story; he’d gone out to the porch at some point in the wee hours after coming home to have a smoke and eat a bowl of Ropa (YES, in his underwear!), and locked himself out of the apartment. Unable to wake us up by knocking, he’d decided to enhance the natural beauty of Key West After Midnight, and sleep in one of the porch chairs.

Well at some point I guess it got cold enough that he decided sleeping in the chair on the porch in his underwear was bullshit, and he began trying to jimmy the doorknob with a spoon. It was just at this point that some of Key West’s boys in blue happened to be cruising by and noticed a dude in underwear and socks trying to break into an apartment with a spoon.. so of course they had to stop and ask just what the hell he thought he was doing.

Long story short, Alex was able to convince the cops that he was a guest at our house, and they decided not to arrest him. Wishing him a good night on the porch, they drove away laughing. This is about when he decided to make the treacherous journey to the back porch down the obstacle-strewn alley between my apartment and the building next door and disturb our restful slumber.

Wait.. it’s Morning Already??

We got up around 10:00 that morning, made some mimosas, and resumed our porch-sitting / tourist-watching adventure. There is literally no end to the amazingly strange people you see walking the streets on any given holiday in Key West. Christina buzzed about in the kitchen all day cooking a turkey and making cornbread, stuffing, and all the other yummy things you have to eat on New Years Day.

We spent the day on the porch hanging out and laughing about the nights adventures, and when the turkey was done, we were joined once again by Moose and Danyle and we stuffed ourselves fat, then spent the rest of the evening shooting the shit and watching funny-or-die videos on the big screen.

Good friends, good food, and good times. That’s the way to bring in a new year!

October was a very rough month for me. It usually is. Halloween is my favorite holiday (is it a holiday? If not it should be), and I always get myself involved in all sorts of crazy projects. Add Fantasy Fest and a house full of visitors to the top of all that Halloween crunchy goodness, and you have a recipe for some serious fatigue. I think I was about ready to fall over and die when November 1st finally came; I felt as if I’d run a marathon only to find out there was no beer tent and dancing girls at the end! There’s only one thing to do when you feel like that… go to the Virgin Islands and keep drinking!

This trip began as a plan for thanksgiving camping trip to St. John. Christina and I go camping a lot with our good friends Gary and Karen, and we thought it would be a blast to fly down to St. thomas and hop the ferry to St. John for thanksgiving instead of trekking all over central Florida doing the family visitation thing. So we made tentative plans back in probably May of this year. As it turned out, Gary and karen wound up not being able to go, so instead of blowing off the entire plan, we changed the dates to the beginning of November to save on airfare and went anyway!

The plan had been to spend a few days on Water Island where our friends Ray and Cheri have a home. (It’s nice having friends who live in awesome places) After a few days, we would hop to St. Thomas and either stay at one of the campgrounds or get a hotel and just float in the ocean for 4 more days. Well..

St Thomas, U.S.V.I.	Movie Night on Honeymoon Beach

Best Laid Plans

We wound up (through a fortuitous chain events that involved many caribs on the beach at Joe’s beach bar on Water Island) meeting a couple of friends of Ray and Cheri’s who just happen to run a sailboat charter… and they weren’t booked that week! Plan change!

Loren and Jo and their sailboat “Ragamuffin” would be our hosts for the next 3 nights.. could it get any better than that?

The four of us met Loren at the ferry dock on water island at 8:00 Am Tuesday. We hopped in his dinghy and he took us out to the boat. And what a beautiful boat! She’s a 62 foot Ketch, teak decks and wood cabins below decks. Here’s their web page, if you are ever in the V.I. and are thinking about chartering a boat, I can tell you that you cannot go wrong with Jo and Loren.. One caveat though.. this is not the kind of trip you take if you are a princess or a high maintenance whiner.. this is a real-life-on-a-sailboat kind of charter. City slickers need not apply.We left our shoes in the dinghy, petted the guard kitty Squeak, and boarded the Ragamuffin for our four-day sailing adventure!

And We’re Off!

We went to Jost VanDyke first to check in with the customs office there. We anchored in Great Harbor and Loren and Cheri and myself dinghied in with the passports. Apparently checking into customs in the BVI is always an adventure.. Loren told us it would cost us either 25 dollars or 125 dollars depending on who was working the counter. We were guests on his boat, but as they are a charter, we might have been charged the higher charter price.. luckily Loren worked his magic and we got off on the cheap.

This was my first time in the British Virgin Islands, and I have to say, it was much more undeveloped than I had envisioned. I loved it immediately. There was a dirt road running along the back side of the beach.. hammocks in all the trees, and a bunch of shacks serving as everything from homes to restaurants to shops. We hopped back in the dinghy and motored back out to the sailboat to get serious about things.

We decided to head over one bay to White Bay in the dinghy so we could visit the infamous Soggy Dollar Bar. Ray, Cheri, Christina, and I jumped in the dinghy with Loren and he ferried us over. We jumped out of the Dinghy into the perfectly blue water and swam a few feet to shore.. Loren headed back to the sailboat. We’d planned on just hoping a taxi back.

We planted ourselves in a couple lawn chairs and hammocks and commenced relaxation. Ray and Cheri picked up a game of backgammon, and Christina snoozed in the hammock while I wandered around and shot pictures. A few painkillers and a vodka-tonic later we walked down the beach a bit to scope out Ivan’s Stree-Free Bar. We had to climb over a rocky outcropping, and through a path that wound down around the rocky surf, but it was worth the trek. Ivan’s seemed to be very stress-free indeed.. in fact no one was at the bar. We had to go find someone to get us a couple drinks. Shortly after we got there a power boat full of tourists from New York showed up and all ordered drinks at the bar. By this time we were beginning to realize that our chances of finding a taxi and getting back to Great Harbor on time to meet Loren and Jo at Foxy’s for dinner were dwindling, so Ray worked some more of his magic on the captain of the boat chartering the New York tourists around, and we were able to hitch a ride with them back around the horn to the other bay.

We said our farewells to our new drunk friends and wandered up the dock to Foxy’s. I’ve heard about Foxy’s before, I think most people have.. if only from the Foxy’s Lager beer signs all over the place in Florida Bars. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I certainly wasn’t disappointed. It was everything a Caribbean beach bar complex should be. Foxy’s would fit right in in Key West, there are license, bras, business cards, dollar bills, and all manner of other detritus attached to the ceiling and walls.

After a few drinks at Foxy’s we wandered on down the main boulevard to seek out some dinner. We wound up at a really cool little open-air restaurant. We ordered a few more beers and placed our orders. And waited. One thing you lear pretty quickly in the islands is that they move at their own pace! And this held true at all the restaurants we ate at, they cook everything from scratch when you order it. And let me tell you.. the wait is worth the mouthwatering cuisine that finally arrives at your table!

I think we must have been there in an off week or something, as none of the places we visited had anywhere near the kind of crowds they seemed to be built to handle. But it was kind of nice, it felt like we had our own personal island and bars!

We dinghied back out to the sailboat, poured some more rum drinks (see a trend here?) and just hung out and talked and generally had a great first evening. We were all pleasantly buzzed and worn out when we rolled into our bunks and passed out.

Jost VanDyke, B.V.I.	Sandy Spit, B.V.I.

Ahhhh…

We got up early the next day and we were off and sailing before 10:00 to our next destination! I slept amazingly well, I hadn’t expected to sleep at all, but the gentle rocking of the boat certainly didn’t bother me like I was worried it might.

We hit Sandy Spit at the East end of Jost VanDyke for some snorkeling before heading to Cane Garden Bay, Tortola for the night. Sandy Spit is a little (and I mean little) sand island in the middle of the ocean.. we anchored there and swam ashore.. wandered around picking up shells and such, then we swam back out to the boat and headed to Cane garden Bay.

We Dinghied in for dinner and shopping, and had some more really fabulous food, those Caribbean folk really know how to cook, then it was back to the boat for more cocktails and then to bed.

In the morning we were off and running.. this day’s journey would take us all the way around Tortola and south to Norman Island, a long distance to go.. but luckily the wind was with us and we really got sideways for a while.. blasting across the waves full tilt!

We anchored in the Bight Bay and surveyed our surroundings. Norman Island really has NOTHING on it, and right there in the middle of the bay.. a floating barge that has a bar and a restaurant on it. No. Way. The water here was the clearest I’ve ever seen.. it was 35 feet deep where we anchored and it looked like a swimming pool.. I could see everything on the bottom clear as day.

We snorkeled, swam, had some beers, and then it was time to find some dinner..

The Willy T is apparently pretty famous, although apart from the similarity in name to Willie T’s here in Key West, I’d never heard of it. It’s really quite a trip of a place, and if you ever go to the BVI, don’t miss out on a trip here. People dive off the top floor into the crystal blue water to the cheers and whoops of the other folks at the bar. Women jump of topless to get a free t-shirt. AND, the food is fantastic… can I just stay here forever?

We ate dinner at the Willy T, had a bunch of drinks at the bar, then made our way back to the boat and had some more drinks before retiring to bed at about 11:00. The willy T was hopping until about 4:00 AM.. stereo blasting, people jumping in the water and whooping it up, and generally making merry. What a trip.

Norman Island B.V.I.	Joe’s beach bar on Water Island

Time to head home.. snif…

Friday morning it was time to get back to St. Thomas and get on a plane back to reality. Well.. as much reality as Key West offers. We pulled up the anchor and headed back.. I was really going to miss this life..

We made it back to Water Island sometime around noon, and then it was time to say goodbye to our new friends and gracious hosts, Loren and Jo, as well as say adios to Ray and Cheri.. we had such a great time, and I can’t thank them enough for showing us all the wonderful sights.. and especially to Loren for kicking my ass with the winches.. I haven’t worked out that hard in I can’t remember, I was sore for a week!

Loren and Joe Dinghied us to Tickles where we ordered a bushwhacker and called a cab to get to the airport. Somehow leaving this time wasn’t as hard as it had been the previous couple trips.. I think that because before, we were going back to Orlando and our crap corporate jobs, but this time.. it we were Key West bound! Home sweet home.

Well that’s the rundown, I left a lot out, but I think I was getting a bit long-winded there. It was all so awesome. I took over 700 photos, and I tried desperately to weed them down to a manageable size to put them all in this post, but I gave up at 100.. so if you would like to peruse them, they are on my google site here.

All I can say is I’m more determined than ever to disappear into the Caribbean.

Cheers!
Mike

It’s A Tough Job,But Someone Has to Look At All Those BOOBS..

I mean really.. if it wasn’t going to be me, who would have stood up and taken the reins to appreciate a week of the saggiest, scariest naked people from all over the world, all collected in one place and covered in paint, stale beer, and beads? I sacrificed myself on the altar of freedom of expression and the fundamental concept of the right to bear boobies so that I could bring you a few blurry, rum-soaked photos of this seminal event.

Last year if you recall, I missed the last couple nights of Fantasy Fest because I had to be in Orlando for a wedding that weekend. Well I decided nothing was gonna keep me from it this year. In fact, I even got in the parade so I could get the view from the other side of the fences.

We had quite a house full of guests on top of everything else.

Thursday My friends Alex and his brother Omar came in on the ferry from Fort Myers. I met them at the dock and we walked past Dante’s where the stripper-in-the-pool contest was just beginning to ramp up. It took everything we had to not go in right then, but we managed to skate out with just a roadie for the long 4 or 5 block walk to my apartment to drop off their bags. Shortly after we got back Christina’s brother Josh and 3 of his friends showed up from Central Florida with all of their bags and other impedimenta. All right!! So far 6 house guests! It’s gonna be a party!

Omar	Josh gets a lap dance	Moose and the Float Crew

We all mixed a couple of cocktails and walked back down to Dante’s where we met up with some other friends from Orlando (who were thankfully not staying with us). The place was already wall to wall half-nekkid people – in and out of the pool. Geeks with cameras skulked in the corners furiously snapping with their digital cameras to get every last nipple they could. I took a few photos myself, but my lens is pretty wide angle (12mm) so my photos are more of the grand spectacle variety. I did however, have a bunch of horned-up guys with me armed with cameras, and they weren’t afraid to actually get IN the pool to get photos, so if you really want to have your hair blown back, check out the pictures on Picasa here.

After Dante’s it’s all one large blur of street parties, drag shows, and parades. Friday my friend Kris and his then-fiance (now wife) showed up for the weekend, and stayed with us that night bringing the total of house-guests to 8! (They got a hotel for the rest of their stay).

I’d give a blow-by-blow of the entire madness, but it would be unnecessarily byzantine, and really.. who cares. You’re just here to look at the boobs right? I will say that actually being IN the parade was an amazingly surreal experience. It took probably 4 hours to walk the entire route, and my feet were killing me! But it’s an experience I wouldn’t trade. I missed out on getting lots of photos of the individual floats, but I think in return I got lots of great photos of the people, and that’s really the better part of the trip.

I’ve broken the photos up into 4 albums:

Dante’s Pool Party (Thursday)
Thursday Night (Out on the streets, and the drag show)
Friday (Local’s Parade, a bit out and about at night)
Saturday (In the parade)

I’ve pared the massive amount of images down to about a third of what I have for these albums. These are photos from my camera as well as my friends cameras, so invariably there was a lot of duplication. I hope I got all the blurry, boring, or duplicate photos out of there, but if not.. eh.. life goes on. Be warned however, there is a lot of nudity in there, if you are in any way easily offended by nipples, don’t look.

All in all a fantastic week-long event. Everyone gets along, there are people dancing in the streets, and lots of good drinks and food. I’ve never been to Mardi Gras, but I’m pretty sure Key West gives New Orleans a run for their money with this one…

Cheers!
M

I can’t believe it’s been an entire year since I was last writing about Fantasy Fest. Time flies so fast when you get older, I honestly don’t know where it all goes.

I have been so insanely busy the last few weeks I don’t know which way is up. We started construction of the Haunted Fort on October 1, and that pretty much sucked 90% of my free time right off the top. Then there was the Vampire’s Ball last Saturday the 23rd, a one-night party out at the fort. We had a costume contest, a DJ, and of course lots of fog and blacklights.. a good time was had by all!

The remaining 10% of my free time this month has gone to a couple of freelance graphics jobs I picked up. They couldn’t have come at a more hectic time, but it’s nice to have some side work to get me out of the rut of the daily office-grind, and re-affirm my abilities as a graphic artist.

Doing freelance work is something I’ve never seriously considered before. I’ve always had opportunities, but turned them down because heck, I was making bank at my big corporate job, and couldn’t be bothered with the annoyance of working on “my” time.

Now I have a pitiful income from a job I honestly would not miss one bit were it gone, and I’m beginning to think I could support myself by doing graphics. Heck if I charged half of what most people charge for freelance work, I could bring home the same money  as I’m getting from my current job each week, for only half the hours of work. Of course.. finding that much work and keeping it is problematic.

I just don’t know what to do with myself.

Christina gets frustrated with me because I can’t just go to work and not get emotionally involved with it. I can’t seem to keep my issues at work from affecting my day-to-day happiness, but then I’ve never been one to go into something halfway. I’m in or I’m out, and riding the fence is supremely frustrating for me.  I need to believe in what I’m doing, otherwise it just feels like a waste of time.

The work I do is simple enough (maybe too much so), and it should just be something I can just do and not let it get to me, but I’m afraid that I’m discovering over time that my boss and I are of different ilks, and interfacing with him daily is testing the boundaries of my patience. But that could probably describe most folk’s relationships with their bosses, huh?It’s time for a change, I just don’t know what that is yet. Maybe freelancing is the answer, maybe working the drive-through at Wendy’s is, I don’t know. We’ll find out, but not today.

Anyhoo, I Digress!

It’s Fantasy Fest week, and there are lots and lots of events on the horizon. We have a few friends coming into town this week, some of which are staying with Christina and I. We’re pulling out the futon, blowing up the air mattress, and may even resort to drawing straws to see who sleeps on the front porch.. haha. I’m sure by the time we’re heading to sleepy land each night, it won’t matter where we wind up as long as it’s horizontal.

I’ll be sure to get some good photos and post them for everyone’s perusal!

Let the madness begin!

What a beautiful beach!

I have lived in Florida since I was 13 years old. That’s been.. let’s see.. 30 years. (Yes I’m an old fart). I have NEVER enjoyed the beaches of Central Florida (New Smyrna, Daytona, Cocoa, etc). I’m not sure why. First I think I’m just not a fan of sunburn, or hoards of ugly, freaky people and their satan-spawn children. But mostly I think I was never a fan of the beach because I’d never been to a real Caribbean beach before. It honestly wasn’t until I visited St. Thomas and Water Island in the U.S.V.I. that I had an epiphany. I LIKED the beach, well… the beaches there. No waves, crystal clear water, very few people, cool fish, cheap rum. It was like a Duran Duran music video, and I was completely blown away. That epiphany started the landslide that eventually led to us moving to Key West.

My favorite Florida beach has been Fort Zach beach since moving to KW. It’s 3 blocks from my apartment, there aren’t a lot of people, waves aren’t bad, the water is beautiful, but let me tell you.. the water at fort Zach State Park has NOTHING on Bahia Honda State Park. Bahia Honda is the closest to a true Caribbean beach I’ve seen in Florida.

It doesn’t have the cool tree canopy that Fort Zach has, or the picnic tables, or the BBQ grills.. well, it does, but they are collected around a couple of pavilions near the parking lot, but the water man.. the WATER.

It’s about 2 feet deep for hundreds of feet off the shore, the ocean floor is pure soft white sand, and the water is absolute crystal. I had some rum in a big sippie cup, and I spent probably 3 hours out as far as I could walk, just sitting in the water.. daydreaming about leaving it all behind again and making the skip to St John now instead of 5 years down the line. It was pure heaven.

We camped for the weekend at the campground there on one of the ocean loops. It was a very nice campsite, and it falls solidly into the top 10 on Mike’s favorite campgrounds list. It’s a bit more expensive than most state campgrounds, and you have to reserve spaces 6 months out to get a good one, but I’ll definitely go back. There are lots of cool places to swim near the campsite as well, you can go to the causeway side and swim there, or chose from about 4 different ocean beach areas to swim. The old train bridge is a really cool thing to see as well, you can walk to the top of it and get a great view of the better part of the island.

Next on my list of camp grounds to check out is the one on St. John at Cinnamon Bay.. it’s also right on the beach… ahhhhhh…. now where did I put that rum…