A major milestone….

Turning forty for me was a major milestone in my life, I always said I would be dead before I was twenty-one due to my brother scaring the crap out of me on a daily basis when we were younger. or his friends and him ambushing me and beating the crap out of me when I got off the school bus.  Brotherly love, it’s a funny thing he and his friends could beat me up, but he would be the first one to my defense when I needed him.

Anyway, my husband wanted to throw me the traditional “Your Over The Hill ” party for my 40th, now I love any chance to have a party, get together with good friends and just hang out. I however had a different idea on what I wanted to do. Being born and raised here in Florida, born in South Florida and raised in the central part, I had never seen Key West… I always heard stories some good and some not, but I wanted to go (one of those to dos before I die). Well we were over at a friends house and my husband was saying  how he wanted to throw me this big party, and I simply said I wanted to go to Key West, well that was the right thing to say.  The couple who’s house we were at has family that lives there.  Scott a good friend of my husbands they worked together at the Sheriff’s Dept where we live, Scott has since moved to the Highway Patrol, anyway he grew up down there and always goes down there to visit his Dad. Well they said we would just have to have the party down there, the other couple that was there said they would love to go as well. Now we were all drinking pretty heavily at the time and I did not think anyone would remember the conversation we had about this trip to Key West.  Well about two weeks later we all got back together to drink some more for no apparent reason other than we just do that every once in a while, and someone brought up my birthday again and I said once more that I wanted to go to Key West and everyone remembered from the previous party, well someone brought out pictures of Fantasy Fest in Key West. I don’t know if anyone is familiar with it, but it is one big party so to speak that goes on down there in October, and since my Birthday is on Halloween, I thought it would be pretty cool to go during Fantasy Fest. Body painting and drinking until you either slithered into a cab or crawled home. I just knew I was in….  Well we ended up planing the trip the week before Fantasy Fest, only because it is so crowded and there is way to many people to really enjoy and take in all the beauty of Key West. I was a little disappointed, but I knew with the two other couples that were going we were destined to have a blast.

 I had to wait three long months until October, but it finally came and we had been fortunate enough to have connections with another friend who just so happen to have a house down there that she rented out, being a Law Enforcement Officer herself she gave it to us at a really good rate. It was a two bedroom one bath house on Ram Rod Key, beautiful home.. The day finally came when we left and I was off to celebrate my 40th birthday with good friends and what better way to do it. 

It was the longest trip I think I have ever been on, we did not take the interstate all the way down because our friends were pulling their boat and to be honest I never got the full story on why we stayed off the Interstate all I know is damn it was a long trip.  We had to make a bunch of stops because anyone knows traveling with me I have to take alot of pee breaks, my husband hates that, especially when we go to Tenn. which we do every year. when we finally made it down there our first stop was a grocery store where we got food and snacks and plenty to drink, we made our way to our house and we had a couple staying wit us and the other couple was off to his Dads house on the last and main Island. We stayed in that evening and drank and kinda just laid back from our long ass trip. The next morning I got up and made coffee for everyone and I took my cup out and looked at our surroundings WOW, it was beautiful. The house is on stilts which most are there. The porch wrapped all the way around the house and in the back yard was a dock with a waterway for boats. I could walk to one side of the house and I could watch the sun come up, which I did most mornings, I love to sit outside and drink my coffee in the morning. While I was outside the first morning I found a coconut tree and some coconuts on the ground, being from South Florida we used to climb the coconut trees and get the coconuts, crack them open and eat them and drink the coconuts milk. I had not been to Ft. Lauderdale since I was 17 and to see a coconut I was all excited, you will learn it the simple things in life that really get to me, I went running back in the house with the coconut in hand and was showing it to everyone and they just laughed at me because I was so excited about this coconut.  Anyway we got ready and went to meet our friends and to grab some lunch, oblivious to the time because we were on Island time, we ordered food and booze, we ate and drank and drank some more and finally it was time to go fishing.  I love to fish, I don’t care if it’s off a bank of a river, canal in a boat it does not matter as long as I am fishing, my fave is deep sea fishing, love it… Now Scott has lived here before and knows all the good places to go, he was our tour guide and Captain of the boat, he kept telling me he was there for me, since it was my first time there and it was my birthday he was going to make it a trip to remember. He did..  He took us to a boat that had sunk and was partially emerged from the water, it was there that we started to fish for bait fish, fish we were going to use for our bigger catches.  Well us ladies were reeling them in for our guys, having a blast, we decided to put one of the fish we had caught on the bigger fishing pole and cast it out and just let it sit there, it was probally thirty minutes later and that line started to scream, my husband grabbed the pole and started to fight with what ever it was on the other end of the line.. I can tell you he was fighting the good fight when all of a sudden about two hundred yards out, up came this huge shark in the air and spinning went back down and went out a little farther, all I could say was “Holy shit I think we need a bigger boat” I ran to get to my camera and Pam was trying to get to hers, but the guys were standing on the compartment were the cameras were. We were screaming for them to move when up from the water came the shark agian spinning and went back down, when the guys finally got off the compartment we reached in to get our cameras when the shark came up again and spun this time he broke the line and was gone… Not that we could have kept it, it was huge and would not of fit in our boat, but a picture would of been great.  So we went on fishing and had no luck the barracuda were bad they were taking our fish not to mention our hooks, so we went to an Island were there was nothing and took a break for awhile we were walking the beach line when we saw a little hammerhead shark swimming up by the shore looking for smaller fish, we ran back to the boat and grabbed the pole and a shrimp, Scott casted out and the shark grabbed the line and he reeled in the shark. We all held it and took our picture with it and set it free. I informed Scott that I wanted to catch a shark he said he would see what he could do, so a little further away there was and Island in the making, it is just a sand bar right now, but we went there looking for shells and I was about a hundred yards from Scott when he started yelling for me to come his way he saw another hammerhead it was a little bigger than the last one, I was running to him and just got to him when he put the line in the water and as soon as I took the pole from him the line started screaming, the shark I thought was heading for Cuba, that’s what I told everyone. Any way I fought this baby shark for about 5 minutes when I finally brought him in. If you look at the picture next to my post that is me with my shark I caught. I was so excited, and I should of kept it, he would of been good eating, but I thought he was cute and could not do that to it. That was my big catch the whole time we were there, we tried on the way back in but no luck. I did however see the biggest turtle I have ever seen. We had a flats boat that we were on and the water can go from several hundred feet deep to only three feet deep in a matter of seconds, so we were pushing with the push pole and fishing when all of a sudden under the boat there was this huge friggin turtle. It was big. I did not know they got that big. I consider myself very lucky to have seen what all I saw that day.

When we got back to land we went to Scotts Dads house for dinner, he happens to live right behind a house that belonged to Francis Ford Coppola, what a big beautiful house. We had a nice dinner and a few more drinks and we were off to do the Duvall crawl. For those of you who do not know what the duvall crawl is well let me explain, there is a street called Duvall Street and there is nothing but bar after bar and shopping galore. The crawl is were you hit every bar on that street and then some, if your lucky enough to make it thru this then you have survived the Duvall Crawl, we had a blast going to Sloppy Joes,  Margaritaville, after that I don’t remember much else. I remember waking up wishing I was dead, I was so hung over and sick OMG!  We kinda took it easy that day, we just drank, that was the hardest thing I think I did was drinking again the next morning, but they assured me I would feel better if I did. It did work because I got just as drunk.. We went shopping and stuff that day.

The following day we bought tickets on a boat and went to the Dry Tortuga’s, Ft. Jefferson. This was the one of the things I went down there for.   This fort is a two hour trip one way by boat and so beautiful. It sits out in the middle of the ocean, people were coming in by sea planes and other boats, my husband I felt so bad for he got so sick on the boat ride over there it was pretty rough when we got out there a ways. I loved it, he hated it. He ended up at the back of the boat looking at the horizon the whole trip over there. Once there he was ok after a bit. I told him on the way back he was taking some Dramamine. On the way over there they will not serve you  booze because there is no wall around this fort and when you go up to the top one wrong step and your a goner. You can however bring your own… Which we did (imagine that). So when we got there guess what we did.. Yep we drank.  We also snorkeled I learned that was not for me. I could not get the hang of it, not to mention the jelly fish were so bad and I did not want to get stung by one of them. So I swam for a bit and then we walked around the fort. It was really cool, something I am so happy we did.  We went on the boat for lunch and I bought my husband his Dramamine so he could take it. We walked around for a bit more and then we loaded back up on the boat and it was time to leave. Now on the way back they broke out the Margaritas and they sang me happy birthday to me and we partied. The Captain was really nice he was from the Boston area and we talked about the Red Sox and so on. We got back to shore (my husband did alot better on the way back) and we went back to Duvall Street and asked to be punished some more.  

We just kinda hung out on the fourth day and drank did not feel like doing much of anything else, we cooked on the grill and sat around the house. It was nice to take it easy and just do nothing.  We left the following day and headed back home, oh that dreaded drive back home. I had the best time down there and what made it even more special was making those memories with such great friends….