Key West and back to Sweet Home Alabama

Day 6:


Key West is absolutely perfect. It's one of my favorite places in the world after visiting it. I really want to go back someday. Everything is so clean, there are cute restaurants and shops everywhere, and the beaches are GORGEOUS!
Pa-Ra-Dise.

Here was the first glimpse of the city from the port. So nice!

We had lunch at a place on the beach at a place called the Southernmost Beach Cafe and Bar. This was the view from our table. The burgers are delicious and the view is spectacular.




Of course we had to do the famous key west tourist picture. We are 90 miles from Cuba and Castro here. Key West is closer to Cuba than to Miami.

We went inside the Key West Lighthouse and had some great views of Key West from here.

We went to Ernest Hemingway's house and took the tour. Hemingway used that light house to find his way home from the bar when he drank a little bit too much. My husband and I both love Hemingway. A Moveable Feast and A Farewell to Arms are two of my favorite books. Plus, he just seems like a fun guy to hang out with. He partied with Picasso in Paris, he trained boxers in Key West, and he went to bull fights in Spain. He was quite the fun-seeking sort of character. Hemingway had quite the place in Key West! His wife's (hard to remember which one) uncle bought it for them for $8,000. Not bad for Key West real estate!

Hemingway was accident prone (which could be related to all that drinking he did since one usually follows the other) so he was always looking for things to bring him good luck. Someone gave him a 6 toed cat and told him it was lucky. There are now 42 descendants of that cat living at the Hemingway house!

Check out the 6 toes on this guy! I was lucky that I didn't start sneezing while surrounded by 42 cats.

Here is Hemingway's favorite bar in Key West. We had a drink in his honor here along with some key lime pie.

They have these cute trolley cars you can ride. The island is only 2 miles long and 5 miles wide so we walked everywhere we went but I still liked the trolleys.

Our day in Key West was my favorite day of the cruise. It's a beautiful place! Can't wait to visit again!

Day 7: Get Your Motor Runnin'

We made it off the ship at 9:30 AM which was way earlier than we had planned. We were happy and pretty surprised about the quick process of getting off the boat. We decided to do a marathon-like drive from Miami back to Birmingham all in one day. Shudder. The trip that should have taken 14 hours ended up being more like 15 hours thanks to me wanting to detour for lunch on Cocoa Beach. Has anyone ever BEEN to Cocoa Beach?! Is there a beach?! If there is, we never found it. We ended up driving around some housing developments from the 50's that were near a beach. There were no restaurants around us and we managed to end up at the Kennedy space center. At least it was an adventure. I still refuse to spend $300 on a GPS system. Instead of having lunch with one last view of the ocean, we ended up at a McDonald's in some suburb of Cape Canaveral.

We detoured through Tallahassee instead of Atlanta because of the 3 hours of road construction traffic that delayed our trip down to Daytona. We also survived the super sketchy gas station in Cottondale, Florida. The places my husband picks to get gas are always an adventure. We drove through Dothan, AL which is a nice sized city and I enjoyed seeing all the little towns along the way back to Birmingham. We walked in our house at a little after midnight and were happy to be home. Our dogs were happy to see us and we were happy to see them. Thanks to the best dog sitter in the world while we were away!

It was a great trip!