Emily Joins Us

After Emily's usual flight delays (she has the worst luck with planes), we picked her up at Miami Intl at about 1am this morning. It was great to see her, but we were all pretty tired by the time we got back to the condo at 2am.

We all slept in this morning. I didn't get up until 9:30am. Emily slept until noon-ish.

I went to the beach twice today. Once in the morning with Laura and Rachel. The water was warm and clear, but the sun was blazing. We only stayed down there about an hour and went back to the condo for lunch.

After lunch we play a game of dominos on the balcony. We're all looking into the sun here, can you tell?

We're on the 23rd floor. The big challenge was shuffling the dominos carefully so that none fell off of the balcony. I think a domino dropped from the 23rd floor could seriously harm someone.

I was excited to snorkel a bit off of the beach here, so Emily joined me this afternoon for another trip to the beach. The late sun and a bit of cloud cover made for a darker view underwater, but the lack of a blazing sun was a net plus in my opinion. The ocean floor here is pretty uniform. Just rippled white sand for several hundred yards off shore. You have to keep a sharp eye to spot anything interesting while snorkeling. That said, I did see a few interesting sights that have me anxious to go back tomorrow. I found this little live conch:

I also saw a few schools for small and medium sized fish. I saw one very large tarpon, maybe 4 feet long, 60lbs. I also saw a sting ray resting on the sandy bottom.

Emily and I returned and went to the pool here with Rachel and Laura. Afterwards, Laura made dinner, tortellini and caesar salad.

The condo has a TV that has a builtin roku. We've connected our Netflix and MLB tv accounts. Rachel and I binged a fair bit of a stupid sitcom called "Schitt's Creek". We also watched the Mariners complete a 4-game sweep of the Orioles. The M's are headed back to the West Coast tomorrow, so their games will be on too late to watch. It's been nice having them on the East Coast this week while we're on vacation. We've been able to watch a few games.

I manged to fix a computer problem back at Whitman this evening while Rachel and Laura are out walking around the neighborhood. Emily is working on her stuff, reading papers and reddit (which is probably not work, haha).

Hoping to snorkel a bit more tomorrow. Going to bed now at a normal hour.

Donut Run

Rachel has been raving about a donut shop in North Miami called The Salty Donut. This morning we went and were not disappointed. I really like jelly donuts and the one they had here was amazing. In addition to filling, there were fresh blueberries inside.

In addition to my "berry buckle" (lower left), after some serious deliberation, there was Rachel's "dragon-passion fruit" (top) and Laura's "maple bacon" (bottom right).

All were excellent.

After donuts, we walked around the Wynwood Art District (the neighborhood of The Salty Donut). The exteriors of most of the buildings are painted in modern/street art. Walls change all the time. In addition, there's a great "gallery" called The Wynwood Walls. Lots of painted walls, but a couple of indoor galleries too. Some great work. I was particularly attracted by the Peter Tunney show. In this particular show, Tunney acquired some artifacts from the now defunct Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, NJ, a failed venture of Donald Trump's. I liked these two pieces. The first is written on blue prints from the original construction of the Taj Mahal:

 The second is on related newspaper and magazine clippings:

Rachel enjoyed some of the pieces in this section:

 After the gallery and a bit of lunch, we checked into our AirBnb. It's on the 23rd floor of one of the numerous condo buildings along the beach here in North Miami. Here's a view towards the ocean from the balcony (of a different building):

Once we checked in, we stocked up with visits to Costco and Publix (grocery store). Emily is en route to Miami from Santa Barbara to join us here for a few days. We meet her at Miami Intl Airport at 12:30am tonight.

Back to Miami

Our night on Key West and the Havana Cubana was restful. We hit the Florida Keys Eco-Discovery Center and learned about the local ecology. After that, we drove back towards the mainland. We stopped at John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park on Key Largo and booked a snorkel boat tour--the last one of the day. The boat took us out to the reef about 10 miles off-shore. Once there we jumped in and swam around for a while. We saw a spotted eagle ray (probably the highlight of the trip) and a lot of other beautiful reef fish. We also saw the Christ of the Abyss statue.

We finished our drive back to Rachel's house and then met Shubham and Emily at Taco Craft. Good the catch up with them. Also, the margaritas and tacos there were very good. I particularly liked the "Exotic Shroom" taco. Our late snorkel boat pushed everything back and it's really late now. Here are a few pictures from the day. A cruise ship docked overnight at Key West:

 We had lunch at a small restaurant called "The Wooden Spoon" on Marathon Key:

 Here we are on the snorkel boat:

 Some of the miles and miles of mangroves along the coast of Key Largo:

 More mangroves:

 From left to right, Albert, Laura, Emily, Shubham, Rachel at Taco Craft.

Key West

We picked up Rachel this morning and drove to Key West, FL. We have possibly now driven our car as far from Walla Walla (without leaving the US) as is physically possible, to be specific 3,237 miles according to Google. There may be something farther up in Maine, but it's still pretty far.

To get to Key West, you have to drive along Route 1 across a long sequence of keys connected by bridges. It's an interesting and beautiful drive of about 140 miles from South Miami. It's also a relatively slow drive--taking about 3 hours.

It's been about 10 months since Hurricane Irma blew through here. The damage is still evident from damaged buildings and homes, to broken roads, to dead vegetation that has been completely stripped of its foliage. There are some smaller keys that are now brown because all of the foliage was stripped from the plants and they simply died. The landscape on these islands reminded me of burn areas that we typically see in the Western US. I suppose that, like those burned areas, these islands will eventually recover, but the sights are striking.

For dessert after lunch, Rachel and I had chocolate covered key lime pie. I was skeptical, but turned out to be a nice combination of flavors.

After dessert, we took our snorkel gear to the beach at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park. The water was warm, but not super clear. We swam around some rocks and saw a few large fish, but it wasn't great. We're hoping to snorkel in a place off of Key Largo on the return trip to Miami tomorrow. And, hoping for clearer water.

After snorkeling, we checked into the Havana Cabana Hotel. The pool was great, also lots of fun games: cornhole, jenga, and giant yahtzee dice.

We swam around for a while and then took the hotel shuttle back to the touristy area to watch the sunset at Mallory Square and catch dinner. It's definitely touristy, but also fun and lots of historic buildings. It's interesting to think about how many hurricanes these old buildings have survived intact.

 I took a picture of Rachel taking a picture of the sunset:

 Side note, there are a lot of wild chickens running around the island.

Indiantown and Miami

We left Sharron and Tom in The Villages this morning. It's always sad parting. A year is a long time. We headed down the highway towards Laura's Aunt Marilyn and Uncle Lew's house in Indiantown, FL.

A couple of days ago, Laura bought a SunPass and put $50 on it so that we could take advantage of the automatic highway toll system here in FL. We jumped onto the Florida Turnpike to Indiantown. At the first toll station, we passed through the automatic toll and the message "Toll Not Paid" popped up. We have no idea why it didn't work. Nor do we have any idea how to deal with whatever happened at the toll plaza from Spain. Finding help via phone or internet seems to be impossible. Furthermore, the human toll taker we encountered when leaving the turnpike was singularly unhelpful. I guess we'll try to figure it out this week before we leave the country. Yay!

We eventually made it to Marilyn and Lew's house. It's a lovely, secluded home surrounded by well-tended tropical vegetation and a pool. We happened to be there on their 46th wedding anniversary! To celebrate (I say this somewhat sarcastically), Marilyn had the pleasure of cooking us a turkey dinner with stuffing and green beans. Next year, we'll have to take them to lunch. We had a nice visit and left around 5pm. Here are some pictures:

 Lunch preparation:

 A nearly domesticated wild bunny in their driveway:

 A mannequin prop that represents an attempt to get the local fauna to not be afraid of them. Kind of works, Marilyn is able to feed the bunny by hand now:

We continued on down the highway, avoid toll roads now, and made it to Rachel's house around 7pm. We had a pizza at The Big Cheese restaurant near her house.

Her new place is smaller than her previous place, but in relatively good shape and certainly adequate to the task. We were a bit worried about where Rachel would store the scuba gear that Marilyn and Lew gave to her, but Rachel seemed happy to have it and promised to put it to use.

After dinner, we dropped Rachel off back at home and Laura and I walked around campus. This helped us get a little exercise after spending most of the day driving and eating. We're now in our hotel room. Meeting Rachel tomorrow morning and heading down to Key West for an overnight visit there.