Duval In The Mirror

There is something odd happening in Key West. We have a friend visiting from Pensacola for a week and my wife wanted to take Therese to Latitudes restaurant for lunch. The lunch menu isn't murderously expensive as dinner is, plus you get to enjoy eating on the waterfront amid the colors and breezes of a sunny afternoon after an energizing ferry ride. The service is first rate and the slapdash style of key West is in abeyance for a few hours to impress the out-of-towner with upscale dining.

Apparently Layne's plan was so good that thousands of other people adopted it as well and Latitudes has no lunch time reservations open before August. In light of the fact Therese is going home in a  week that isn't going to work out. I have no idea what's happening but I am guessing the pandemic has made everyone desperate for a vacation and with borders closed Key West is the next best thing. It feels as though climate change is taking a back seat to over population as the leading cause of land sinking in the Keys at the moment. The place is packed.

The Viper sports car as  an ecological symbol.  Irony is alive and well in Key West (below). As is tourism alive and well and everyone wants to be here, except Conchscooter. How perverse am I? I was mentioning to my wife after the pool party, our first social outing in 15 months, how silly we were 23 years ago to quit our California beach home, our convertible and our precarious lower rungs on the expensive ladder of life  in Santa Cruz, in order to go sailing and land up in Key West.

Now we have another precarious lower rung on the increasingly absurdly expensive ladder of life in Key West and in a few months, less than 300 days actually, we will be giving it all up. How does that make sense?

I don't think of it as leaving Key West, rather it is a matter of going somewhere else. My wife also pointed out that as the subject of our open ended travels come up none of our friends tries to dissuade us, none of them argue for us to stay put, none of them find it odd that we are planning our departure. It isn't  a question of leaving Key West, it's the imperative of seeing somewhere else.

In the world of sailing there is the joke that is you want to go from A  to B you take a power boat. If you want to leave A you take a sailboat. In our V-6 powered van we are leaving, we hope, with no final destination in mind, no return date on the calendar. We will scrape the bottom of the barrel of human travel experiences we hope.

Why the imperative to go? I'm not sure if it is a lemming gene I inherited, or a curiosity gene or the restlessness of a life lived outside the polite confines of settled society.  The need to depart implies a criticism of the place one is leaving and in this case I don't think that is fair or accurate.

The deficiency lies in me in that regard, not key West. I think my wife would have been fine with taking planes to lots of different places round the world had I pushed for that. As long as she is seeing new places she's happy. However she has dived right into thevan as home concept and is an equal partner in the madness of overland travel as planned. And as unplanned later.

I have this fear inside that I am letting life pass me by if I sit still, it's too easy to sit still and not be challenged. I did the job to earn the pension, that equation was easy. Now I feel as though I am letting myself down if I don't find and face the challenges of the road. I could go boating around the Keys, or learn to be a barfly, or take up another career as a fishing guide ( I jest) but what I want more than anything is to see certain places before I die.

Driving round the US is fun but I don't find it challenging. Going places I've not seen before, fixing the van in exotic places, learning new currencies, new histories and figuring out how to say hello in Xhosa would be fun. Bob Evans and Flying J truck stops are the same everywhere, though my biggest challenge in insular communities is being understood through my immigrant's accent.

Travel liberates me, I can be who I want to be in places where I'm not a civil servant. I want to love where there are no expectations of me, no roots to define me, places where I am as strange as the places I discover. Key West was like that once long ago, and I trust it will be again when like Odysseus I return from jousting with Fate. 

Duval Night

Bar  debris proving the night before was a commercial success. 

I wonder what all refers to?

I got a complaint at work that neighbors were leaving trash cans on the sidewalks. I referred them to city inspectors for such things. I don't call in complaints when Rusty and I are walking around town.

There's a new chain store on Duval Street so I took a  photo to remind myself to look it up. Branches in Oklahoma and Key West. It's a place that sells food to go in picnic plates or some such. When you thought you'd seen everything...

Dawn coming up all blue behind the Pier House. 

More faint dawn light, the blue hour, over Key West harbor. The east winds that are persisting nicely this year make being outdoors really lovely and fresh. Good sleeping weather, except my dog wakes me up even on my days off.

Very temporary tattoos as evidenced by the brown paper door covering. Post pandemic life.

One day I shall list every single alley off Duval Street. Or maybe I shan't, there are so many.

Back to bed and to sleep.

Café Marquesa

Our visitor said I want to take you guys out to dinner. Okay my wife said and  got us reservations at six o'clock right after my shift ended. Which is how we ended up at Café Marquesa. We walked in and I realized I did not even have  a mask in my pocket. Only the staff were masked and the diners, all adults, were one supposed, like us vaccinated.

You can imagine the emotions, sitting down and being waited on like we were people who mattered, talking about this and that, it was all banal and normal and profoundly changed. A quick zip to get us started, amusing our mouths:

We came to the café years ago and found the experience profoundly unsatisfactory, a  snobbish affair and  not at all welcoming. The pity of it is that was an age ago and obviously everything has  changed, in this town change is the constant and we have deprived ourselves of the possibility over the years of a special night out. 

The food was excellent, not salty, not gimmicky but also not quite normal. I don't normally eat shrimp and grits with broth but after this example I wish I did. Layne had friend green tomatoes which she loves for some reason only here they came with smoked swordfish:

I joked it was an upscale tuna fish sandwich (which I really  like in normal life) but once again the odd mixture of ingredients made the dish special.  Therese had oysters Rockefeller, a classic made perfect and creamy and not overly overdone. Sharing was the order of the night of course as my wife says sharing food is an unwritten marriage vow.

I've never had flash fried osso buco before, but the chef explained the meat is brined and marinated before being fried and naturally the meat fell of the bone. Layne likes duck and she found hers with - not an orange sauce but cherry!- the best she's had....It was the theme of the evening.

Therese ordered Sancerre to drink and scallops to eat which were of course perfect and we spent two hours dawdling like the good old days.

If Café du Monde in New Orleans could produce beignets like these I would be happy, but they don't. These are soft and vanilla flavored, airy doughnut balls perfect to end a meal on. Therese gave us the history lesson them and said they were developed as siege food when all other ingredients ran out and only oil and flour were left. My kind of starvation diet.

Because we had gone mad, or perhaps because Therese started out dinner with a brandy (wild woman) we ordered three puddings including a pot of chocolate and a slice of Key Lime Pie, properly tart. There used to be a lady in the Torch Keys who made pies for Parrotdise the restaurant that went away and she made the best Key Lime Pie in the Keys (fighting words). This has to be a close contender to win that title.  Who would have expected that in a place like this? Fishermen's food made right.

Even the toilet had me fascinated  studying this contact sheet of photos from Havana I'm guessing.

Worth a visit. Definitely. 

Walk it off!

A serene yet breezy evening in Key West. 

Zero Night

I attended a retirement party this week. It took me a few moments to realize that there were no masks, just a bunch of vaccinated middle aged people hanging around the pool. We are starting life again. How odd.

Gary asked me to post a picture of him on the blog so I chose this one of him swimming in the canal, as the pool wasn't large enough to contain his saltwater ambitions. When you are from Tennessee and you are Garythetourist a trip to Key West doesn't count unless you immerse yourself in Mother Ocean. 

His wife shrugged philosophically as he took off on the paddleboard frantically jabbing the water to find unexplored vistas of open water. Another wife joined in the shrugging pointing out sometimes you have to let your husbands be idiots so they get it out of their systems. That seemed a positive note for my retirement plans… He came back in the fullness of time none the worst for wear. I was still pondering the new/old normal. I quite liked being normal for a evening. 

The pandemic has undoubtedly had some positive spin offs, assuming you weren't one of the nearly 600,000 dead, and millions more made sick or bankrupted or unemployed. Oh and the mental health deterioration suffered by so many in lockdown. 

There was that pandemic period of time by contrast when you could eat on the sidewalk in Key West. Compared to the wreckage economic and human it wasn't much of a compensation for the damned virus but it was nice for people who craved eating at a restaurant to be able to get outdoor table service.

Inasmuch as the virus is in retreat in the US, so is sidewalk dining in Key West. I am not a huge fan of sharing my food with the flies but after a lifetime living around people who like to eat alfresco I submit to the will of the majority and sit outside when asked. I picnic with the best of the them, I sweat over my food like a champion.  I tell you: I love to eat outdoors (lying through gritted teeth).

Oddly enough this isn't about me and my peculiar flair for nonsensical nonconformity, because tons of people love to eat outside, so much so the City of Key West has now returned to its pre-pandemic stance and is working to making it unviable. A story in the Keys Weekly is pointing out the absurdly high fees charged by the city to allow sidewalk seating. So high most places can't make a go of it.

Key West is the ideal town for outdoor seating so the city is now going to charge five hundred dollars per sidewalk seat. That's a lot of pizzas and sandwiches to sell just to pay for the seat. The paper in its very thorough report checks other cities' policies and none of them come close to charging five hundred bucks. Many of them demand nothing more than insurance coverage, a no cost paperwork modification apparently.

So I shall ask myself out loud: why? Does no one in charge know the fable of the death of the goose that laid the golden egg?

Beside the fee structure the pleasure people get from eating their food where it is best exposed to microbes and dust and personal discomfort is hard to assess. 

This fee problem reminds me of those irritating "No U-Turn" signs scattered around municipalities. Why, I ask myself do they say no U-turn? Because people want to make a U-turn here, that's why!

It was nice while it lasted, seeing people eat outdoors as they preferred. Not any more. This is a return to normal that makes no sense to me.

The crucial paragraphs that explain the dilemma clearly to me:

“A total of two applications were approved and paid for, the first was Bill Lay of La Trattoria, and the second was Cafe Marquesa,” Anderson said. “I am an owner of Amigos, and at that time I looked at the program and determined it was too expensive. We chose not to participate, as did every single other restaurant on the island except for the above two.

“There were many reasons we thought the fees were too high,” Anderson said, explaining that, “additional sidewalk seats only generate extra revenue for a restaurant when 100% of the interior seats are occupied. If only 75% of seats are full, and a table chooses to sit outside, the restaurant is not generating any additional revenue, but merely shifting occupancy from interior to exterior.”

In addition, Anderson said, outside seats are not as valuable as interior seats because they’re not as desirable when it’s too hot, too windy, raining (or threatening to rain).

“Restaurants with higher ticket averages, such as La Trattoria and Cafe Marquesa, can more easily absorb annual costs. Low-ticket restaurants, such as pizza parlors, taco shops and others are at a disadvantage,” he said, adding that the program includes numerous other unknowns that make such a large investment risky, especially following the pandemic year.

How much more rational than that can the explanation be for opposing the fees? Only in Key West, the best known frost-free city in North America does outdoor dining not exist. That is way weirder than going to a mask-free pool party, and that felt weird enough. 

Duval And Front

Tourism in the Keys, what a thing of beauty! I enjoy history and I recommend taking the 90 minute Conch Train tour to get a condensed view of the history of this town, and there is a bit of history as the town  is approaching the 200 year mark.

Sloppy Joe's is where everyone goes for bar food, music, drinks and t-shirts which give visitors the right to say they were there. It's not my kind of place but Key West would have gone bankrupt a long time ago paying attention to my whims.

Souvenir stalls are everywhere selling what the English call tat but which I find very useful as little thank you gifts when I travel. A tatse of the Conch Republic...

Mallory Square is in the news as the city commission is gearing up to rebuild the ship dock off the square. It's designed to accommodate smaller cruise ships and it won't be enlarged because there isn't room. But it will be opened to the public after it's done.

I like that idea. the current pier is fenced off as it is considered a hazard when ships aren't docked there. The new will allow people, even I dare say people with cameras, to step on the new dock. I might have to come back to check it out...

I was interested in the buildings that were decomposing and are now being rebuilt on the southern side of Mallory Square.  What the shirtless man was doing I couldn't say. He seemed harmless which is as mush as you can ask these days.

I checked out a group of people limin' in a most unAmerican way., more like European villagers if you ask me. I found them quite charming, a reminder to slow down. So I kept walking of course.

The Mallory Square observer. I wonder if she enjoyed watching the space as much as I did on my lunch break?

The city commission is apparently finding enlightenment on the sore subject of electric bikes. The newspaper says the city will allow electric bikes to travel as pedal bikes. In a town overwhelmed with cars helping alternatives to flourish seems sensible to me. There are always the detractors who complain about some poor riding techniques and doubtless the debate will continue long past my departure. And no we aren't hauling bicycles, kayaks or paraphernalia of similar sorts around with us on our van. We shall rent locally as the mood strikes us.

I am surprised how strong the scooter market remains in Key West. I would have thought electric bikes would be popular but I suspect someone needs to create a strong simple durable electric bike at a bargain price to break into the rental market. 

Summer is here, bright lights, strong shadows and lots of people. The virus is fast becoming a  memory, an unpleasant one at that.