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Hanging Out in Key West

 We spent a week in Key West at the beginning of March, but we didn’t go there in the Scamp. Parking is hard in Key West, and there’s also a lot of rules about vehicles you can sleep in not being allowed to park anywhere down there, so we winterized Scamp Shrimpi and found a place for it to rest next to a ferris wheel that made it look even smaller than it really is. Then we took an airplane to the Keys.

Our friends Mark and Anne picked us up at the Key West Airport, which is still under construction and probably will be for a few more years, but that’s okay. We were quickly on our way to their house in paradise, and as usual the warm weather and blue skies never end when you’re down there.

We went for a walk down to the harbor not long after we got there, just to get a glimpse of the turquoise sea. We found that the wharves and walkways extend a long way between the many restaurants and resort hotels, so we wandered for awhile.

Looking out from Key West wharves at the Straits of Florida

We also went past the Southernmost Point buoy, just to see all the folks waiting in line to get their photo taken next to the buoy. Later in the week we discovered that they have a blow-up simulacrum of the buoy at the weekly arts & crafts fair, for those who aren’t up for waiting in line and don’t mind a little subterfuge.


The Southernmost Point buoy in Key West

Our friends have a lovely back deck around their swimming pool, and Anne once took a class in mosaics and made a pillar with a watchful octopus who keeps an eye on activities at the pool. Other neighbors include parrots at a parrot rescue that backs up onto their lower patio. We listened to the parrots yammer at each other and occasionally wolf whistle, and they all go quite mad at 3:30 in the afternoon when it’s time for them to go in. A really jungle sound effect to go with Mark’s poolside music playlists, which always make me think I’m at Philipps Swim Club listening to the radio tuned to WSAI in the 70s or WEBN in the 80s.

This octopus watches over the pool

We visited the Key West Aquarium one day, a small but interesting place. It was built as a WPA project in 1935, and survived the Labor Day hurricane that hit the keys that year and wiped out Henry Flagler’s railroad (more about that in another post). I once visited an aquarium in a shopping mall in Boise, Idaho, not to mention the impressively big Newport Aquarium in Northern Kentucky, so I’ve seen aquariums large and small, and the Key West Aquarium can hold its own. In addition to lots of smallish fish and corals in tanks along the walls inside, there are big pools with sea turtles and rays, and outside there is another pool that features giant tarpon, catfish, nurse sharks, and other species. The Aquarium was the first tourist attraction in Key West—it had previously not really needed tourism because it had been one of the richest cities in America before the Great Depression, but had fallen on hard times with the rest of the country.


A seahorse at the Key West Aquarium

The Aquarium also originally included artwork, because it was a WPA project, of course. The paintings are frescoes, in which the artist applies color to wet plaster—a difficult medium that goes way back to pre-Renaissance Italy and Giotto’s famous frescoes. The main artist at the Key West Aquarium was also originally from Italy, a man named Alfred Crimi. His paintings of the fisheries on the islands were restored after they fell into disrepair, and are looking pretty good today. More sightseeing in Key West coming soon!

A fresco at the Key West Aquarium

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