One thing we haven’t done in the last two weeks, is watch the news on TV. This morning I thought that perhaps I should check on the Covid status in Florida. Sheesh! I guess cases are going up up up. Of course, the hotspot of the state (48% of the cases) is still the Miami/Ft Lauderdale/Palm Beach area. Hmmm. What if we don’t go that way after all, and head back up our own west coast from here? That depends on what the weather looks like for crossing the Gulf on Wednesday. So I pulled up all of my various marine weather apps, and … it looks great! The weather has been calm, and the Gulf has been calm for several days. Wednesday winds are forecasted to be 5-10 knots, with seas around 1 foot. It doesn’t get any better than that.
So when the Captain got up, I mentioned that this is Monday, we are leaving Wednesday, and we don’t have reservations anywhere. We talked about it and we were both thinking the same thing. Let’s not expose ourselves to Miami right now. It’ll be there some other time when we would maybe actually get off the boat and explore and go to a restaurant or something. Sooooo… since the Gulf looks good, how about if we go all the way to Ft Myers Beach from here? It’s 135 miles to Pink Shell Resort & Marina. It’ll be a long day, but then we’ll have the open water done. Thursday looks like the wind will start picking up, so let’s just get there. And then, should we stay two nights or five? We don’t really like to travel the ICW on the weekends if we don’t have to. Let’s make a reservation for five nights if they have room. We‘ll plan to go home from there on Monday, and we can always change and go home early if we want. So I called Dave & Craig and as luck would have it, they had one spot left that would accommodate Island Girl. Sweet! Done deal, Lucille.
Now – on to the rest of the chores for the day. Pink Shell doesn’t have laundry facilities nearby, so I better work on some clean clothes today. Captain pondered whether to get a new 8-D battery, or put two smaller ones (in parallel?) to replace the dead one. To get a new 8-D, we’d either have to mortgage the boat to buy one from West Marine, or go get one from Carquest clear across town via Taxi or rental car. And then that one wouldn’t be for marine specific application. OR, West Marine has two smaller ones for about the same price as the Carquest + rental car option. While he pondered and researched and got the dead battery out of the engine room, I went to do laundry. It was about four blocks away among residences, and it was really pretty quintessential Key West.
This house has the pretty light blue ceiling that either keeps evil spirits or spiders away, I don’t remember. They’re kind of the same thing.
This is just a typical street. Narrow with lots of parked cars, the houses are very close together, and lots of trees along the sidewalk.
And here is the laundromat!
It had no windows, just bars, so open air with ceiling fans. Surprisingly, it wasn’t any hotter inside than outside, thank goodness!!
The washers were $3.50, and the dryers were 3 min for .25. The washers were not very big capacity, but the dryers were. Kind of weird. So two loads of wash went into one dryer load. They were fast, though! I was there for less than an hour!
Right next door, I saw this. I guess we could have gotten our Official Conch Republic Passports at the Key West Trading Company.
Darn. I didn’t have an appointment.
This was kitty-corner to the laundromat. Key West Fine Wines. I guess it is a wine store! Maybe the owners live upstairs?
And next to it was this magnificent tree in full bloom. These are all over Key West and are beautiful and vibrant this time of year. I looked it up, and The Royal Poinciana is actually the official tree of Key West.
Meanwhile, back at the boat, the big box of lead was ready to be moved.
It was pretty much all the two of us could do to lift this thing, especially going up stairs! By the time he got that big sucker out of there, and we both worked at getting it up the stairs, out of the boat, and up to the dock, the decision was made. Two batteries to replace the one monster! So off to West Marine we went to get the new ones. Fortunately, they let us use a shopping cart to bring the new ones to the boat, then take the big one back for the core charge. It’s nice that the store it literally only about 600 feet from our boat. Here -I’ll show you. Oh! – and this shows how close Dante’s pool is to us too. It’s much quieter over there today compared to the weekend.
So here is the finished product. Y’all think this story is boring, but we actually look back in these blogs to see when we’ve done things, where we were, what happened. It’s like a Dear Diary, right? 💁♀️
While Mechanic was hooking this up, I went for a short walk to a local little grocery store, to see if they had any fruit. Our groceries are holding out well except for fruit. So this is my Key West walkabout look. One hot momma. Literally!
The “grocery” store was like a gas station grocery. Nothing fresh. Darn. I came home empty handed. I didn’t have a dinner plan, so I suggested that we only have two nights left in the Keys. We should go have dinner some place that we’ve never been. I saw somewhere that D.J.’s Clam Shack was highly recommended, even by Guy Fieri on Diners, Drive-ins, & Dives. It’s down Duval quite a ways, so we ventured out.
It’s a funny little place. It has a walk-up-to-order window, a couple of places to sit out on the sidewalk, some stools and little counter at the fence line, and then a couple of picnic tables out back. It wasn’t real busy (sometimes it’s packed!). Kenny ordered their famous lobster roll, which surprisingly is made with Maine lobster rather than warm water lobster. I really wanted their famous tasty coconut shrimp. It is not actually on the menu because they don’t have it all the time. They didn’t have it today, so I ordered fish fingers. 🙁. What kind of fish has fingers, anyway?
Kenny said his lobster roll was really good. I wouldn’t recommend or order the fish fingers again. 🙁 As we ate, we watched these crazy Key West chickens. They are everywhere in Key West. This rooster nearly became a pancake a few times out on the road while he was being sassy.
We headed back up Duval, and remembered that we wanted to get some cigars for our son’s upcoming wedding. There are cigar shops everywhere. We still cannot legally buy Cuban cigars in the U.S., but most of these available here are Cuban ingredients, then rolled in the Dominican Republic. And they aren’t cheap! But we thought it would be fun for our boys, so we went into the Island Cigar Factory. The young gal there was very knowledgable and explained all about the different kinds of cigars available.
They even had a smoking lounge in the back.
As we wandered west back up Duval, I suggested we go out to the Sunset Pier and have a sundowner beverage. That was a fun stop. There was live music, and we each ordered a beverage, and watched the sun dip into the horizon behind the islands and sailboats. Sailboats are really good for sunset pictures.
My attempt at a sunset selfie. The sun is setting out there, but it washed out in this picture.
It was really a pretty evening, and fun watching all of the boats. After the sun goes down, all the sunset cruises come blasting back to the marina. It’s quite a show!
Tomorrow is our last day in the Keys. I don’t know what we’ll do. Oh – P.S. Captain says that Laverne starts right up like a champ with her new battery. YAY!