way down south
Sep. 9th, 2010 11:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishOn a more pleasant note, Key West.
Our journey started less than auspiciously on Thursday (8/26), withuilos and me waiting for the bus to take us to the metro, from about five minutes before the scheduled arrival time to twenty minutes after. Metro's "Next Bus" thing online went from claiming "7 minutes" to "3 minutes" to "No data available" to "98 minutes," so we got a ride from a guy at the leasing office who was heading out to West Falls Church anyway. (I suspect "Next Bus" knows the schedule and GPS locator information for the bus in the same way that Lipton knows tea.)
The flights were unremarkable. Miami's airport is very pretty and has lots of fish all over the place, but sucks for food. Key West's is about the size of Roanoke's, I think (but I've not been to the Roanoke airport in five years, and not been inside it since before 9/11) so there's not much to be said about it.
We arrived in weather that was remarkably like the weather we'd left, found the guest house where we were staying, and collapsed for the evening.
The guest house was actually pretty neat. It's made up of several small buildings and a couple of pools, in a courtyard with lots of palm trees and other tropical greenery. There were a bunch of little lizards (anoles, most likely) running about the place, a "continental" breakfast from the Continent of People Who Don't Much Care About Breakfast, and an orange cat who liked to sleep on the newspapers. About my only complaint is that the in-window AC unit wasn't really sufficient to cool or dehumidify the room, so each morning any part of my body that had been touching anything (like, say, the bed) was drenched in sweat.
Friday was much touristing, during which I did not buy a hat (oops), and also the Aquarium with green herons that tried to steal the fish being used to feed the horde of nurse sharks and rays. I do mean horde, too: the nurse sharks (looked like fifty or so but probably around twenty) were literally trying to swim on top of each other to get at the food, and the rays were jumping out of the water for their fishes. The aquarium is small but neat: it's got several walls of fish in tanks, a number of wounded turtles, and even a couple of alligators. Plus the aforementioned green herons. Sunset was nice but nothing special: a bit too cloudy, and due to the time of year it ended behind a small island.
Satyrday started with a failure to snorkel (slightly rough weather and, more importantly, no one else signed up for our trip), so there was some compensatory swimming in the pool (because it was hot out there) and then some more tromping. We got out and wandered through the graveyard where they've started stacking the coffins on top of each other due to a lack of space. There's something pleasantly permanent about a graveyard, a sense of continuity in community that I don't get from things like churches or parks. I've about come round to the idea that if and when I find a place I belong I'd like to be memorialized in some way. I'd also prefer for it to be a useful memorial, though, a bench or statue or some such rather than a simple headstone. (I've known for decades that I want UKL's "Only in silence the word" etc engraved on whatever it is.)
And then there was, finally, snorkeling, with a different (and awesome) company. We took the Reef Express out to a couple of diving spots with good shallow reefs for floating and drifting and staring at and occasionally diving to get a closer look at. Lots of big fans with purple stems and veins fading off to greygreenblue, and a few nicely swirly brain corals. A whole bunch of different varieties of parrotfish snacking on coral, and not just the rainbow ones you usually see or hear about. I did not witness the gigantic grouper, because I was about thirty feet away watching a hundred or so medium-sized blue fish wander past. Good, but exhausting; I wimped out about twenty minutes into the second 45-minutes dive. (I'd rented prescription goggles from the dive shop nearby, so I could still see what was going on. Which was a Good Thing.)
Sunday we packed up, scooted through the very bored Key West airport security, and flew home through Miami, where we collapsed rather than try to get out to Tribal Cafe's fifth anniversary show. Oh well. I'll make it to one of those again at some point.
All in all, a very good and very much-needed vacation.
Our journey started less than auspiciously on Thursday (8/26), with
uilos and me waiting for the bus to take us to the metro, from about five minutes before the scheduled arrival time to twenty minutes after. Metro's "Next Bus" thing online went from claiming "7 minutes" to "3 minutes" to "No data available" to "98 minutes," so we got a ride from a guy at the leasing office who was heading out to West Falls Church anyway. (I suspect "Next Bus" knows the schedule and GPS locator information for the bus in the same way that Lipton knows tea.)The flights were unremarkable. Miami's airport is very pretty and has lots of fish all over the place, but sucks for food. Key West's is about the size of Roanoke's, I think (but I've not been to the Roanoke airport in five years, and not been inside it since before 9/11) so there's not much to be said about it.
We arrived in weather that was remarkably like the weather we'd left, found the guest house where we were staying, and collapsed for the evening.
The guest house was actually pretty neat. It's made up of several small buildings and a couple of pools, in a courtyard with lots of palm trees and other tropical greenery. There were a bunch of little lizards (anoles, most likely) running about the place, a "continental" breakfast from the Continent of People Who Don't Much Care About Breakfast, and an orange cat who liked to sleep on the newspapers. About my only complaint is that the in-window AC unit wasn't really sufficient to cool or dehumidify the room, so each morning any part of my body that had been touching anything (like, say, the bed) was drenched in sweat.
Friday was much touristing, during which I did not buy a hat (oops), and also the Aquarium with green herons that tried to steal the fish being used to feed the horde of nurse sharks and rays. I do mean horde, too: the nurse sharks (looked like fifty or so but probably around twenty) were literally trying to swim on top of each other to get at the food, and the rays were jumping out of the water for their fishes. The aquarium is small but neat: it's got several walls of fish in tanks, a number of wounded turtles, and even a couple of alligators. Plus the aforementioned green herons. Sunset was nice but nothing special: a bit too cloudy, and due to the time of year it ended behind a small island.
Satyrday started with a failure to snorkel (slightly rough weather and, more importantly, no one else signed up for our trip), so there was some compensatory swimming in the pool (because it was hot out there) and then some more tromping. We got out and wandered through the graveyard where they've started stacking the coffins on top of each other due to a lack of space. There's something pleasantly permanent about a graveyard, a sense of continuity in community that I don't get from things like churches or parks. I've about come round to the idea that if and when I find a place I belong I'd like to be memorialized in some way. I'd also prefer for it to be a useful memorial, though, a bench or statue or some such rather than a simple headstone. (I've known for decades that I want UKL's "Only in silence the word" etc engraved on whatever it is.)
And then there was, finally, snorkeling, with a different (and awesome) company. We took the Reef Express out to a couple of diving spots with good shallow reefs for floating and drifting and staring at and occasionally diving to get a closer look at. Lots of big fans with purple stems and veins fading off to greygreenblue, and a few nicely swirly brain corals. A whole bunch of different varieties of parrotfish snacking on coral, and not just the rainbow ones you usually see or hear about. I did not witness the gigantic grouper, because I was about thirty feet away watching a hundred or so medium-sized blue fish wander past. Good, but exhausting; I wimped out about twenty minutes into the second 45-minutes dive. (I'd rented prescription goggles from the dive shop nearby, so I could still see what was going on. Which was a Good Thing.)
Sunday we packed up, scooted through the very bored Key West airport security, and flew home through Miami, where we collapsed rather than try to get out to Tribal Cafe's fifth anniversary show. Oh well. I'll make it to one of those again at some point.
All in all, a very good and very much-needed vacation.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-10 03:26 pm (UTC)What I meant was, "I have very little recollection of how big Roanoke's airport is, other than 'kinda not big,' but the Key West airport is also kinda not big."