Off The Hook

Snowy grouper they called the special which my wife and I both ordered for dinner. As good as it looks.

Off the Hook was a favorite before the pandemic and they are still here on Caroline Street with outdoor seating as good as ever for us vaccinated scaredy cats. It was a good meal in good company.

I dislike being the one with the camera so Ed (director) and Marilyn (producer) obliged by exchanging shots over the outdoor table.

Marilyn says the pizza at Off the Hook is the best she's ever had and I had some and it really was good, not salty, crisp and not overloaded. 

I was surprised to see dog bowls and even a  fenced dog area behind the musician's dais with a  fire hydrant and seating for humans. A waiter came out with a bone and our neighbor dug in under his table.

Gosh, I spent the evening feeling guilty for leaving Rusty at home...

The music covers happy hour and ends at seven pm so our fears of not being able to hear each other were exaggerated. It was a very pleasant evening.

And we did the right thing.

Summer dusk cooled by the usual June breeze. It was the perfect evening to eat outside and I mentioned I was surprised to see the snowbirds at our table still in town. They have learned to enjoy early summer in Key West thanks to the pandemic they said. It's nicer than Baltimore.

One gets the feeling that is a new perception of people used to feeling the great heat wave every Easter. Our secret is out. We had  Key Lime ice cream wedged between Snickerdoodle cookies to compensate.

Off the Hook, off the charts. Great service, on point and not intrusive and I really like their Founders All Day IPA a beer with character but without the bitterness of high alcohol beers brewed for people who claim to enjoy bitter beers. I am related to a few of them and I am held in disrepute for preferring beer below 5%. Off the Hook caters to me thank goodness. 

Joy On The Waterfront

Eat it raw indeed. 

It was all business as usual at the Historic Seaport at Key West Bight.

I find myself feeling pompous and rather silly every time I describe the Bight as the Historic Seaport...etc... but as it happens a  Very Important Consultant said the name matters and that's what they came up with. 

The transformation of Turtle Kraals into the Boathouse at Turtle Kraals is not moving especially fast. That's a good name though, connecting the new to the past.

For a mad moment I wanted to own the dinghy with the flared bow. Then I remembered that vans don't need dinghies. Another point in their favor.

Why you say? Because engines fail at the most inconvenient moments, that's why:

This was decidedly a good day to walk the Historic Seaport at Key West Bight on my lunch break:

It's called the Bight by locals because a bight is an indentation in a  coastline suitable for anchoring a ship. The original American settlers in Key West after they bought the island from the Spanish made this corner of the new city the harbor.

Now the shrimp boats are gone and recreational boats have taken their place. This is where the people anchoring out leave their transportation. The one closest has a bag of laundry aboard, reminding us of the joy of living at anchor and doing chores.

"This area is under video surveillance" Makes me glad I don't have to review hours of boring tape every time someone loses their marbles. I behaved impeccably while being surveilled, just so you know.

As usual I was walking against the flow. 

And there were quite a lot of people out enjoying the day.

I saw the potential for a vacation date here:

Telephonic vacation:

Schooner Wharf making people happy since forever. Its Schooner Wharf Bar, by the way, no plurals involved. Schooners Wharf sounds like finger nails on a  black board to my delicate ears. 

Key West: ideal for family vacations. And lots of people think this happy town is not child friendly.

Time to go back to the salt mines. It was good while it lasted. 

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.