We decided to try Sunset Grille one more time, so we headed there Sunday , hoping to get there in time for happy hour. We got there at 5:30 and they said it would be an hour wait for a table. We put our name on the list and headed to the upstairs bar, which was packed. So we decided to check out the outside bar on the lower level, which was also packed. Luckily a couple was leaving and we were able to grab their stools – and managed to get a drink ordered. We tried to order an appetizer but the bartenders were so busy that they never checked back with us to see if we wanted food or another drink – it was like we were invisible. While Rich tried to catch the attention of a bartender to pay our bill, I got some great sunset shots.

We thought all the boat stuff was going to be finished yesterday, but it was discovered that the fresh water pump for the port engine was leaking and would need to be replaced. Our mechanic was able to order a replacement from a parts place in Key West, so we “had” to go down there today to pick it up. And of course we had to go at lunch time, so we stopped at Goldman’s Deli down there and had matzoh ball soup and a Reuben – very delicious!

The next stop was a cigar factory that Rich had read about. He bought a sampler of cigars that came in a very nice wooden box – I’ll have a very nice box when he’s done with the cigars!

Across the street was a shop advertising rolled ice cream, so we had to check it out. You choose what you want in your ice cream and then they mix and chop it with a liquid ice cream mix and scrape and smooth and work their magic with it on an ice cold round metal surface. It’s very labor intensive! When it’s been smoothed and is the right consistency, they use a metal spatula to scrape it into rolls.

After ice cream we had to stop at Hemingway distillery, where they make Papa’s Pilar rum. We got to sample the light and dark rums and ended up buying a bottle of each, as well as rash guard shirts. You can never have too many rash guard shirts!

To get to Key West from Marathon, you have to go over the Seven Mile Bridge. We checked it on the odometer and it really is 7 miles!

We’ve been having a lot of maintenance on the boat done in the last few days. It was time for an oil change, which led to other engine maintenance, which led to flushing out various systems with Barnacle Buster, which led to numerous trips to West Marine and Napa Auto (which stocks marine parts as well – who knew?!). The guy doing the work is great and has made a point of explaining and showing everything to Rich, but poor Rich has been run ragged getting parts and trying to keep up with everything Sean has been doing. Hopefully the work will be done tomorrow and I can put everything back in place inside. We’ve gone out for dinner the last two nights because all the stuff Rich stores in the engine room is scattered all over – there literally was no way to get to the galley tonight – it was definitely a bad night for cooking!

I’ve spent most of my days while this work is being done either on the fly bridge or by the pool. While on the fly bridge I’ve seen a variety of boats and activity at the marina.

We tried to have dinner at the Sunset Grill tonight, but the wait for a table was at least 45 minutes, so we ended up back at the bar at the marina. I did manage to get some great sunset shots at Sunset Grill.

I can’t believe it’s been almost a week since I last posted anything. I guess I’ll try to do a day by day account of what we’ve been doing for the past week – if I can remember that far back!

I spent last Wednesday figuring out when we will go back to IN in March and then trying to find the best flights for the dates we needed. That was a real chore, but I was eventually able to get us nonstop flights both ways. Now we just have to pray for no snow in Indy so we can get there as scheduled.

Thursday was spent doing laundry – nothing too exciting about that. It is nice to sit by the pool, though, instead of going back to the boat while the clothes are in the washers and dryers. After doing laundry, I decided it was a bad night for cooking, so we went back to the restaurant that had the great Caesar salad and had salads and seafood apps. That meant we had enough room for dessert – and what a dessert we had!

Friday – big event was to see if we could finally run out of water in our water tank. We decided since we’re hooked up to marina water we should empty the boat’s water tank so we don’t have water getting stale and nasty in it. We got the tank monitor down to 0%, but it seemed like there was still water in it. So we took showers, I washed dishes three times, and we used water for cleaning. Eventually we did run out of water, but it took a lot longer than we thought it would. We finally figured out that since it always registers 81% when it’s full, there must have been 19% (or approximately 18 gallons) of water in it when it first showed 0%. Too bad the monitor doesn’t really tell us how much water is in the tank.

Saturday we met up with looper friends whom we first met last August when they were in a transient slip by us in Holland. We crossed paths with them several times along the rivers, but hadn’t seen them for quite a while. They arrived in Marathon last week, but are at a different marina. We had lunch, then checked out each other’s marinas. The facilities at their marina are beautiful, but they close everything at 6:30! The joke is that boaters’ midnight is 9 p.m., but closing at 6:30 is way too early. Happy hour is barely over at the bar at our marina at 6:30!

Sunday was lazy day until mid afternoon, when we hung out with our friends Keith and Gail on the back cockpit of their boat. Rich and Keith have become cigar smoking buddies and usually get together at least twice a week for a cigar. This time the wives were invited to hang out with them while they had a cigar – fun times. Keith was a delivery captain for many years and brought our boat from MN to us in MI, so he knows our boat. We like to remind him we’re still using the little 4 cup Mr. Coffee that he had to buy at Walmart in MN. The coffee pot was missing from the boat and he said the boat wouldn’t move unless there was a way to make coffee in the morning, so when he provisioned for the week of travel, he bought the coffee maker. It went on the list of expenses that he submitted and he left it on the boat. It still makes great coffee every morning!

Rich has an app called Wordscapes on his iPad that he has been playing for several days now. I kept watching him play and would sometimes make suggestions of words he might try, which he found annoying (I don’t know why 😊). So I put the app on my iPad and played it for WAY too many hours Saturday night and all day yesterday. I didn’t play as much today, but I’m only 45 levels away from him now – the challenge is to catch up and then pass him. It’s a very addictive game! And unfortunately the number of levels seems to go on forever. At some point I may have to remove it from my iPad.

No pictures of any of them, but there have been several boats docked by us overnight for the last few days that are obviously boats headed to the Miami boat show. They’re huge, look like new, and would definitely take a large lottery win to be able to afford for nearly everyone. They’re certainly fun to see!

Today I did some sewing and managed to get the blocks for two more months of the quilt I’m working on completed. There are 11 months of blocks and I only have three more to do.

Our friends from Lafayette who spent a few days with us on the boat in October are spending February in Marco Island FL. They drove down Sunday to spend a couple of nights with us, so Rich and I spent Sunday morning cleaning up the boat. Unfortunately what should have been a three and a half hour drive for them turned into a 7 hour drive because of a bad accident that forced them to turn around and take another route. They got here just in time for us to head to the Sunset Grille for happy hour and a beautiful sunset!

Monday morning we woke to find it had rained overnight and was gray and windy. We went to the Stuffed Pig for breakfast and once again walked away stuffed! It looked like it might stay gray for a while so we decided to take a drive to the beach. I know most people go to the beach when it’s sunny, but even on a cloudy day a walk on the beach beats a cold snowy day in Indiana. The sun kept trying to come out – I was wearing a scoop neck shirt and managed to get a sunburn on my neck and upper chest. Will I ever learn that I can burn on a cloudy day?

By the time we got back to the marina the wind had died down and the sun was really beginning to shine, so we decided to spend time at the pool. The water was really warm and because it’s a salt water pool Rhonda and I were able to float very easily in our noodle chairs for a long time. We had prune hands by the time we got out!

Being in the pool made us hungry and thirsty, so Rick and I grabbed seats at the bar for all of us while Rich and Rhonda went back to the boat to get into dry clothes. It was happy hour at the bar so while I went back to get into dry clothes they ordered food and drinks – food arrived just as I got back – perfect timing! It was almost sunset when we finished – another sunset in paradise!

Rick and Rhonda just bought a boat so they can do the loop, so we spent a lot of time talking about boats and our experiences thus far. Rick is getting ready to retire in the next year or so – Rhonda says he has “senioritis” because he’s spending more and more time looking at boating websites and less time thinking about work. I should remind her it’s good to have something to look forward to in retirement!

We had breakfast at an out of the way place this morning before they left. I’m sure they wondered where we were taking them as we drove down a narrow street with trailers and houses on both sides still in disrepair after Hurricane Michael. The front of the restaurant looks really run down, but the inside is classic mom and pop restaurant/bar. Our “server” has lived in Marathon for 35 years, but still has her Rhode Island accent and a voice that could be heard several tables away. She is an old-time waitress – none of the “hi, my name is Susie and I’ll be taking care of you today” – just what can I get you to drink while you look over the menu. And the food is fantastic!

I actually know what day it is! And it was a good day 😊

The morning didn’t start out so great – we are keeping the car for another month and it needed an oil change so enterprise told us to go to muffler man to get that done. Not a problem, but they said it would be 20-30 minutes before they could get to us, so we said fine. It was almost 2 hours before we got the car back. By then we were starving since we had not eaten breakfast and it was now just after noon. We headed to a place Rich had read about and had really good Greek food – souvlaki and gyros as good as we got in Tarpon Springs, which we had thought were the best. We got a piece of key lime pie to go and had it later tonight – some of the best we’ve had. We knew the rest of the day would be great after that lunch!

The afternoon was spent relaxing on the boat. Rich had a cigar and shared beers with our friend Keith, who captained our boat from MN to Saugatuck, when we bought it. Keith and his wife Gail are staying in our marina. I worked on more quilt blocks and finally finished the smallest block after having to redo it THREE times.

We headed to the restaurant that’s by the marina for appetizers about 7, and were lucky to find two seats at the bar. I had the ahi tuna tartare and it was delicious!

Friends from Lafayette are coming tomorrow to stay with us until Tuesday. They traveled with us for a couple of days in October and have just bought a boat to do the Loop, so we’re really excited to see them again.

I can’t believe it’s Friday night already! Where did Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday daytime go?

Monday we were lazy.

Tuesday I did laundry and then we had a late lunch at an open air restaurant overlooking the water on Boot Key Harbor. While we were waiting for our food I noticed people all along the rail looking down at the water ( the tables are all on the second floor). I heard someone say “manatees”, so Rich went over to check it out. There were two manatees right by the restaurant!

Wednesday our son’s in-laws came here from Naples FL where they are staying for a couple of months to spend two days in Marathon. We had breakfast with them at the Stuffed Pig and waddled away like stuffed pigs – great breakfasts here! They had not seen our boat so we spent a little bit of time on the boat. They stayed at a hotel because they had their dog with them, so they then went back to the hotel to take care of the dog. Mid afternoon they returned and we drove down to Key West. We wanted to go to a small park that has busts of many early settlers of Key West, but couldn’t remember exactly where it was. We asked a couple of people for directions (a shopkeeper, someone at an information booth), looked at a tourist map, and still had only a vague idea of where it was. We eventually found it, but I’m still amazed the woman in the info booth didn’t know what I was talking about and the map didn’t show it. We did keep running into an interesting character as we were walking. A man, obviously already drunk, approached us several times asking for change because “I’ll be honest with you, I just want some change so I can get drunk”. At the price of drinks there, it would take more than some change to get drunk.

We did find the statuary garden and spent time reading about all the people who established Key West. A number of them started out with nothing and through hard work became quite wealthy. And some started out with more –

Thursday we met again for breakfast and then headed to the turtle hospital. We decided, after finding out it was a 90 minute tour and cost $25/person, that we would go back to Key West and tour Fort Zachary Taylor instead. It was quite interesting and only cost $2/person to get into the park. The exhibits at the turtle hospital were quite informative and we didn’t feel the need to see live turtles. And it was such a beautiful day that it was nice to spend it outside.

Today was another lazy day – I spent a lot of time on the fly bridge reading and enjoying the warm weather while Rich recovered from eating too much licorice yesterday. We did get back to Enterprise car rental today to renew our rental for another month. Apparently car insurance companies won’t cover a rental for more than 30 days at a time, but at least we were able to keep the same car. And we can drop it off at the Miami airport when we fly back to Indiana in early March with no extra fee for dropping off at a different location – I love Enterprise!

The title sounds like we might have done something really exciting, but we didn’t, unless Rich figuring out what’s wrong with our dinghy motor and me working on a quilt sounds exciting to you. Unfortunately the dinghy motor problem is going to require a professional to get it fixed, but at least Rich can tell them what’s wrong. He looked at YouTube videos to see how hard it would be and decided he didn’t have the tools to replace the part that’s causing the problem. It still runs, but it’s only a matter of time before the problem part breaks completely. Hopefully it will be a quick, cheap (that’s a relative term when talking about boat repairs) fix.

We had dinner last night at a very popular restaurant near us. (You know it’s popular when the parking lot is completely full and you circle around looking for someone to leave.) We had entrees that came with two sides, so we each had a Caesar salad as one of our sides. Besides being quite good, it came in these fantastic bowls that had been chilled.

When we decided to do the loop, we also decided it was time to get rid of property. We didn’t want to be landlords any longer with the Chicago condo and fortunately a real estate development company had decided a few years ago that they wanted to buy all the condos in the building. After 3 long years of negotiations to get at least 75% of the owners to agree to sell, that sale finally closed just before Christmas – one down. We also decided it was pointless to keep the Michigan condo since we wouldn’t be there for at least a year. We sold it on a land contract that was paid off today – two down. Now we just have our house in Lafayette – and it’s going back on the market within the next month. We don’t know when we will finish this adventure or where we will go once it ends, but we know Lafayette won’t be a permanent residence. So if anyone wants a very nice house in Lafayette we know where you can find one!

When I got up this morning I saw that a sailboat was on the dock next to ours and there were lots of people, dock carts, and other stuff all on the boat and dock. Rich noticed that it looked like someone was doing makeup on a woman in the cockpit, so we decided it was a photo shoot of some sort. A friend stopped by a little later and said he had wandered over and found out it was a Ralph Lauren photo shoot. How cool was that!

They eventually left the dock, motored around in front of our boat, came back to the dock, took more photos, them went out a short way into Gulf waters. They finally finished after 5. We wonder how many of the photos will ever be used.

A variety of pictures for this post –

We had dinner with friends Friday night and decided to start the evening with a vodka taste-testing. A conversation with a friend as well as an article in the Wall Street Journal had us wondering if you could really taste differences in different vodkas. According to US regulations, vodka is supposed to be colorless, odorless, and flavorless. So off to the liquor store to buy airplane sized bottles of as many kinds of vodka as we could find – someone has to test this! Surprisingly, we found that there were slightly different tastes among them! Who knew?

Saturday I got to see my first manatee up close! Rich was outside on the dock when he spotted one in the water by the boat next to us. By the time I got out there with my phone, it was working its way toward our boat. It slowly ate its way under the dock, ate around and under our swim platform, around our dinghy, and finally headed off to the fuel dock. Rich said they can eat as much as 200 lbs. of seagrass and other stuff in a day! All I could think was how big must their poops be😂

Saturday afternoon there was a small cigarette-type boat going in and out of the marina several times taking people for short rides. It was incredibly noisy and very annoying. I hate this type of boat because they are so obnoxiously loud and have no purpose except to go fast. So I had to chuckle when, as it got ready to leave with a couple more people, it wouldn’t start. They tried for a long time to get it started again to no avail and finally pulled it up further on the fuel dock to get it out of the way. Yesterday it was towed away and I cheered.