Keys

The old farmer and his lovely wife spent a few days down in the Florida Keys.  Our first time to the southern part of Florida.  We flew into Miami, rented a little red Toyota Yaris, and drove to Key Largo for our first night.  Gilbert's Resort and Marina is an old fashioned resort right on the water.  The restaurant served German food, so I had a German burger for supper.  It was a big hamburger topped with grilled onions, mushrooms, bacon, and smothered with Swiss cheese.
The back door of our room opened onto a boardwalk along the water with a view of the marina and one of the Keys bridges.  Pelicans frequented the area.

We drove on out to Key West over many bridges, including one that was seven miles long.  I had my first Key Lime pie at the Grand Cafe at noon on Duval Street.  We took a history tour of old town Key West in the afternoon.  The weather was pleasant and we saw Truman's "Little White House", Hemingways house, the Shipwreck Treasures Museum, and many other historic buildings.  In the evening we ate at the Hogfish Bar & Grill in the commercial fishing(seedy) area of the island.  I had crab stuffed hogfish.  The Hogfish is an ugly fish with a "pig like snout" that it uses to root on the bottom of the ocean looking for its food.  It is not caught on a line, but rather speared by divers.  It is a mild white fish that tasted very good.
Here is our little rental car.  It got 33 miles per gallon.

 The next day we walked around the old part of town, toured the historic seaport district, and shopped Duval street.  At noon, we had lunch at Sloppy Joe's Bar & Grill. It is famous for the sandwich it supposedly invented, but also because it was where Ernest Hemingway used to hang out.  We had just gotten a table, when a cruise ship full of Ohio State Buckeyes unloaded and inundated the place.  We offered to share our table with a couple if they promised not to make fun of the Illini.  They didn't.  We had a nice chat, and it turned out that the wife has a brother who lives in Tremont.  I had a fish sandwich called the "full moon".  It was open faced and smothered with red peppers, mushrooms, onions, and covered with melted cheese.

I had my second piece of Key Lime pie at Kermit's.  In the evening we sat at Fort Zachery Taylor State Park beach to watch the sunset.  It was beautiful.

The next morning we stopped at the southernmost point in the continental U.S.  We were closer to Havana, Cuba, than we were to a Walmart!  It is 90 miles to Havana and the closest Walmart was 150 miles away.  We stopped at a couple of Key West beaches before heading North on Highway One for the 3 hour drive the length of the Keys.  We spent the night in Homestead.

We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick:
Numbers 11:15