Key West Vacation - Part II

We checked into the hotel and did a fairly intensive pub-crawl that first night getting back to the room at around 1:00 am.

It seems my kid can drink...he held his own and was able to walk under his own steam the final block and a half after our last stop on the crawl that evening....

He had lost his capacity for intelligible speech during our stay at the third bar we went to (the world famous Sloppy Joe's) at around 10:00 pm and I believe was on auto pilot while we listened to the band at the last stop on our crawl, a club called Fogerty's, on Duval Street.

Upon waking the next day, I expected (and was not disappointed) to have a world-class hangover to contend with. Anyway, I peeled my tongue from the roof of my mouth, showered and dressed and made my way down to Starbuck's to kill time while waiting on my son to rise.

The weather was the usual gorgeous down island. I am always impressed by the beautiful combination of water, weather and easy manner in which the native folk in this city conduct their day-to-day affairs.

After finishing up with the latte, I made my way back upstairs in the hotel to see if my son had awakened yet. It turns out he was still sawing wood in his bed. I put together a note and told him I was headed down to the marina. If he woke up, he could call my cell or wander down to the marina (about three blocks from the hotel).
At the marina, I took up a position at an outdoor bar and started in with a couple of rounds of mimosas. I asked if there was any place to get food but, the barmaid said that the only place she knew that was serving breakfast was either in one of the area hotel restaurants or a small diner about three blocks over from the marina on the Gulf side of the island.

I decided to skip the solid food and go with more juice until my son could join me.

The view from the marina on this particular morning was fantastic. It was about 80 degrees at 8:00 and I knew that by noon, it was going to get pretty sticky. At that hour, there were very few folks wandering around that were true tourists. Most of them (I imagined) were either folks that decided not to go to bed, insomniacs or locals.

I enjoyed the quiet and the sunshine. The barmaid and I shared a couple of stories. Seems she was a Midwest girl initially and moved down to the islands two years ago after a vacation stay that never ended. She was the youngest of five kids and had led a pretty sheltered life back on her dad’s farm in Omaha.

When my cell phone rang, I knew it was son. He asked if I could bring him back some food and wasn’t up to facing life outside of the hotel room right now. I told him to go back to bed and that I would retrieve some caffeine and some food and bring it back to him within the next hour.

After our “breakfast”, we decided to take a walk over to the Atlantic side of the island to the large public beach and just say hi to the ocean for a few minutes. Along the way we purchased some essentials that we had forgotten to pack for the trip. Neither of us had thought to bring sunglasses or sunblock.