Key West 2012

Below is my account of our trip to Key West back in May.  Because my mom reads this, some of the details in my blog have been edited, like I had to do with my Amsterdam blog.  So, if you want to know the WHOLE story, you will have to ask me in person :)

Key West Trip May 6^th – May 11^th 2012

I had planned a trip to Key West for Gary and myself once my classes at GVSU were done for the summer.  Finally, the trip had arrived.  Early Sunday morning, we took off from Grand Rapids, with a short layover in Detroit, and arrived in Miami, Florida around noon on May 6^th.  The plan was to rent a car and drive the 3-4 hour drive from Miami down to Key West.  Once we landed, we got our luggage and car rental just fine.  After about 45 minutes of trying to get out of the stupid airport, we finally made our way south.  Because we were planning on staying at an apartment in KW and camping for a couple of days on the Dry Tortuga Islands, we stopped at Wal-Mart to get some food and snacks.  After suffering for an hour at the busiest Wal-Mart in the universe, we were finally on the road to KW. 

During the 4 hour ride we stopped occasionally to take pictures of the bridges, stick our feet in the super warm salt water and look at horrible crap for sale at stores with names like “Shell World”. 

Me and a giant lobster

Bridge Connecting Key West Islands

The road to KW is basically the white trash version of Route 66, if you can imagine anything worse than the crap on Route 66.  When we finally arrived at KW, we found our apartment just fine.  It was a small, one room studio which was wedged in with other cottages in the Old Town district.  We unpacked, put the food away and decided to check out our surroundings a little. 

Entrance to the apartment

The apartment came with two bikes to use for the week, so we hopped on the bikes and rode around KW getting ourselves oriented with the area.  After riding around for about 30 minutes, we decided to park the bikes and walk around on Mallory Square.  Every night around dusk, Mallory Square becomes transformed from an empty boardwalk into a place for people to set up booths to sell pictures, jewelry, and various other crafty items, snacks and drinks.  It also becomes filled with street performers for the evening.  There are people on unicycles juggling knives, dressed up as Jack Black, playing guitars and strapping themselves into strait jackets to be thrown into the ocean to prove their magnificent escaping techniques.  It’s quite a spectacle. 

Me, a Silver guy and his bike

Mallory Square

The best performance of them all was this guy who called himself the Catman.  He looked like he was 100 years old and completely insane.  His talent was that he had somehow trained several cats to jump thru hoops of fire, walk on tight ropes and sit on little stools.  He talked to the cats and to the audience, but you ccouldn't understand a dern thing he says because he speaks with a garbled French accent.  It is by far the craziest performance there. 

Catman and his amazing cats

Kitty walking the high wire

Once the sun goes down, most of the performers pack up their stuff and leave.  We then decided to get something to eat at this place called Willy T’s.  When we were there, Gary noticed that we were sitting right next to this couple that we had seen down at Mallory square.  The girl had had on these really cool, super tall shoes and when she walked by everyone was whispering about her shoes and making a comment about them.  So, Gary bugged me until I asked the girl if she was just at Mallory square and if she had on these incredible shoes.  She said yes, but they were killing her feet so she had to change before they went back out for dinner.  We laughed and talked a little bit to them.  They were in from Ohio and they were staying in KW about the same length that we were.  After our dinner and our goodbyes, we decided to walk a little more around Duval Street.  There was this bar that advertised a nightly drag show at 9pm and 11pm.  I casually asked the very tall drag queen out front if I could possibly have a flyer that she was handing out.  We had already missed the start of the 9pm show, and we felt that we were too tired to attend the 11pm show, so we decided to go to it the next day.

Me and a very boob-alicious Drag queen!

  However, across Duval from the drag show, we came upon this bar called Bourbon Street.  From the sidewalk we could see inside that there were mostly guys at the bar and there were gorgeous guys in their underwear dancing on the bar.  Well, as they say, “when in Rome”!  So, we figured we would hang out at the gay bar for a while.  We started to walk in and pay the cover, when the guy at the door laughed and said we didn’t need to pay cover and let us in free of charge.  I’m guessing I must have been Gary’s free ticket or they really wanted Gary in the bar. We pull up a couple of seats at the bar and just observed our surroundings.  The front bars had two or three guys dancing on them all wearing nothing but tennis shoes and boxer briefs.  In the back of the bar, there were two or three guys dancing completely naked except for tennis shoes.  At first, we were both in complete shock, but we figured what the hell and ordered a couple of drinks. [Material Edited :)]  One of the dancers eventually knelt down and asked us where we were from and what our situation was (gay, straight, bi, a couple?)  He was from Mason, Michigan and traveled around the US dancing at different bars.  When we told him we were from Michigan too, he mentioned that he was going to be dancing at some bar called The Dunes in Saugatuck this summer.  It never fails, I could travel to Pluto and I would run into someone from Michigan! [Material Edited :) ]  We finished up our drinks and headed back to the apartment for the night.  What a way to kick off a week in Key West!

The next day (Monday, May 7^th), we started off the day by hopping on the bikes and riding around KW to hit all the tourist attractions.  Our first stop was the southern-most point monument.  Even though it was early in the morning, there was still quite a line of people waiting.  The good thing about that, is that everyone hands their camera to the person standing behind them and takes the picture for you.  The group of people in front of us volunteered to take our picture instead, and when I handed him my phone he shouts, “Great! Free iPhone!” and pretends to run off.  I suppose that actually could happen, but since KW is a small, crowded island, I don’t think he would have gotten far. 

After the hitting the southern-most point, we headed over to Ernest Hemmingway’s house.  It’s really interesting because they have left the house exactly the way he had it before he died.  And, since he was a crazy cat lover when he lived there, they keep anywhere from 40 – 60 cats on the property just like how he did.  It was great for me because I got to love on all the cute little kitties that hang around the property.  And it’s funny too because they will be laying on furniture and walking around amongst the tourists.  I wanted to get a picture with Gary petting one of the kitties.  As we were walking out, we stopped to pet this cute black and white kitty laying in the shrubs.  Of course, just as I go to snap the picture, the kitty decided that he didn’t like Gary and swatted at him and ran off.  I was laughing so hard.  There’s a million cats and they are all super friendly, but somehow Gary makes one mad. 

Our tour guide of the Hemmingway house

Kitty!

Hemmingway's house

Kitty, mid-swat, and Gary the cat wisper-er

After the Hemmingway cat attack, we rode around until we found mile marker zero, where the end of the US highway is. 

We then rode our bikes over to the KW cemetery.  The cemetery is pretty interesting because it is very old and they cannot bury people underground, either because of the high water table or because the island is too rocky, so most people are buried in above ground tombs. 

 

Once Gary was fully depressed, we decided to head back to the apartment, change, and ride over to one of the beaches to lay out for a few hours.  We biked over to a beach called Smather’s beach.  It seemed like it was on the opposite side of the island from Duval street and most of the drunk tourists.  The beach was not over-crowded and there were many palm trees to get shade from.  Periodically along the sidewalk there would be a truck that served cold drinks and food.  The beach had a main area where there were bathrooms, chair rentals and stand-up board rentals as well.  We spent a few hours there sleeping on the sand, reading and enjoying the water. 

Once we were thoroughly cooked, we gathered up our stuff and headed back to the apartment to shower and get ready to head to Mallory square for the evening’s entertainment.  Although most of the street performers were the same from the night before, we still had fun watching them and watching the people who were watching them.  Afterwards, we had dinner and just walked up and down Duval street drinking and people watching. The fun part about KW, is that you can walk around with an open container, as long as it’s plastic.  So, we would just pop into a bar, grab a drink, and continue walking up and down the street.  At  11pm, we headed over to the drag show.  The drag show was in a small bar which was upstairs from a gay bar.  The room was fairly small.  There was a ‘T’ shaped stage at the front, which had red velvet cushioned seat benches around it.  Behind the seating, was a small, square bar with bar stool seating around it.  Since it was a Monday, there weren’t that many tourists there for the show; however the rest of the seating was full of locals.  When the show started, the ‘girl’ who was doing the MCing for the show came out, introduced herself and asked the tourists where we were from and then introduced our first ‘dancer’.  Basically, the entire show consisted of each drag queen coming on stage in full drag and lip syncing to some song.  During the song, people would walk up and put dollars in her bra or g-string.  It was the funniest and craziest thing I have ever done.  I’m not exactly sure how much money in ones Gary and I ended up putting in drag queens underpants, but the show was at least 2 hours long.  For some reason, every time I went to the bathroom, Gary had some kind of trauma happen to him.  [Material removed :)] The last time I went to the bathroom, I came back to find Gary all in a tizzy.  He said that some girl at the bar was hitting on him and he had to run away.  Just then, this girl came up to Gary and said, “There you are!” and sat on his lap.  She was really drunk and when she leaned over to me to say “I love him!” I could barely understand the words that were slurring out of her mouth.  I just shrugged my shoulders and laughed and told Gary that he was on his own with this one.  As the show went on, Gary’s new girlfriend proceeded to flash everyone her boobs and her butt.  It was starting to become apparent that she wasn’t just drunk, but scary drunk.  I told Gary that she’s too drunk because at that point she was starting to pass out and I could not understand any of the garble that was coming out of her mouth.  So, Gary leaves her with me and goes to the bar to ask for help from the bartender.  A guy and a girl who worked there came over and pulled her off of Gary and escorted her out.  About 15 minutes later, the girl bartender came back to us with a couple of shots and told us they were sorry about the drunk girl disturbing our vacation.  We said no problem, but I also asked if she was ok.  The girl bartender says, “Who gives a fuck?  We just threw her out.  Now enjoy your vacation!”  After many more drinks and dollar bills, the show finally ended.  As we headed out, we decided to hit the Bourbon Street gay bar again just to top off the night.  As we were evaluating the crowd inside the bar from the sidewalk, I noticed that a couple of gross, fat, older gay men were making kissy faces at me.  I slowly turn around and notice that Gary is standing directly behind me.  I said, “You know those kisses are for you, right?”.  We ignored the gross old men and went inside.  There really wasn’t the same kind of crowd there had been the previous night, so we just had one drink and called it a night and headed back to the apartment.

The next day, after rolling out of bed late and nursing our hangovers, we decided to take it kind of easy for the day.  The first thing we wanted to do was find the exact location that we needed to be Wednesday morning for when we go to the Dry Tortugas. 

We rode our bikes over to the dock where the boat would take us there.  We talked to one of the guys working and he confirmed that we were in the right location and he said to just be early since we were camping and the crew would need to load our gear first before everyone else got on the boat.  After that, we rode our bikes over to where the cruise ships dock.  From there, we just rode lazily around the coast of the island, until we finally came upon the old military fort called Fort Taylor. 

We decided to take a look and rode our bikes inside.  The Fort Taylor area consisted of the old fort buildings, but also a large beach area where people could lay out and grill.  This beach was quite packed compared to Smather’s beach we had gone to the previous day.  After looking around for a bit, it was just too hot to do anything else, so we decided to ride back to the apartment, change our clothes and go lay out at Smather’s beach again.  After a few hours at the beach, we headed back to the apartment to get ready and check out Mallory square again for the night.  Since we had to get up early the next morning for the Dry Tortugas, we just went back afterwards to pack our stuff and get ready for the morning.

Bright and early Wednesday morning, we gathered up our camping stuff, hopped on the bikes and rode over to the dock to board the catamaran that would take us to the Dry Tortugas.  We dumped our camping gear where they loaded it on board for us and waited patiently for all the other passengers to arrive.  Around 7 or 7:30am, we were allowed to board the boat.  Since I have the potential to get sea sick, we sat up top and in the back of the boat, where they said it was the most stable part of the boat.  We choose a couple of spots on a bench seat and sat down.  The trip included a buffet breakfast, so I held the seats and Gary went to go stand in line and get food.  Not 5 minutes later, this behemoth of a woman and her tall scrawny husband came up the stairs and started looking around for seats.  As my luck would have it, they sat right next to me.  As the amazon woman was sliding all the way over next to me, I quickly said, “There is another person sitting here”.  She replies, “Well, this bench is made for 4 people”.  Sure, I thought,  4 normal sized human beings.  But, I could tell she was an angry, fat woman who probably got criticized for her weight all the time, and because she was on the defensive and could squish me like a bug, I wasn’t going to fight.  However, when Gary came back with his plate of food, I could see him just slightly stop short as he evaluated the situation.  I just shrugged, because there was literally nowhere else for us to sit because the boat was at capacity.  I then gave Gary my seat as I went and got some food.  The rest of the boat ride was spent with the 2 of us huddled on 1/3 of the bench, while super-size took up the rest.  After a 2 hour long boat ride over relatively calm seas, we eventually made it to the Dry Tortugas.  The Dry Tortugas are a set of small islands in the Gulf of Mexico.  In the 1800’s there was a fort built on the island that was supposed to be used as a military access point for the US.  Once the Fort was closed down, it then became a US jail.  However, because it was so expensive to haul supplies and water to that location, the jail eventually closed and now it’s just part of the national parks system.  The island is not very big, maybe 1 mile in circumference.  The fort takes up most of the island and it is surrounded by a moat that you can walk on.  Inside the fort are other smaller buildings, the ones in use now are just for the rangers who stay on the island. 

After everyone departed the boat, a DNR ranger made us campers stay on board so that he could explain about camping on the island.  He first warned us about not swimming in the moat.  He said that there was a salt water crocodile in the moat.  At first, we totally thought his story was complete BS, just something to keep people from swimming in the moat.  However, later in the day we would come to realize that this ranger was not full of BS!  Then he had to explain to us what we needed to do if Cubans showed up in the middle of the night.  The other guys who were also camping for the night said that they had been to the Dry Tortugas several times and that over the course of 10 years of camping they had witnessed 3 different landings.  I had no idea that the likelihood of Cubans landing on this island was so high.  The Ranger explained that the Cubans would most likely land in the darkness and they might wake us up asking for food and water.  We were to go get the on duty ranger who would be staying on the island and he would contact the coast guard.  The Coasties would then come and get them and take them to go get processed into the system.  The Ranger also informed us that just 2 weeks prior to our visit, Cubans had landed at the Dry Tortugas.  I could see that this was going to be a very interesting camping trip. 

Once we got off the boat and gathered up our gear, we made our way over to the camping area.  The camping area was really small, I think there may only have been 6 camping sights.  We found a campsite that had one lonely palm tree that we could get some shade from. 

Camping under a palm tree

After setting up the tent and organizing our camping stuff, we went back to the dock to check out some snorkeling gear.  We got our gear and headed down to the beach to snorkel around the moat of the fort.  It was really cool to snorkel and see all the coral and fish under the water.  However, it’s very awkward and difficult.  After snorkeling about halfway around the moat and destroying most of the delicate coral with our flippers, we became kind of bored and tired of snorkeling.  We made our way back to the beach and returned the gear.  The rest of the day was spent reading, laying in the sun, lathering on sunscreen, swimming, and walking around the moat.

 Sometime during the late afternoon, one of the guys from the other camping group walked by us and mentioned that the alligator was out of his hiding spot and hanging out in the moat where you could see him.  This was a complete shock to us, because the whole time we thought for sure that the alligator was just a BS story.  He pointed where he thought the alligator had been hanging out and we walked into the fort to look out one of the windows for a better view.  I crawled into the window and peered over the edge into the moat.  Oh my god, he’s right there!  He was about 8 or 9 feet long and he was a BIG boy!  We snapped few pictures before he got scared and swam off into the moat, presumably to go back to his hiding spot, which we discovered was a little nook he could slide into under the wall of the moat. 

Around 3pm that afternoon, all the day people had to pack up and get back on the boat to head back to the main land.  After they took off, there was just a handful of us left on the island for the night. 

Boat leaving the Dry Tortugas

Since the inside of the fort only remained open until dusk, we decided to walk around inside and get a better look.  There wasn’t too much to look at, but they did have a boat left over from when a group of Cubans had arrived on the island a few years back.  We decided to check out the boat.  It looked like it was made of a metal patchwork quilt.  They had used bits and pieces of different metals and welded them together to form the hull of the boat.  Right in the center of the boat was a car engine which they used to turn the propeller.  They had the exhaust pipe routed up and out of the boat like a periscope and a long rod was connected to the engine which turned a small propeller at the back end of the boat.  A large sheet of metal with what looked like water pipes were fashioned together to form a manual rudder.  Looking at it you wouldn’t have even believed that the thing even floated. 

As the afternoon wore on and it finally started to cool down a bit, we noticed that the island was coming alive with creatures.  Hermit crabs were appearing everywhere and they were the biggest hermit crabs I have ever seen.  Of course, I had to pick up every one and touch it.  The island also has an abundance of rats, which Gary wasn’t too thrilled about.  I did get a glimpse of a few of them running around as well.  During our stay we managed to see hermit crabs, rats, tarpin, a goliath grouper, lobsters, a conch, sea urchin, a sea turtle nest and of course an alligator.  J

Once the sun went down, we really couldn’t do too much because it was so cave dark out there on the island.  But before we retreated to our tent, we walked around the moat in the dark.  It was so cool to see the water and the stars and there was no noise or lights to interrupt it. 

The next morning, we got up fairly early because the sun was up and by 8am it was already too hot to lay in the tent.  We packed up most of our gear and took it to the dock so when the boat arrived they could load our gear on board.  Afterwards, we just got on our suits, lathered on the suntan lotion, hauled our books and food to one of the picnic table in the shade on the beach and just enjoyed the scenery.  Because there weren’t a lot of people who stayed overnight on the island, it didn’t take us long to get to know each other a little bit and for Gary and I to give them all nicknames since we really didn’t know their real names.  There were the stoners – 3 guys who looked leathery from the sun who came out to the island for an annual guys fishing trip.  One of the guys was Mason the Mason.  He talked to everyone and drank Sanka all day.  The European – a single guy from Eastern Europe who came to fish.  The angry couple – An older couple who only spoke to each other as if they hated one another.  The beautiful couple – a younger couple from up north who was there to relax and camp.  They were both so beautiful they could have done Calvin Klein underware modeling.  And the ever famous Johnny Visor – a guy who came to the island on his awesome boat, who always was seen with a beer in his hand, who always had on an awesome white visor and who generally thought he was pretty awesome.  Johnny Visor became our secret entertainment.  This guy (thought) he knew everything about everything and he never shut up. 

Around 10am the boat from the mainland arrived and the island became packed once again with day tourists.  At this point, I was just about going out of my mind and I could not wait for 3pm to roll around so we could get on the boat and head back to key west.  I had done everything I could possibly do on the island.  I had read, napped, played in the water, sat in the shade and walked around the moat about 1000 times.  Gary laughed and pointed out that the hardest part of this for me isn’t the camping or the not showering or even having to go to the bathroom in port-a-johns.  It’s the fact that I can’t just sit and relax and enjoy myself and the scenery.  I can’t just sit still, I have to be doing something.  He was right, because if I had to stay one more day on that island, I’m pretty sure it would have turned into a scene from Lord of the Flies.

3pm.  We all board the boat and leave Johnny Visor and the Dry Tortugas behind.  Once we reached the mainland, it was just after 5pm.  Since it was our last night before heading back to Miami to fly out, we quickly made it back to our apartment to shower and run down to Mallory Square for one last time.  As we arrive to Mallory Square, we noticed a group of people and a couple of camera men all hovering around someone and taking pictures.  It was David Arquette!  Before he ran off with his entourage, I managed to just snap a blurry picture of him. 

After the evening’s street entertainment finished up, we just went down to Duval street to have a couple of drinks and people watch.   It was Thursday, so Duval was starting to get busier for the weekends tourist.  At one bar, we ran into the Angry couple from camping at the Dry Tortugas.  We talked with them for a minute and they mentioned how they had seen David Arquette as well.  After a few drinks, we had to turn in early because we knew we had a long day of travel the next day.  So, we headed back to the apartment to finish packing and get ready to head back.  Friday morning came early and we loaded up the car and said good bye to Key West as we drove the long drive back to the Miami airport.

Impression of Johnny Visor

The End