Happy New Year!

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 Rough, I need a Vacation!

Go South Old Man!

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

Fantasy Fest 2010: A Marathon of Madness

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

It’s October!

Fantasy Fest is upon us once more!

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!

Bahia Honda State Park

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…