The Weird and the Wonderful

Here's the weird...I was catching some shots of the pelicans at the pier. I turned my camera sideways and the LCD display went black. What the heck??? I turned it back to the horizontal position and the screen lit up like normal. Turned it vertically, it disappeared...."ELDY! Come look at this...something is wrong with my camera." (It's not that old, so I was annoyed to say the least!) He couldn't see from the distance I was holding it at. I came closer to him and showed him the camera. He said he couldn't see anything wrong with the camera. He had pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head to get a closer look. "I really don't see anything wrong with your camera! Why don't you take your sunglasses off so you can see better?" I take my sunglasses off, rotate the camera vertically and the lit LCD display was just as bright. I rotated it again and nothing was wrong! Get this...I put my sunglasses on, and darned if the camera display didn't go black again in the vertical position! Can somebody please explain the phenomena of why the LCD display is fine in the horizontal position and goes black in the vertical position while wearing polarized sunglasses? Does anybody really care? Of course not! Well, it's about to get weirder later in the week 'cuz.....

We're going to Key West on Friday. There's some pretty weird and wacky stuff I understand in the town furthest south in the continental U.S.  Maybe that has something to do with everybody's brain being cooked by the sun 365 days a year..can't wait!..But back to the wonderful....78 degrees was the high today...we have great neighbors on all sides of us...very friendly...the waters of the gulf are the coolest (as in awesome) blues and greens...you can see the bottom for a L-O-O-O-N-G ways out. The pelicans are neat! We watched them fish today at Bahia Honda (no, it's not a car dealership!) State Park. They have the biggest gullets (I think that's the right word) when they yawn....here's a passel of pelicans roosting....

The Wreck Bar and Grill in Marathon

We walked the beach at Bahia Honda and checked out the campgrounds...sites are reasonable but booked solid till April! You can't get in. The attendant at the gate said you had to start calling 11 months ahead of when you want to come...You'd be extremely lucky and have to be on the internet daily to try and catch a cancellation. We checked out another park, Fiesta Key, in Islamadora, a town farther away from Key West, hoping it would be cheaper and it was.  They were running a special 49.95 a night for three nights, we just stumbled upon that today. But we are committed to one week here at Jolly Roger. It seems you can't find anything under 85.00 a day, even with a weekly rate. We've been looking hard as we are having to pay 465.00 this week for our stay here in Marathon...some of the parks are not very nice places to stay or you are jammed in next to your neighbors and the prices are sky high this time of year in the keys. But this is quite the experience, so we will be tightening our belts after our stay here for our travels to Texas coming up at the end of the month to make up for this splurge. Speaking of tightening our belts, we could be in danger of breaking our belts by all the great waterfront restaurant choices to choose from. Who wants to cook when you can sit out on the gulf with a light breeze blowing, and eat happy hour appetizers specials and drink $1.50 beer at the Wreck Galley and Grill restaurant just down the street? How does 3 shrimp cocktail for a dollar sound? Three mozzarella cheesesticks for a dollar? No? Well, then sit back and enjoy free live entertainment and see if there's something else on the menu you would like....

Here's some more wonderful....the lone pelican on the post....the view from the pier just a couple of rows over from our site...

view down the pier

Here's a view from the pier looking in the other direction....

We'll see you in the keys again tomorrow.......where's it's 5:00 all the time!