We got up at 4:30am so that we could catch the ferry for Key West.

During the 3.5 hour ferry trip we met a couple of ladies about our age. Their shtick was that they were sisters who didn’t share any characteristics.

When we got to Key West, we almost rented one of those golf cart thingies for getting around the island, but when we saw that the hotel was only 3 miles away, we figured “Heck, we walk that distance in Naples all the time” so that’s what we did. We felt quite smug about this.

We walked over to the Original Margaritaville. Pam had a margarita and I had a diet coke.

Pam ordered a “Perfect Margarita” but got an “Uptown Shelf Margarita” instead. Then Pam really got a “Perfect Margarita” but it turned out that Pam preferred the Uptown Shelf after all.

We then made one of the biggest mistakes of our lives and we’ve made a lot of mistakes.

The problem was that we hadn’t factored in that we each had a heavy backpack for our luggage. After a mile of walking to our hotel, we were pretty uncomfortable. After the second mile, Pam was muttering about biggest mistakes of our lives. After 2 and a half miles, I got Pam’s backpack.

After checking into our room, we found that the room was at 77 degrees and climbing. We moved to another room. It was “handicap accessible” but the AC worked.

We went back downtown (we took the hotel shuttle this time) for dinner. We wound up at a Cuban restaurant. Pam had pork that she didn’t like. I had picadillo something or other with plantains – it was delicious.

We hung around the waterfront waiting for sunset. By then, the sun was hidden behind a layer of clouds on the horizon. We took a selfie in front of a cloud bank and called it close enough.

We started to notice that an awful lot of chickens were hanging around the sidewalks and roads. Historically, chickens were imported for either eating or cock fighting. The freeway let folks import chicken meat and eggs so the local farmers freed the chickens. When cock fighting was banned in the 70s, those chickens were freed too. Anyway, the upshot of all this was that folks didn’t seem to mind these filthy disgusting things wandering around inside restaurants.

Since we missed the next shuttle back to the hotel, we hung around Alonzo’s Bar and Gril while Pam knocked back a couple more Margheritas. Best so far.

The driver on the shuttle back to the hotel was named John. When he moved to Key West, it was on October 21st – the first of the 10 day Fantasy Fest. There were 10 days of nonstop, well, debauchery. He got a job applying glitter to naked women’s bodies. The poor guy thought that Key West was always like this. November first was a rude awakening for him.

The following morning, we went to a house of pancakes for breakfast. It was international. From what we could tell, 3 out of 5 coffee cups had other people’s lipstick on them.

We checked out of the hotel, took a shuttle “downtown”, stashed our backpacks with the ferry folks, and went walking again. We stopped every block or so to pretend we were shopping in stores with blessed AC.

We got to the Southernmost Point of the Continental United States. There was a long line of folks waiting to take a picture beside a monument that we didn’t care about. Pam took a non-selfie picture of the monument as we skipped the line.

We slowly made our way back to the Key West Express terminal with a lot of not-shopping to use the blessed cool AC. Pam started more shopping than not-shopping but the blessed AC was still cool.

The ferry back to Naples was a lot more crowded than the one from Naples. We sometimes read, sometimes slept, and got home around 10:30pm.