In Key West, we also had our first visits from friends and family. Our friends Sherri and Cory came down for Sherri’s birthday via the Key West Express out of Fort Myers. How cool is that?! A few weeks later, these two crazy kids got engaged! Inspired by this sunset they witnessed and their magical day in Key West? I’ll let you be the judge! We also got a visit from my parents! It was great to have them down, and neither of them had ever been to Key West. As a welcome, the island treated them to this beautiful …

Back aboard Holiday, we also made some great friends in Key West. My favorite part of cruising! We spent some fun times with Ren, Ashley, and Ani that grabbed a mooring ball next to ours aboard their trimaran Jade. Apparently, we were having so much fun that we forgot to take many pictures, but the couple I have here display the helpfulness within the cruising community. While dinghying over to Jade one day, our outboard motor seized up. Not wanting to bother Ren with it, I started to get out the oars to row back to Holiday and see if …

Ashore in Key West we checked out all the usual pubs and restaurants in the area from our previous trips to Key West, as well as a few more, and did some of the other standard Key West activities like visiting Hemingway’s house (I’m still working on those short stories…), seeing the Southern Most Point, and watching sunsets at Mallory Square. But, we also checked out some of the other places that we hadn’t really done previously or heard about in advance. Fort Zachary Taylor was one really cool place we went. It is a very old fort started back …

With decent weather forecast and a wind from the east, we left Boot Key Harbor after 6 weeks there and headed for Key West. The initial plan had been to stop at a few anchorages along the way and check out some of the other Keys, but our trip had been delayed a few times by the weather, and we decided to leave early and make the 8-10 hour sail directly to Key West. Plans are to stay in Key West a while, so the weather on the whole should be nice more often for exploring around the Lower Keys …

So, our initial plan was to leave Marathon a few days ago when our time was up on our mooring ball rental, but this cold front that has been making it frigid across the entire country blasted down through the Keys, and the wind has been howling. Since the weather is the controller of all plans while cruising, we extended for an extra week here on our mooring ball. Is Holiday capable of handling the 25 knot plus winds? Certainly. It probably wouldn’t even be too uncomfortable with the sails reefed in, and we can always do some motoring. But, …

Well, we’ve been here in Boot Key Harbor, Marathon, Florida Keys for over a month now. “What do we do everyday?” you might ask. Good question! We’re tied up to a mooring ball and sort of at one of our “destinations.” The cruising life is different here than the previous months where we were anchoring and moving around a lot. We’ve been doing all kinds of different things some days and other days, nothing at all. It’s kind of been all over the board so I thought I’d just pick a day, walk around with the camera, and take you …