We are getting cautionary essays about hurricane season being upon us and as we haven't had a storm hit the islands for several lovely years I have no doubt this subject will have to be revisited before the end of November. Some people in town look forward to hurricane parties where drink flows liberally and stories get taller as the winds get stronger. However I have survived a few storms in Key West and I have found that being prepared helps, especially when we manage one more hurricane-free summer and preparations were not needed at all.
Let me say straight up that if there is any need visitors get evacuated first and this year the people in charge have announced they will be cautious and thoughtful before they order an evacuation. In the past they tended to evacuate tourists at the first sign of a distant storm to the detriment of local business. The chances of a vacation being interrupted are remote but it can happen. Prices are lower in summer for a reason and a vacation in the tropics in hurricane season requires a certain level of maturity and flexibility in a traveler. Just like if you come in winter and meet the rain and gray of a two day cold front there's no point in getting mad. Shit happens but a hurricane is no threat to a visitor's safety.
Everyone has their own plan and my wife and I have developed our response to the threat. For what it's worth she gets the dog in the car and evacuates the minute schools are closed (high season for storms is in September when schools are back in session). She leaves immediately before Highway One gets clogged and lines form at gas stations and she takes a "vacation" with friends on the mainland. I don't get to evacuate as mine is a reserved occupation so I close up the house and wait to be ordered in to work where we get locked down for the duration of the storm, and if you think sleeping in a police station with one's colleagues is a breeze you have another think coming. There's nothing quite like stepping out of the shower into the men's locker room where the SWAT team is getting a last minute briefing. "Uh, good morning!" one says brightly clutching the towel closer. Boarding school was never quite so...well armed? 
People wonder how one copes with an annual storm season and it is a nuisance but when one considers that hurricanes give plenty of warning and loss of life in a storm is a rarity in Key West
we have to feel sorry for the people living through and dying in tornadoes and flooding Up North while cold winter rains fall on people out west in June and so on and so forth. Living in the Keys it's hard not to notice the power of nature up close and personal, so one tends to be more preared mentally for the possibility of disaster. The millions who live in the unprepared suburbs of the big cities like Miami and Fort Lauderdale are likely to suffer a lot more during the soggy power-free aftermath of a hurricane. People in the Keys really pull together when faced with a destructive hurricane, if history is any guide.
Hurricanes bring out a lot of braggadocio in people and the pseudo toughs sneer at those of us making preparations but I have always found talk is cheap. Sensible precautions are...sensible. Storms are unpredictable and they generate tornadoes within them that create unpredictable damage and your home may survive one and not the other. There is an element of luck that supersedes preparation. I just know that I feel better locked in at work knowing my wife and dog are safe and I have done what I can to look after our home. And that is how a fussy middle aged worrier prepares for hurricane season. Getting drunk rarely enters into it for me.
Let me say straight up that if there is any need visitors get evacuated first and this year the people in charge have announced they will be cautious and thoughtful before they order an evacuation. In the past they tended to evacuate tourists at the first sign of a distant storm to the detriment of local business. The chances of a vacation being interrupted are remote but it can happen. Prices are lower in summer for a reason and a vacation in the tropics in hurricane season requires a certain level of maturity and flexibility in a traveler. Just like if you come in winter and meet the rain and gray of a two day cold front there's no point in getting mad. Shit happens but a hurricane is no threat to a visitor's safety.Everyone has their own plan and my wife and I have developed our response to the threat. For what it's worth she gets the dog in the car and evacuates the minute schools are closed (high season for storms is in September when schools are back in session). She leaves immediately before Highway One gets clogged and lines form at gas stations and she takes a "vacation" with friends on the mainland. I don't get to evacuate as mine is a reserved occupation so I close up the house and wait to be ordered in to work where we get locked down for the duration of the storm, and if you think sleeping in a police station with one's colleagues is a breeze you have another think coming. There's nothing quite like stepping out of the shower into the men's locker room where the SWAT team is getting a last minute briefing. "Uh, good morning!" one says brightly clutching the towel closer. Boarding school was never quite so...well armed? People wonder how one copes with an annual storm season and it is a nuisance but when one considers that hurricanes give plenty of warning and loss of life in a storm is a rarity in Key Westwe have to feel sorry for the people living through and dying in tornadoes and flooding Up North while cold winter rains fall on people out west in June and so on and so forth. Living in the Keys it's hard not to notice the power of nature up close and personal, so one tends to be more preared mentally for the possibility of disaster. The millions who live in the unprepared suburbs of the big cities like Miami and Fort Lauderdale are likely to suffer a lot more during the soggy power-free aftermath of a hurricane. People in the Keys really pull together when faced with a destructive hurricane, if history is any guide.
Hurricanes bring out a lot of braggadocio in people and the pseudo toughs sneer at those of us making preparations but I have always found talk is cheap. Sensible precautions are...sensible. Storms are unpredictable and they generate tornadoes within them that create unpredictable damage and your home may survive one and not the other. There is an element of luck that supersedes preparation. I just know that I feel better locked in at work knowing my wife and dog are safe and I have done what I can to look after our home. And that is how a fussy middle aged worrier prepares for hurricane season. Getting drunk rarely enters into it for me.
By the time you arrive in the parking lot there are many useful sign posts, better late than never as the cliché has it.
Dogs are welcome but I prefer to leave Cheyenne, well walked, in the car providing there is shade and a breeze and that was what we did. The shaded parking on the right... 
are Tiki huts for the people who live on their boats in Burdines' marina. 
The restaurant is at the end of the pea rock, past the date palm dedicated to Gene Burdines.
Burdines offers the passing boat all services including fuel which could be a bit of a hazard for diners.
I had a bottle of Yuengling but my wife took her calories in the form of Burdines well known home made lemonade.
The basket of fries in the middle are heavily salted but I resisted the temptation for a second beer. Excess in moderation. The cheese steak was fine though there was more bread than I could eat. My wife enjoyed her tuna, a dish I cannot for the life of me enjoy as I like my meat cooked which is barbaric I know.
It was a great day to be out, windy and thus cool overlooking the water. This view east toward Boot Key Harbor...
The whole shebang came to $35 including a decent tip.
The planners rejected by the city could have formalized this back to the Earth citizen's movement and given it structure, so it's dismissal on the grounds of cost seems spurious at best. More likely it seems the alternative , low key planning threatened the nonsensical marina plan and upscale shopping experience suggested by Spottswood-Meisel.
I don't see much in the way of community value to be placed in a project that promotes more Miami-style upscale development when this waterfront open space could be used for the people who live in town and who don't arrive by yacht. In the end I am a county resident and don't vote in city elections so I stand on the sidelines and watch the tussle from a far. 
In other development news I was saddened to hear what I believe is only a rumor. It seems the plan to convert the Waterfront Market building into a brew pub may be foundering. Apparently the Bight Board (the city owns the properties around the waterfront) says a brewpub is not compatible with other used. Like the Turtle Kraal? Half Shell/ Conch Republic Seafood? Huh? I hope this rumor proves to be unfounded. Mind you there is a move for a bowling alley to go into the former Waterfront Market which isn't a bad idea. Personally I'd rather the rent for the empty, vast spacious Silver Eagle distributing warehouse on North Roosevelt were able to accommodate a bowling alley and game parlor (pool anyone?) and decent beer be brewed on the waterfront. I would like that compromise a lot. I hope the rumors of brewing's demise are just that.
My forays around town lead me to think there are huge numbers of visitors here compared to the normally somnolent nature of key West in the period between snowbird season and summer family fun time.
I was mooching around on Elizabeth Street sharing a moment of directional indecision with my dog when I looked up and saw this: 
I often find people like to drive slowly on the famous bridge which as a result ends up with me passing the visitors as I prefer to be at homerather than staring up their exhaust pipes. It does not seem to be a well known fact but the dotted double yellow lines on the bridge do allow passing though, like anywhere in the Keys if you are going to pass you want to do it cautiously. Some callow youth killed a couple of strangers here a few months ago in a head on that closed the road for some considerable time. Looking in my mirror this grotesque contraption followed my example:
Darth Vader on an orange tricycle followed me across the bridge. I was surprised by how handy the contraption appeared to be. I see more and more tricycles appearing in various guises on the roads so I guess a simple old fashioned hack as a sidecar is known, is no longer desirable for many riders. I had always planned on getting a sidecar for my motorcycle when balancing becomes tricky but perhaps I will have to harness something like this instead.
That would shock the wife if she went downstairs one day and saw the Bonneville had been traded in for a Volkswagen engine in a tricycle...It would shock me too.
Despite the lack of convenient parking. Scaffolding means construction:
What comes next here who knows. I shall be interested to see what happens to the former sail loft. The empty building next door has two sets of development fans, if you read the anonymous comments in the paper. I'm with the brew pub contingent as I can't bowl to save my life. Where I grew up in Italy we rode mopeds owing to the severe shortage of bowling alleys.
I had thought the new dorms at the Florida Keys Community College were going to appear in the parking lot behind the cafeteria but instead the much more sensible idea seems to have taken root to stick them in the very back of the college next to the Public Safety training g building which also houses the dive school. This last legacy of the Landesberg-Boyle administration is coming along nicely and should help the school attract students from out of state. Onwards and Upwards!