Double Up - Thursday&Friday 6/4-6/5 - Chillin in Key West

Had a couple of  relaxing but busy days here in the Key West and got to tired to write last night.  So....It's a double up blog today.

More Chickens

Iguanas are everywhere here in every shape, size and color

Wednesday 6/4
Yesterday again brought a significant rain throughout a good part of the morning and early afternoon.  We mostly hung out at the marina on the boat.  Renee did a LOT of studying for her midterm exam that she has scheduled for Saturday morning.   Erik cooked omelettes for breakfast, did a couple loads of laundry, napped :-) and did a zoom meeting for work in the mid afternoon.   We had our leftover ribs from the monster rack of ribs from the day before for a late lunch. 

We could walk the streets here for many hours checking out all of the cool old houses; also large and small

By about 4pm the rain stopped and the skies partly cleared.   Our friends Matt and Krysten Smart had arrived from Zanesville for their 20th anniversary trip.   They had their honeymoon here, came for their 10th anniversary and now are back for their 20th......congratulations on two decades of loving, living and laughing together!   We rode our bikes into town to meet up with them.   Our hoooptie bikes are starting to show signs of failure.  Renee's is having issues shifting and she is basically stuck in one gear.  Erik's is making an awful high pitched squealing sound that no amount of chain oil has yet been able to cure.   Both of them occasionally loose their chains and if you peddle backwards the chains loosen badly.   The worst part is that when the chain comes off it is very messy to get back on because they are still covered in a nasty concoction of rust/PB blaster/chain oil.  We have been leaving them in spots all over town with the hopes that they will possibly get stolen and we will be FORCED to purchase new ones....lol.    So, after some fiddling with them we managed to make it into town a little later than expected.   We were to meet Krysten and Matt at the Cuban Coffee Queen and decide what we would do from there.   Unfortunately, for the second day in a row, the Coffee Queen had shut down just before we arrived :-(

We walked a mile or so through the streets people watching, looking in windows of shops and enjoying nice conversation.   We stopped at 'Flamingo Crossing', an ice cream shop that our friend Ben had recommended as having a bomb Cuban Coffee ice cream.    We all four had it and it did not disappoint!    We then walked down the street toward the Southern Most Point monument where as we were standing and talking Ben showed up on his scooter and we had a nice visit with him as well.  Of course there was the obligatory pics taken at the monument. 

Matt and Krysten here to celebrate their 20th Anniversary.....congratulations guys! 

AND....our good friend Ben tracked us down again at the Southernmost Point

On our way walking back we stopped off at The Hemingway House and the Lighthouse, both of which were closed for tours by this time of the evening but it was still neat to see the outsides and get a few pictures.   We parted ways with Matt and Krysten as they are staying at the Heron House right downtown.   We continued along back to our bikes.....darn it.....they were still there untouched.

We love our lighthouses

Hemingway house
Closed for the day but got some good outside pics 

It was a nice, relaxing and very enjoyable day and we retired happy to be able to have great friends to meet up with in this special place.

Thursday 6/5
It was yet another rainy start to the day.  Not much hard rain but on and off throughout a good part of the morning again.   Renee did more studying although we are not sure why because she did look at the grading scale for the class and discovered that she can basically get an 11% on the test and still be holding a strong A......besides, C's get degrees :-)  Erik spend a good part of the day on boat maintenance; checked all fluids on engines, replaced the shower water pump discharge, vacuumed and fiddled with the bikes again to ensure we can get some more rides out of them.   We also spent an hour or so hanging out and with our boat neighbors (Gary and Ronnie aboard 'Island In The Sun') two slips down.   They have been here since Christmas.   They have boated here from Vermont and had intended to be heading back north with the boat a couple of months ago and then.....Covid.  So, they have now been here six months.  Nice folks recently retired, she from nursing and he from engineering. 

As is customary among 'Loopers' we exchanged boat cards with Gary and Ronnie from Vermont

By about 3pm the skies had cleared and the sun was shining.   We grilled up Italian sausages and asparagus for a late lunch/early dinner and then headed out on the bikes back towards town.  We had been wishing that we had one of the fancy bike baskets that so many folks have down here so, as we came into town we stopped at a bicycle shop and purchased us one.  We rode by the 'Anchors Aweigh Club' which is the local recovery clubhouse here in downtown.   It was almost 6:15pm by this time so we missed the 5:30 meeting and the next one was not scheduled until 8:30pm....maybe tomorrow we will catch one.

We will be back to visit more friends of Bill another day! 

Basket in place must mean that it's a shopping day!  So, that is what we did.   We first went to Key West Marine Hardware where we were told earlier by Gary that they had really good pricing.  We are still debating on pulling the trigger on the purchase of a new chart plotter.  Unfortunately, we discovered they do not sell them.  We moved on to West Marine where we decided to pull the trigger and get the Simrad Go7 XSE with Navionics.  But wait....of course they did not have one in stock.  Guess we will have to keep looking.  Today we actually went into quite a few shops and made some purchases.....all things we NEEDED of course: two stops at the Cuban Coffee Queen (one Cuban Coffee Frappe is too many and a thousand is never enough!), a couple of Yeti coffee Mugs, a new spray nozzle for our hose, peppermint oil from CVS (Erik's note to self....never use the bathroom shortly after applying peppermint oil on wife's back! lol), a new bathing suit top for Renee (yep yep...you read that right...bathing suit TOP...WOOT WOOT!), a small jewelry box, two sea horse shot glasses (of course we will use as espresso cups) and last but not least was a stop in the candy store where we walked out with a couple of chocolate/pecan covered pretzels to bring home to enjoy with our evening coffee.

Our many wares of the day
This basket may create the need for us to get a bigger boat!  

These hanging hammock chairs would be the bomb hanging on our porch at our land home :-) 
They are SOOOOO comfortable

Key West Hammock had several very cool things that we wanted
We took lots of pictures of several different ones so that we can maybe attempt our own versions when we get home

Nice lighthouse painting we both liked
$3500 art is not exactly our budget though

Do we really need more? 

delicious chocolate and pecan covered pretzel sticks that came back to the boat with us 

old theater building is now a Walgreens

After our rides back to the marina we showered and enjoyed our pretzel treats while Renee did a little more cramming for tomorrow mornings test while Erik sat and caught up on the blog for the past two days.