The Keys

I arrived in Key West on Friday afternoon. Google said it was going to be an eight hour drive. It wasn't even close. It took me about 5 and a half hours. Stupid Google — that stock price is going to plummet. As soon as you get south of Homestead near the tip of mainland Florida you realize you're heading into a unique place. Key West is an archipelago, so you're essentially driving on coral reefs for 100 miles. I ended up chatting with a couple of my hostel roomies, Dean and Sean, and we decided to go down Duval Street for the night. Dean is an Australian who worked as an accountant, hated his job and quit to travel the world (like me!). He's been on the road for five months and been all over the place partying. He says he's spent close to 40 grand. My heart hurt. Meanwhile, Sean has been travelling about for a few weeks and is headed up to Salt Lake City! He mentioned how he was kicked out the same hostel I stay at last time he went. Crazy. Duval Street is wild. We got ourselves a drink beforehand, sitting inside a liquor store eating chicken and drinking then slipped down the road into an Irish bar. Somehow, we lost Dean cause he was chasing down a cougar (and this morning he tells me, 'Yea, she was 43...but she was alright!'). Sean and I made due, listening to the live music and drinking Guiness. The singer played Wild Rover so I got a kick out of being the only person in the bar who knew the words and would yell, 'Ride up yer kilts!' as da boys used to do at Shillaleghs. I encouraged Sean to heckle the singer with me and ask the guy to play Dirty Old Town, since it WAS an Irish bar. He ignored us. We wandered down the road and jumped in and out of bars for a while, getting turned down by a big black bouncer at one place for being too intoxicated (true) but unwittingly ending up inside by a different entrance so when we left by the original entrance, he grabbed a hold of us and started ranting about his coworkers letting people in like us who he said couldn't go inside. Beautiful. We just stood there and played dumb. I was the drunkest person on Duval. For sure. I don't remember much after that except falling into bed and throwing in my ear plugs. That as they say, was that.