One More in Marathon

Our last day in the Florida keys is tomorrow....we've had a wonderful, wonderful time...the weather really has been perfect...it's funny how 73 degrees feels a whole lot hotter in the direct sun than 73 degrees feels in Naples or St. Pete's Beach..we're closer to the equator, so it makes sense that it would feel HOTTER! Eldy is getting tanned nicely, I'm trying not to..fair skin, blue eyes, skin cancer in my family. For years and years, my mother told me, "WEAR SUNSCREEN!" Stay out of the sun, wear a hat...for years I did the opposite. Baked in the sun summer after summer after summer..used to get out on the top deck of Read Center, down at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN,  in the spring as early as February holding our foil reflectors in front of our faces to catch the earliest sun rays. Used to be a lifeguard for many years and never wore sunscreen. I never did tan in a tanning booth, those came later, but I did do a home sunlamp many times. But the damage from years of tanning in the sun has been done. After becoming overly burnt over the years, I can no longer tolerate the sun. I break out in a rash due to sun poisoning, and I have so many brown age spots, I'm starting to look like a spotted lionfish! (That's the only thing I could think of that I resemble with all my age spots!) I have suspicious looking spots that I go to the dermatologist every year to get checked, so now I am vigilant about staying OUT of the sun! Where is all this going, you ask? Well, tomorrow we might go to the BEACH! You can't stay in the keys and not hit the beach! There's Annie's Beach and Sombrero Beach, for starters...decisions, decisions, decisions! PS. On the lionfish thing...did you know these are an invasive species and they are taking over the reefs? They have no predators and it's a real problem for the fishing industry in this state. The red lionfish eat the smaller fish off the reefs and are disrupting the natural fish food chain in Florida and the keys...they actually have lionfish hunts or kills down here to try and control the rapidly spreading lionfish. Here's an interesting article from a Miami paper on how bad the lionfish problem is...

If we do go to the beach, I'm going with SPF30 and going to stay in the shade...Eldy has darker skin so he's probably going to lay out and Z-Z-Z-Z-Z in the sun....

Last night we went out for dinner....I picked the restaurant this time...Now, you know my nickname is Sparky, so of course, we HAD to try dinner at....drum roll, please! Sparky's Landing.....it turned out to be fabulous and delicious and they had reasonable prices!  I had a flat iron steak (listed under appetizers for 7.99 and it was huge and flavorful.) Eldy had a slab of ribs that just fell off the bone. There was a guy out front by the entrance making coconut palm hats, animals and roses. He was a jolly sort of guy, his name was Jerry and he said he was world famous! Apparently, he's in a lot of tourist brochures from different parts of the world, toting the keys...he says to me, "Some people are rock stars...well, I'm a bar star..." and he handed me a coconut palm rose... aw-w-w-w...naturally, I had to give him a tip and take his photo!  And of course, I had to buy a tee shirt from the restaurant! On the way there, we saw this sign, don't you just love it?

Well, in the last couple of days, Eldy got an email from an old friend who is battling cancer and the prognosis is not great. He had not heard from him in years and found Eldy on Facebook. He wants to get together with us, so naturally, we are going to change plans and instead of heading to an Escapees Park in Wauchula, FL, we are going to head towards Ft. Lauderdale to visit him for an afternoon or evening. We'll probably stay a couple of nights as the traveling time tomorrow will be several hours, then we need time to visit...Eldy has been busy planning our route towards northern Florida, mileage estimates from one destination to the next, diesel costs. He does a fantastic job of planning and preparing and researching. Me, I'd just hop in the car and go and probably get stuck without a place to stay...we figure from now until we land for a month in a park in Dickinson, TX, the cost of traveling that far will be about $600.00 in diesel fuel alone. We are definitely going to stay put for longer periods of time now as we start traveling north and west, due to fuel costs. But for now, it's time to visit an old friend who needs our support.....see you on the road tomorrow!