Blowout

We blew our budget big time in Key West, Florida. We just kept telling ourselves this was a once in a lifetime visit as we spent more and more money.

It started with the campground. We went to Boyd’s Campground. No, I’m not related to any of these Boyd’s. Perhaps if I was they would not have charged us $111 to camp one night. My stepmother let us camp in her driveway for free. Boyd’s was a nice enough place but only their location made it worth anywhere near that much money. It turns out if we had waited three more days to come here we would have hit their off-season discount. No, you don’t want to know what it would have cost then.

Next, we asked the campground clerk about driving into town. She marked a map showing us that we couldn’t drive anywhere near where we wanted to go in our RV. No vehicles over 21 feet are allowed in Old Town (ours is 24 feet) and the streets are too narrow to let us meet oncoming traffic in an RV as wide as ours. We had heard from friends who have an RV like ours that they were told, if they parked theirs, it would be towed away. They were told, “Yes, you can park here. But we will tow it if you do.”

So we did some research into various modes of transportation and decided the best thing to do would be rent a car from Enterprise and have them bring it to the campground this afternoon and we would bring it back in the morning. They said, “Fine. That’ll be $75.” Ouch! Not having our own insurance that covers rental cars sure hurts. But we reminded ourselves–once in a lifetime.  So they brought us a car and we drove into town with only two stops on our agenda.

The first was the southern most point in the continental U.S.

This is undoubtedly the closest I will ever get to my birth place. My Dad was in the navy stationed in Cuba when I was born there. I was only three months old when we came home and none of us have ever been back.

Our second stop was, of course, Mallory Square for their famous sunset celebration. Only $12 to park for three hours there.

We went a couple of hours before sunset to get a good spot since we’ve been told thousands of people come out for this. There was a cruise ship parked between the square and the sunset so we walked further south and found the Bistro. They have tables with umbrellas on the dock so we decide we’d have a leisurely dinner thus claiming comfortable seats for the wait until sunset. We did not know that the seating area on one side of the walkway had a different menu from the one on the other side so we choose the expensive one because it had better shade. Of course the shade moved as we sat there so we wound up in the sun again. Then, because we had lots of time to kill we had a four course dinner:  appetizer, salad, main course, and desert. Oh, yes, and Dave had wine. $125. At least I have some steak leftover. And Dave said their key lime pie was not bitter.

While eating we also watched some free-lance entertainers who hang out in the area each evening making money off the sunset watchers. There was one entertainer who didn’t understand crowds, though. He yelled and blew a whistle trying to drum up an audience. Not enough people came so he didn’t perform. Wrong. You start performing to draw a crowd. Who’s going to stand around and watch him blow his whistle when there’s all those other performers actually doing something?

And we watched boats.

Some of the people in the boats were also there to watch the sunset. The crowd got very unhappy whenever a boat passed between us and the sun. But Dave managed to take enough pictures of the sun setting into the ocean without boats blocking the view to satisfy those of us who have always lived inland.

And I got to see the green flash. For me, a once in a lifetime event.

TTYL,

Linda