Posts tagged "key west"

Oh, My Tropical Paradise.. Where Have You Gone?

When we sold and gave away most of our junk to move to Key West, I remember distinctly looking at a pile of long pants and wool socks, thinking to myself that I’d never need those again. We were moving to the tropics after all, and the average low temperature in Key West even in January is only 65 degrees. I was ready for the life of shorts and flip flops!

Of course, we were only moving from Orlando, but even Orlando freezes.. Key West has never seen frost; the lowest temperature ever recorded being 41 degrees, and that was way back in 1981. The only other time it had ever reached that low was back in 1886! I was safe from freezing. Or so I thought..

This last week down here we’ve seen the second lowest recorded temperature in Key West ever.. 42 degrees. Now I’m not one to complain, I mean it is KEY WEST after all, but like most of the old homes down here, ours was built to keep you cool in the summer.. scant provisions were made to keep you WARM. Few homes have central air, let alone central heat, and most homes have window AC units.. which typically have no heat cycle.

So over the weekend we broke down and hit up a few stores looking for a space heater.. of course, so did everyone else in Key West.. suffice it to say we came away empty handed. Now, I’d watched a lot of MacGyver back in the day, so I knew all I needed was a little duct tape, a lighter, and a small furry cat, and I could build a space heater, so I sat down with an irish coffee and put my mind to work. The more irish coffee I drank, the more I liked the cat idea, but Christina was against it, so I settled for the next best thing.. I turned on the oven and left the door open. Not as spectacular and cool as a flaming cat, but it did the trick.

Of course I wouldn’t recommend trying this at night while sleeping, but left on for 10 minute increments every half hour or so, it worked quite well in taking at least the coldest chill from the air. AND you can bake at the same time!

I look forward to some more warm weather, I’ve had enough of these ‘mainland’ temperatures!

Key West during the holidays… who knew?

Woah.

It’s the week between Christmas and New Years Eve here in lovely Key West, and all I can say is WOW.. I have NEVER seen so many people here. Fantasy Fest was pretty crazy, but the vast majority of those people came out at night to crowd the streets and bump nakedly against one another with the relative anonymity of darkness.

The Christmas holiday travelers are swarming the streets in broad daylight; mothers dragging slack-eyed, Nintendo gazing  children around by the arms, huffing and puffing to get down the street to that next big tourist destination on their travel map, while the fathers lag a few yards behind, beer in hand wishing to themselves drunkenly as they stagger through the crowd that they were here without the family.

Duval Street is packed!

It looks like a Disney theme park out there. But I do have to admit that I find it pretty cool that 90% of the people I walk by aren’t speaking english, or even spanish.. the foreign folks are here in droves man, and they aren’t leaving without their T-shirt! It’s funny to me, and probably just because it’s new to me, but the family vacation dynamic seems to be the same for every culture; Dad just wants to plant it somewhere with a hot waitress and drink. Mom wants to see the lighthouse, Hemingway’s house, the little White House, the aquarium, the shipwreck museum, the secret garden, etc, etc, etc, and all before dinner at that Italian restaurant Frommer’s said was so good. And the kids just want to play video games in the hotel room. You gotta love it! The Key West motto is One Human Family, and this holiday season I’m seeing it in person, we truly are all the same.

Even my street a block over from Duval (which is typically pretty quiet during all the festivals and such) is clogged with more scooters, bicycles, and pedestrians than usual. Finding a parking space on the street is near impossible this week as thousands of rental cars driven by people who are most likely not only a bit tipsy, but more accustomed to driving on the other side of the road vie for open spots as close to Duval as they can get.

I lie in bed at night and hear raucous groups of drunks yelling and whooping it up as they walk from the bars back to their hotels and B&B’s at 4 A.M… something that even during Fantasy Fest and the Poker Run I didn’t hear much of. Sirens are wailing until all hours of the night; they seem to go on forever.. how is that possible? The island’s only a couple miles wide! Are they driving in circles??

Is it possible that Christmas holiday travelers are more unruly than Fantasy Fest goers? That certainly seems to be the case, although I never would have guessed in a million years. I can only assume that it will get worse as we creep closer to New Years Eve.

Christina’s brother Josh is coming Wednesday to stay through the weekend, so we’ll be doing our part to help crowd the streets Thursday night. Schooner Wharf Bar is having it’s ‘Wench Drop” at midnight. They drop a wench (A live one) from the mast of the schooner Wolf which is moored right next to the bar. I think we’ve decided that’s our midnight destination this year. There are other ‘drop ‘ celebrations happening at various bars on Duval, like the drag queen in the big red shoe, but I think we’re going to try to avoid some of the crazy tourists and stay close to the local’s haunt.

I’ll be sure and post some photos!

Mike

More Power Boats!

Here are a few more photos from the power boat races. We wandered around on Duval Saturday night after the races to take in the up-close-and-personal experience with the boats, and then caught the final race on Sunday. Once again, a street festival on Duval street.. always so much fun.. lots of people, food, and of course beers.

The boats were so loud while they were racing, I could hear them from my front porch and I could smell the nitro from their exhaust wafting on the breeze blowing across the island.. good times!

The Miss Geico boat won the race, and no surprise.. it was very impressive – it’s turbine powered instead of piston-engine powered. It sounded like a jet airplane when it went by, quieter than the other boats, but quite obviously faster.. it was like watching something out of a batman movie.. well except it was bright green! It shot by so fast on the water that I had a hard time snapping a photo before it was out of the frame! The photo up there is the victory pass, even at idle it sounded like a jet.. I get chills just thinking about it now.. it was very cool.

Still, as much as I enjoyed the Miss Geico boat, I think my favorite was the Cintron boat, it was LOUD and painted a very sober grey. Unfortunately I think it must have broken down at some point, because it wasn’t in the race on Sunday. When we saw it on the street Saturday night, I understood why it was so loud.. it had two 1500 HP blown V8 engines in it.. you can see the photos down the page a bit.. makes miss my gearhead days from high school!

MorePowerBoats (12 photos)
13 November 2009

Note: To see the pictures in the original Picasa album, click here

Fantasy Fest; it was fun, but now you must go.. Part ONE

Well, I survived it. There were times I thought I wouldn’t. And I wasn’t even HERE for the last big hurrah on Halloween night.

The weekend before Halloween my friend Walter came into town for his ‘bachelor party’. It was just he and I, so I figured how bad could it be.. well we pretty much completely wore ourselves out that weekend..

I never made it to Goombay festival like I wanted to, but I had a great time anyway. I think Walter may have had a bit more fun than I did however because when Monday rolled up and it was time for him to get on the ferry back to Ft Myers at 6:00, he was no where to be found.

He did eventually show up, but far too late in the day to make it to the ferry, so the missus and I didn’t get to have that lull in the action before the next wave of revelers came in Tuesday.

He had so much fun in fact, that we had to call a Doctor who makes house calls (I love Key West) to check him out on Tuesday, turns out he had smoked and drank so much that he was on the verge of pneumonia.. well a few steroid shots, and some antibiotics later, I shoveled him onto the boat and promptly sighed a very heavy sigh of relief. It was all up to his fiance at that point, haha.

For those of you who know Walter, you feel my pain I’m sure. At least the next wave of friends were relatively tame and responsible by comparison.

The real kicker to that story is I had to leave that coming Friday morning to drive to Orlando to be in his wedding, so at best I was in the eye of the hurricane, AND I was going to miss my first Fantasy Fest Parade. Remind me to never agree to be in another wedding….

As it turns out, our Tuesday guests became Wednesday guests so we wound up having our night to lay like broccoli on the couch.. a VERY much needed respite. We eventually couldn’t resist, and decided to leave the couch for a couple of hours and make one pass down Duval, just to get a feel for our first Fantasy Fest.

By this time the night-time crowds on Duval were getting increasingly large and more naked. We wandered about sipping a couple of Coronas trying to take in all the madness. We were too wiped out to really spend too much time out, or to really register how many sets of boobs or male genitalia wrapped in sparkle wrap we’d seen. We snapped a few photos and headed back to the apartment to crash. It was all very surreal, and we were beginning to understand just how insane this was going to be…

I’ll get to the real meat of the adventures in my next post. Right now I have to run out to Fort Zach and start tearing down the haunted fort. When that’s done in a week, life will finally be back to something resembling normal. Next adventure is to find a job!

P.S…. no that is NOT Christina in that photo up there..