Day 9 Thusday Oct 20, Key West, FL sighseeing

Today is our ninth day of travel since leaving Ohio on Oct 12 and the fifth day of our GatorMog tour of Florida.  It is a much needed sightseeing day with no driving.  The cars will remain in the hotel parking lot while we make other arrangements to go into downtown Key West and behave like tourists. 

Sleeping Morgans

Of course, we began the day with the usual hotel provided continental breakfast.

Our tour guides and leaders, Mark and Andrea Braunstein

We were pleased to see that our encounter with the local newspaper reporter resulted in a large front page photograph.  Now we are famous... well, perhaps for 15 seconds.

Many of us decided to take a "hop on, hop off" 13-stop tour trolley to town.  The driver took us past the "southernmost spot in the USA, marked by this unique monument.

Once downtown we hopped off and started walking down Duval street again.  Lots of interesting shops and eateries, but most unique was the old Strand Theatre, now converted into a Walgreens drug store.

There are a many significant historical sights on the island,  We chose to tour the Truman Little White House, a home on what at one time was a Navy Base here.  It was build in 1890 as quarters for Navy Officers,  but later used by American presidents Taft, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Carter and Clinton.   Truman used the facility more than the other presidents as a vacation home and functioning White House between 1946 and 1952, spending a total of 175 days there including 11 working vacations.  President Eisenhower used the house while recuperating from a heart attack in 1956.  In 1961 a summit between President Kennedy and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan during the Bay of Pigs incident, and Kennedy came back after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

After the tour we walked, and walked and finally ended up at the waterfront marina area looking for and finding a late lunch.  While we enjoyed lunch we could watch a chap cleaning fresh caught fish on the dock next door.

 When the fish scraps were tossed into the water near the dock a group of large Tarpon swarmed and fought over the pieces.  Meanwhile this Ibis or Egret watched carefully for a scrap too.

There were many locations where musicians would be playing for tips in the Mallory Park area.
This steel drummer was quite good.

Now, a chicken story....

The trolley driver explained the presence of so many chickens wandering around the streets all over Key West.  Seems years ago the government started to tax farmers for each chicken they owned.  The farmers retaliated by releasing all of their chickens into the wild.  Many generations of chickens later they still roam the city.  One side benefit, said the trolley man, they eat mosquitos, so there are very few of around.  We were never bothered by the flying insects at all. The chickens, however, have become clever beggars if encouraged.


The scheduled evening event and finale for our Key West visit was a dinner cruise on a 65 foot catamaran in the Gulf of Mexico north of the Keys.  A couple of hours of food, music, dancing and another spectacular sunset.  What a nice way to end our stay in Key West.

On the road again tomorrow, as we head north to West Palm Beach.