Key West

I took a short (too short) vacation to Key West over the weekend. Despite a lot of things going wrong (well, off) I had a good time.

To begin with, I booked using Priceline, and ended up with a late start and early return. We got in to Miami at 11 PM, and then drove - through the dark, through the rain - for three hours on a highway built over the ocean. Good times. However, the hotel was nice, and we slept well.

This was a trip with my current paramour, and was a sort of compromise between me wanting to dive and him wanting a kind of B&B getaway. It was also our first trip as a couple. I thought that part went well, but there was no diving to be had - there was some kind of storm around the keys, and no one was going out. Well, there was one shop, but I wasn't willing to go out with the one shop that was going out when everyone else was staying in. They also had some pretty stark reviews on Tripadvisor.

So, we just hung out on "island time". While the seas were windy, and there were bursts of rain, the weather overall was nice enough that we had a nice walk all over the main part of town. We saw some beach, saw the southernmost point of the US (90 miles to Cuba), found Mile 0 of Highway 1, walked past the Hemingway House - too busy to bother join in - and had some key lime pie, which was surprisingly hard to find. We excluded prepackaged KLP.

I also visited the Mel Fisher Atocha museum. He's since passed away, but in the late 1970s Mel Fisher found a wrecked Spanish galleon filed with treasure. After a lengthy court fight over ownership, he established salvage operations and opened a museum, filled with historical dioramas and framing, along with bricks of silver, old jewelry, and other artifacts. It's really quite amazing, and was a pleasant find. I'd only recently learned about it myself.

We had a lovely dinner - lobster mac and cheese, snapper with mango salsa, and a delightful french toast cake concoction. On our last day, it was really rainy, so we slept in, took a short walk, and then drove back to Miami, where we checked into a South Beach hotel and had sushi and mojitos. We had an early flight back to EWR, and I was home before noon.

So it was a good trip. Some place new, with someone new, with just nothing in particular to do. Even though some things didn't work out (like the diving), it was a good trip, and I would gladly go there again.