A photoblog and other things

Key West has a massive festival called “Fantasy Fest” that finishes up this weekend, and I’m going to it today, Saturday and maybe a bit of Sunday. Now, my last time in Key West was pretty interesting so I’m a bit apprehensive about this one. The only place I could find accomodation was at a Bed and Breakfast place (that doesn’t serve breakfast) located on Marathon Key, about 45 mins drive away from Key West. The guy who owns it is a Vietnam veteran and he was a fighter pilot who flew over 200 missions, so it should be interesting hearing what he has to say for himself. He’s also a massive environmental activist who has had no small part in preventing a lot of Key Largo from being developed and subsequently destroyed. His name is “Captain EcoEd” but for some reason I keep on shortening that to “Captain Co-ed”. Uhhh, yeah.

During the time Florida was getting bombarded with hurricanes, there was one guy we all watched to give us the low down on what the hurricanes’ plans were: Bill Kamal. Bill was the man! We watched him for hours on end coz basically that’s all that was on TV at the time. He always wore a pin-stripe suit and was so precise in what he said I was thinking “now there is a guy who knows his hurricanes!” He was a fountain of hurricane knowledge.

Now read this: news story

Florida just isn’t the same any more people.

Was pretty darn full-on. Like I said, I went to Swap Shop on the Friday night. I wouldn’t say that the place was Florida’s 2nd largest tourist attraction because of the drive in theatre part though. They’re crap. We were watching “Team America” on some shoddy screen with a shoddy projector and shoddy sound. Oh hold on, people don’t go to a drive-in to watch the movie anyway. Anyone who has watched “Grease” would know that. Doh! Ok, next time I go to a drive-in theatre you won’t be hearing about it. Mwa haha. Unfortunately this time I was there with fellow nerds. You can find the best bits of “Team America” on the ads, I swear. I did laugh a couple of times but only at the fact the movie has freaking marionettes walking about, I didn’t laugh at any of the actual dialogue much. Hearing South Park voices everywhere is sorta off-putting since I’m pretty much over South Park.

So, the best part of the night was finding that the Hooters 5 mins from my apartment is actually good. It’s so good in fact that I’ve no need to go to the one in Ft Lauderdale. The quality is, IMHO, much better. The food is good too.

Saturday I was up at 5:30am (only after getting 2 hours of sleep) to go kayaking in the Keys. That was an absolutely FANTASTIC day! I was in a single kayak as was one other guy who is quite experienced. There were about 8 other people in double kayaks. We paddled about 8 miles that day visiting a few small islands around the place like Indian Key. It was just such a fantastic day weather-wise. At some points I was in the middle of the ocean, trying to paddle against the currents and when I stopped to rest and took in the sights I was just so damn relaxed. And then I paddled some more. It was hard to keep up with the rest of the group coz there were two people per kayak making for more paddling power, but I did Australia proud and kept up nonetheless. I did find it difficult at times trying to hold a beer and paddle at the same time though. One pretty funny incident was when we stopped at one of the keys for a swim. Two of the guys were standing on the edge of a jetty and had just jumped in when a park ranger came in on his speedboat *out of nowhere* and said “you’re not supposed to swim within 100 feet of the jetty. There is a sign over there and a sign right under where you jumped from. Please go swim somewhere else”. The amazing thing we didn’t notice him coming, he just appeared and he would have seen everything! The guys were standing up on the railing of the jetty for at least half a minute whilst the ranger was speeding towards our general location.

That night I was in an awesome amount of pain. My shoulders hurt like they never have before and I had a really hard time trying to get to sleep. The pain pretty much disappeared Sunday night though and was completely gone Monday. I was expecting some muscle soreness either Monday or today but I haven’t got any yet, which is really bloody weird. Something is wrong there. Anyway, I plan on doing the trip again so I’ll grab some pictures next time I go.