Friday, January 24, 2003
The morning dawned cold and blustery. The sunrise over the Atlantic was spectacular, but I didn’t feel like cooking outdoors and shivering thru a breakfast in camp. So we hopped in the truck and drove down the keys and took the first breakfast place we could find, which just happened to be an IHOP. We felt a lot better after breakfast and enjoyed the rest of the drive to Key West.

Driving along the lower keys, I thought I saw a blimp. Monika said it was an airplane, but the way it was hovering I became more and more certain it was a blimp. Like many folks, I like blimps and might be even accused of being a “blimp-lover”. But I persisted and we turned off when we found a side street with the suggestive name, “Blimp Road”. The blimp we saw in the sky turned out to be a tethered aerostat with some kind of an antenna pod in place of the usual gondola. When we finally got to its docking site, we saw a second blimp clamped to its storage mast. This blimp was large, pure-white blimp which I immediately named, “Moby Blimp” (with all due apologies to Melville). Since this surrounded by a big fence with warning signs, we assumed this was a military or surveillance blimp of some kind and just took some pictures from afar before continuing our journey.

In Key West we first drove to the southernmost point of the U.S. to take pictures of us and the truck at this corner of our country. I would like to get a picture of the truck at all four corners of the Lower 48, so we’ll see how that goes. We then drove by Hemingway’s House on the way to the marina at the Truman Annex, where we found that the “Gigi” was already out racing. We ensconced the truck at a public parking garage on the edge of the historic district and started wandering around. We first found the Truman “Summer White House” near the marina, which had some nice exhibits of the Truman presidency and offered tours. But the tour that really intrigued us was the Hemingway House, so we bought some tickets for that together with some post cards and walked along Duval street looking for lunch places.

Didn’t find any luncheonettes before we arrived at the Hemingway House, which is just across from the Key West lighthouse, so we did the tour. Our guide was quite good and we enjoyed the stories of Hemingway and his second (out of four) wife, “Pauline”. One idiosyncratic thing she had done was to remove all the ceiling fans and replace them with an outlandishly eclectic set of chandeliers. It was cool enough that we didn’t miss the ceiling fans, but we could well imagine that they did miss them in the summer months. The famous pool was there along with the “last red cent” that Hemingway had thrown down at Pauline’s feet, after which she had mounted in cement beside the pool! It must have been an interesting marriage.

We were struck by the number of cats on the grounds of the house. We found out that they were all descendants of the original Hemingway cats and were all 6-toed and quite strikingly colored. The current count was 61 cats, and they are all named for famous people and even had their own cemetery in the back. In general, the house was sparsely but nicely furnished with mostly original Hemingway furniture.

We were even hungrier after the tour than before, so we settled for lunch in the “Ernest Café” just across the street. We wrote post cards while waiting for our food to arrive and after lunch walked down to the Post Office to mail them off. We circled to the truck walking on the Historic Harbor Trail, which was fun. The harbor was jam-packed with sailboats large and small, and one of the regattas for race week was taking place just outside the harbor mouth. We were somewhat tired from several hours of walking and rested a while at the truck a bit before deciding to catch a bus back to the center of the historic district.

I was waiting for the bus in a somnolent state, just watching the cars go by, when a voice in my head said, “That’s Bill Wagner driving that car that just passed”. Another voice answered, “No, that can’t be Bill—he doesn’t drive a Chevrolet.” The first voice replied, “You idiot, he probably flew down here and is driving a rental car!” So I finally woke up, jumped up, and ran out into the street to wave at Bill, but by this time the car was disappearing down the road. Instead we caught the bus to the center of the historic district and then walked to the Truman Annex where we found Gigi with David and his crew tied up along the wharf.

They were waiting for "Gigi" to be hauled out of the water by a crane, which took a while but was an interesting process. Once the boat was safely on the trailer, however, they still had to wash it off and remove the mast so it could be transported on the trailer. There was a line of sailboats for each of these steps, so the whole process took until sunset. After the mast was down and everything secure, we went out to dinner at the “Half Shell” seafood restaurant. Monika didn’t break her string—she had a nice juicy hamburger with fries. Bill Jr. and I tried the tuna, and David and Bill Sr. tried the grilled grouper. We liked our meals very much and the post–race crowed was happy and boisterous, including us! The restaurant was only a block from the parking garage, so we sadly said good-bye to everyone and started the hour and a half drive back to the campsite, during which I had a lot of trouble trying not to fall asleep at the wheel, but Monika kept me awake.

By the time we returned, the wind had died down, so we slept better than previous night but just suffered from going to bed at 11 p.m. It probably sounds funny to some folks, but that is quite late for us, especially which camping when we tend to go to sleep when the sun goes down or a little after.