[legion]

Chapter 7: The Conch Republic

We slept in, hit the breakfast buffet, and got off the boat around 10:00. This was the only stop we hadn't booked an excursion for. My wife wanted to take the tour of the "Little White House". I wanted to walk off the gin & tonics from the piano bar the night before. My wife thought I was giving her the slient treatment for some unknown reason because I was not my normal, loud self. I had to explain that it wasn't that I didn't want to talk with her, it was that I didn't want to talk.

We walked around for an hour or so. Finally feeling better, we decided to go to Ernest Hemmingway's house. I thought it was a cool house, but a way overblown production for a guy who only lived there for three years. He lived in Cuba for something like 15 years.

Next we decided to do the tour of the little White House. Well, until we saw the place and decided it was another big production for not a lot of historical significance. So we headed to the pirate museum. When we finally found it, there was a note on the door that stated that they had moved to St. Augustine. St. Augustine? Really? That's quite a move.

So we got lunch at a place called Bagatelle. Excellent food. I got a Cuban sandwhich. The pulled pork had a wonderful, rich, smoky flavor to it. My wife had the crab cakes. We split an order of deep-fried tiger shrimp wrapped in bacon and drizzled with a spicy barbecue sauce. It was the best meal of the trip.

Finally, we headed to the shipwreck museum. I didn't know that in the early days, the people of Key West subsisted mostly by salvaging ship wrecks, so the museum had a lot of historical significance to the island, and a lot of locally recovered artifacts. Very cool. Even cooler, the museum has a huge tower that gives a full view of the island.