The Florida Files

So, we decided to take a trip to Florida during the long, cold winter but we forgot that all of the college and university kids would be here as well. This is why we are here in April. With the weather reports from home threatening a snow storm I think we made a good choice! You'd think that the first picture from this trip would be of palm trees or flamingos but, no! Instead it's a shot of Marilyn and her brother Bruce. We accidentally ran into him at Pearson this morning. He was working on some new restaurants in terminal 1 and we met him while trying to find our departure gate.

After an uneventful 3 hour flight, we arrived in Miami to find balmy 28 or 85 degree weather. We picked up our car, a new Mazda 3, and headed off for Key Largo. On arrival at the Holiday Inn, we were starving since we hadn't eaten since breakfast. The only places we saw along the way were assorted fast food joints and I didn't want our first meal here to be junk! Here are a couple of views around the hotel.
Bananas growing the courtyard. Who knew?

The area around the pool.

As you know, I tend to research a bit before we go somewhere so we ended up at a place called Sundowners for dinner. It had a great deck over the gulf and we were on the early end of the dinner rush so got a perfect table. It was so nice to sit in summer weather and have a couple of beers. It's the first time I've ever worn sandals in April!

Our first beers of the evening were Key West Sunset Lager, a local brew, and Dogfish IPA. My Dogfish was good but disappeared fairly quickly...

Next came the appetizers. We had never tried conch before so the conch fritters were a must. We also had crab stuffed mushroom caps. I think we'll definitely do them at home. 

In between courses, we were entertained by a flock of pelicans that dropped by. There were some tarpon swimming around and the restaurant people would feed them. This attracted the pelicans. We'd never seen one live before so were quite fascinated. It's hard to believe that such a large, wonky looking creature can fly and glide so effortlessly. There was quite a bit of variation in how they looked. Not sure if it was male/female or young/old or different types.

For our main course, we decided to split a seafood platter. It had a Florida lobster tail, scallops, shrimp and blackened mahi mahi. Needless to say, we were quite full after all of that. Oh, there were a couple more beers involved too.

For the beer drinkers out there, my second was called Holy Mackerel Special Golden and it was great. Marilyn chose Abita Purple Haze which had raspberry in it, so it wasn't really beer!

And then the sunset happened. It was pretty much like watching a sunset at Sauble Beach in the summer, but it wasn't summer! Pretty cool!  Not sure exactly what we're up to tomorrow but it might be a drive to Key West.