Late Coffee…Early Cocktails

Charming corner on Fleming Street

Key West is best seen on foot, an easy task as the island is only 2 miles wide and 4 miles long.   Every day the weather allows us to get off the boat, we hoof it around town drinking in the sights.  While Duvall Street and its neighbors are always an interesting conglomeration of local characters, tourists, merchants, and bars, our favorite venues are the residential streets with their parades of houses from an era long since gone.  Each avenue unfolds like a new tropical garden to explore as we stroll to the library, the post office,  or just follow our noses in search of the latest heady fragrance.

We are startled by the friendliness of the locals, a trait that seems dampened or killed in most towns packed with tourists.  While walking down Fleming Street, one of our favorites, we stopped to photograph the colorful bikes framing a quintessential Key West house and the bougainvillea tumbling over a fence.  We are dressed in full cruiser chic, well down the scale of fashionable propriety.  As soon as Greg started snapping away at different angles trying to capture the early morning light, the owner popped out the door of her very expensive home.

My eyes got  big as she approached and I wondered if she had called the police.  If you are surprised at my

Bike painted in tribute to Captain Outrageous

defensive reaction you have to understand that people who live full time on boats and no longer own property are often treated like a scourge, affliction, or criminal marine growth needing squelching.   And our appearances definitely did not allow us to be mistaken as a neighbor to this coifed, manicured, and elegantly-dressed lady.  We smiled tentatively and lead off with a friendly “hi, your bikes are so beautiful we just had to take a photo”.  She smiled, held out her hand and introduced herself, proceeding to tell us all about the bikes.  She had seen us taking photos and had not come out with a broom to sweep us out of her neighborhood but to share with us that the bikes had been painted by her daughters as a tribute to Captain Outrageous, a local legend!

This is not an isolated incident; later that same day locals stopped us on the street to ask what books we were reading, leading to a half-hour instant book club conversation.   People here rub elbows with ease and

Every street's a garden

seem to understand that what makes Key West charming is the diversity of its inhabitants combined with a high level of “live and let live”.  This is in stark contrast to the gated communities that have proliferated in the last ten years, “gated ghettos” promising that all tenants will look, speak, spend money and think exactly alike.

Earlier in the season fellow cruisers asked us which we liked better, the Bahamas or the Keys.  We couldn’t answer and just said the Keys were different than the Bahamas.  And that is a good part of why we cruise, to seek out and consider differences.    Different is a divine experience itself in this mass-produced world.