Apologies for my absence the past few days. I was in Key West last weekend promoting my chili spice mix at Peppers of Key West and, I have to say, if it weren't for the fact that my wife and I left our 2-year-old at home with his grandparents, we may have just stayed down there for good.
We took lots of pictures during the trip, so I'll share a few of them here as a little "show and tell" documentary of our journey. By the end, I think you'll agree with me that Key West is most definitely the land of free living and free spirits (in more ways than one, as you'll soon find out).
On to the tour...
My wife and I were accompanied by our friends Brady and Erin, who actually flew us down to Key West in Brady's company Cirrus, a very nice four-seat single-engine plane. We left Maryland Thursday night and spent the evening in Savannah before completing the final leg Friday morning. Many thanks, by the way, to my friends and cookoff sponsors at Airtec. I don't think many people would complain about a trip to Key West, but making an 1800 mile venture puts wear and tear on any plane, so for that I'm thankful.
We're not trying to prove how cool it is to fly with your eyes closed; the girls were taking pictures and had to use a flash because it was dark (night flight). So three seconds of blindness was definitely better than three minutes.
Here's a good shot of our final 20 minutes in to Key West. If you look closely on the screen, the plane is just about in the very middle.
Great shot of the runway (and the propeller) on our approach.
We landed! Here Captain Brady poses with Amie and Erin in front of "Stiff Willi One."
My hair's seen better days. Hat-head and wind: not so sexy.
One of the first things we did after we checked in at our hotel was head off to Duval Street, where I immediately noticed that there is no motorcycle helmet law or open container law in Key West (or if there is, it's not enforced). We sat down for some lunch at Fogarty's to fuel up with some food in preparation for the afternoon at...
Sloppy Joe's! There aren't many things better than live music and Maker's Mark at 4 pm on a Friday.
This is a terrible picture I took Friday night at Irish Kevin's with my flashless camera phone, but the only reason I post it is because the blondie in the middle was probably the most charitable person I saw during this trip and I have to give her some props -- she was walking around in a paint-on bikini top (which is to say, no bikini top at all).
Allowing bare breasts in a private establishment is one thing -- property rights dictate that property owners are allowed to make their own rules -- but given that this gal obviously had to walk down public streets to get to Irish Kevin's in the first place, it appears that Key West doesn't freak out too much about a little nudity either. Kudos to that. Oh, and by the way, no smoking ban either.
On to Saturday afternoon where we found ourselves at Peppers of Key West, host to T-Rev's Stiff Willi Chili and my spice mix promotion.
This is a photo of Brady giving me a break behind the display as we talked to some happy customers. Suffice to say, the early part of the gig was a little rough after Friday night's festivities. And if I remember correctly, Peppers of Key West is the only non-bar in the area where open containers are not only allowed, but welcomed! That definitely allowed me to get a little "hair of the dog" and snap out of my hangover.
Peppers of Key West owner Pete Legrady and I pose with customer Dale McCool, who lives in Springville, N.Y., about an hour from where I grew up in Olean. Ah, Key West.. small town, but an even smaller world.
Saturday night we walked around a bit aimlessly wondering what to do, until we ran across a bouncer at Big Uns sports bar who was yelling "2 for 1 drinks till 8!" in the doorway. As I noted earlier, Key West might be known for having a lot of free spirits, but that didn't extend to many of the bars we visited. This place is also well known for a bunch of $100 bar tabs -- of course, this is one cost of freedom I'm definitely willing to endure -- so being the savvy shopper that I am, we headed in.
I bellied up to the bar and noticed that the bartendress named Margaret had a shirt on that read "PEACE LOVE 'CUSE" so I asked her if she was from New York. She said she was from Bath and asked if I knew where that was. I told her I went to college at Geneseo and she said, "That's where I went!"
Seriously? Like I said, small town..smaller world.
Around 9:00 pm we met Amanda, a pole dancer at Big Uns who jumped on the bar and started workin' it. (Hey, there were three poles and she picked the one in front of me. What was I supposed to do, move?)
And yes, that's my $5 bill.
On Sunday we took it a bit easier because we had to fly out Monday morning, so the day was filled with a little more sightseeing of the non-bar variety. We had a nice dinner in the hotel and then headed out to find some of Key West's other "free spirits" -- during the 8 pm ghost tour. I'll let other bloggers explain the history surrounding the ghosts of Key West, but from what our tour guide told us, it's second only to New Orleans in terms of most haunted cities in the country.
I mean, just take a look at those two ghosts that appeared behind my wife and our tour guide!
I confess to having been a little skeptical of the extent of paranormal activity in Key West at the outset of the tour. But take a look at some of these photos my wife snapped that depict any number of "orbs" that paranormal believers say represent energy patterns of ghosts or entities.
Apparently some people insist that it's digital photo technology itself that creates these orbs in images, or that it's just dust or pollen on the lens, but I can tell you there was no shortage of people on our tour who were rubbing their lenses clean and shaking their cameras after these orbs appeared.
Erin and my wife must have taken at least 100 photos combined of this one house, just to see if there were any consistencies amongst all the pictures. But as you can see here, there are no distinctly apparent orbs in this one.
In the very next one, however, a few of them are very pronounced. Click on the photo to enlarge it and check out the bigger orbs up close.
This is a shot down the street to an old church that was apparently burned down with eight children inside. Some people say you can feel intense heat at times, and others claim there's a scorch mark that reappears on one of the walls no matter how many times it's repainted. Make of it what you will, but here you see some more orbs. The tour guide also told us that if you put your backs to the front doors and place your hands palms-down on the glass, you can feel tapping -- as if the children are trying to get out.
Amie and Erin did it and swore they each experienced a twitching feeling, but only on their right hands. Now, I consider myself to be a fairly macho dude, but the last thing I really want to think about is that little dead kids' spirits are tapping on my hands trying to get out of a burning church.
And anyhow, if anyone's going to tap on me I'd much rather it be a friggin' transvestite, right? I don't know what it is, but old ladies and gay dudes just seem to love me (19-year-old strippers, not so much). Amie and Erin insisted on going over to the 801 Bourbon Bar and snapping pictures like they were at a zoo. And everything was cool until this guy in the pink robe decided to grab my junk out of the blue right after we posed for this photo. Dude, I'm down with your right to be free; my nuts also like to be free, too, thank you very much.
For me, Monday was bitter-sweet. I'd had a blast the past three days but I also couldn't wait to get home to see Biggie Smalls. If I could've snapped only one photo the entire trip, it would have been of him when Amie and I walked through the front door that night. He was jumping up and down and clapping his hands and screaming so much I thought we were back at the 801 Bourbon Bar! But seriously, I've never seen anyone so excited and it reminded me why I hate leaving him behind.
So that's why I just had to take these last three pictures. The only way the bumper sticker above could be any better is if it read "DON'T ELECT ANYONE," but this is close enough and certainly reflects the tone of Key West.
Amazingly, despite an atmosphere free of nanny-state prohibitions on things like public smoking, drinking, nudity, and wind-in-your-hair biking, I never once saw anyone self-destruct or internally combust!
In fact, I only saw three -- yes, three -- police cars while we were in Key West, and they were all just parked alongside the road somewhere. Come to think of it, this area might just be the only place left in America where the cops actually want to protect and serve anyone other than themselves.
So I suppose it's only appropriate to end on a photo of a government mandate, but I couldn't resist taking this one for Biggie Smalls. Clearly I've watched Finding Nemo way too many times, but the first thing that popped into my head when I saw this was Gill saying, "All drains lead to the ocean, kid."
The biggest irony I observed while in Key West was that while it's obviously publicly funded in many capacities, it most certainly doesn't need to be. It's living proof that societies comprising individuals going about their business peacefully are not necessarily destined for chaos, and that even if there are laws on the books prohibiting vices, life goes on even if they're not enforced.
As a parent, one of my biggest concerns is that I won't be able to raise my children free of police-state tyranny, which by definition generally increases with continual upticks in nanny-statism because the police are the enforcement arm of the legislature. However, it's pretty difficult to get tased or shot for flouting an absurd law if there aren't many police in the first place. So while it may require a bit of planning to just up and move to Key West, I think that's exactly what I'm going to try to do. Not to mention, the island's only 90 miles from Cuba, and it's one of my life goals to own property there one day.
With any luck, this kid will end up at the ocean one day too.