So, feeling super stuffed with food after our first dinner on the cruise, Thew & I go back to our stateroom to chill for the night. Still in shock over the fact that we can gorge ourselves again in the morning with a several course breakfast or choose from the many options that room service has to offer, we decided to gorge on room service, checked our selections, and hit the sack.
Now back it up about an hour previous...we're walking around the ship after dinner taking in the awesome sunset and we remark that we're kinda tired and want to get a good night's sleep for walking around Key West the next day. After much boo-hooing from my dad and little bro's calling us pansies and old people, etc., we head down to the room around 9:00ish to hang out/check out the free movies on TV/read for an hour or so before dozing off. Yes, I've become a bore since college...only 3 short years ago...the nights of hanging out 'til 2:00 or 3:00 AM & getting up for a day that started with 8:00 AM classes (or a 6 hour stint of student teaching) followed by 3 hours of practice, are definitely over. I'm lucky if I can keep my eyes open past 10:00 PM nowadays without the help of caffeine. If you haven't hit your mid-twenties yet, just you wait!
Anyway, we dock in Key West at 7:00 AM, so this girl's thinking she'll set the alarm for 7:00 AM, get ready, eat her leisurely room service breakfast, and hit the shore around 8:30 AM (giving us plenty of time to see the sights we originally saw on or Honeymoon 3 years ago and reminisce).
Instead, Thew & I (or should I say, just I, wake to a knock at our door at 5:30 AM with a cheery, rough English shout of "Room Service"). I look at my cell phone next to me, which hasn't changed over from EST time, and see 4:30 AM on the clock...WHAT?! I throw on a robe attempting to not look half as disheveled as I feel and stumble to the door. Now, I'm sure the foreign room service attendant has seen people in more compromising situations than how I looked, but I sure felt exactly how I happened to look...like someone had just awaken me from a few hours of sleep with a tad of jet-lag, a hastily flung on robe, bangs sticking out & other hair jutting out from my head in weird shapes that are usually controlled by hairspray, and to top it all off, my 1950's-style blond glasses (that I don't ever wear in public).
When he asks me to sign our original order I glance at the bottom of the form to see the delivery time of 7:45-8:00 AM scratched out and hastily re-written in my father's handwriting, 5:30-5:45 AM. Oh, I'm steaming now...but not enough to let it bother me from my new plans to shove a croissant in my mouth and drift off to sleep again until 8:00 AM.
This lovely routine continued the next morning, when we didn't even order room service...a lovely greeting at the same time before dawn with a healthy order of smoked salmon and 6 orange juices. Now I convinced this room service attendant to drop off this order at my dad & brother's room just 2 doors over instead of leaving it with us, so I felt a little better. Oh, and don't you think for a second that I didn't order fake room service FOR THEM that morning for an even earlier time...that's right, you don't mess with me and my precious sleep!
After two mornings in a row of this, you better believe I called room service and made a request that no orders be sent to us, and if they did, they were fake and to please not process them. Hence, me being able to sleep in in perfect peace the rest of our time on that ship...well, until Friday morning when some drunk loudmouths decided to park it right outside of our door to talk about how slammed they were at 4:00 AM...but other than that, I slept very well the whole rest of the time on vacation :)
I digress back to the morning of Key West...we walked up and down most of the cool harbor of Key West and Duval Street (equivalent of Main Street Annapolis...man, I miss where I grew up!) filled with cool shops, museums, and the cuteness of the southern-most point of the States, that makes you feel like you're not even in the US anymore.
just laying around and waiting for visitors to pet them them...about half the cats (including this one have 6 toes, a rare genetic mutation that randomly appeared in the generations of cats related to Hemingway's original many cats).
Thew & I posing with the concrete-embedded penny that Hemingway claimed was all that was left of his fortune after he came home from overseas to find that his wife had the first swimming pool in Key West put in. A staggering $20,000 cost (even now), though that was back in 1938 when it only cost Hemingway $8,000 to build his original house that is still standing today (built by a master architect & basically hurricane-proof). A short time later, Hemingway divorced that wife and moved onto wife #3.
The 2nd Floor of Hemingway's House
A cool palm in the garden that my talented hub snagged a pic of
It was so cool to see where Hemingway spent his time...the beautiful house with wrap around porches on both levels, lush gardens, and writing house. Though his written works are a distant memory to me, I always remember watching the movie version of his most famous story "The Old Man and the Sea" with my dad when I was little. There's something about that story of that old man who spends 2 full days to pull the biggest marlin he's ever seen from his line that the marlin has snagged to his boat only to realize that he can't even fit it in his simple boat. He finally has to kill the marlin so he can even row home with it since it is still struggling. With the marlin trailing in the water behind him, sharks start to eat it as the old man rows home and the man is able to kill some but not enough to end up at home only with a shell of what the marlin once was. In the end, the old man's journey allows him to reconnect with his young apprentice who has been forbade to fish with him b/c of the old man's bad luck recently at sea. So heartbreakingly sad, but such a good story, with a great ending. You realize the story isn't as much about the old man and the marlin, but is actually about the old man and the sea...how it has connected him and the boy in the story. A connection that is hard to explain even through Pulitzer Prize winning novella or a simple blog post about a girl's relationship with her father. My dad and I have some memories that I hold very dear to me of our time spent on and around the waters of Severna Park...one of the reasons I desperately miss my peninsula of a hometown and hate the mountains of Fred-neck, but that's another post.
Key West was super fun and stinking hot...what an awesome first full day of our cruise! Well, that's enough yapping out of me for now. After all, I have some housework to catch up on. I mean, not everyone can afford to do this...
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