she’s baaaack…

That’s right, I made it back in one piece from Key West, and then promptly slept for 15 hours. I’ve got a tan (!) with big blotches of sunburn here and there where I completely failed in my sunscreen application, I’m considerably less tense than I was before I left (but talk to me after today’s packing session and we’ll see about that), and I feel pretty great. Many many thanks to the lovely Jocelyn, Jake and Anya for putting me up and cooking great food and burying me in the sand at the beach and making sails out of sarongs and sitting up on the porch with gallons of sangria and talking long into the night. Now all I need is for Chicago to be about 20 degrees warmer and I’ll be all set.

So what about Key West? Despite what pretty much everyone who’s been there told me, it was not what I expected. Sure, it’s a big resort town, and sure, there are tons of tourists hogging the sidewalk and buying up absurdly awful (and not in the good way) fart joke t-shirts, but just off the beaten track of Duval Street, there’s a real neighborhood. A good one. The architecture in Bahama Village (and the rest of Old Town) ranges from cape cod-style homes with wraparound porches to victorian gingerbreads to cottages that look for all the world as though they were transplanted directly from New Orleans. There’s a pirate costume megastore, too, but more on that when I get the pictures posted. And of course, there’s diving.

Diving.

The water conditions and visibility have apparently been uniformly awful for the past month or so around Key West, so I got insanely lucky. On Saturday morning, Dave, Joe, Jason and I ventured out to dive the Cayman wreck, about 35 minutes off Key West, 90+ feet down. Talking to Jason, who’s a divemaster at Lost Reef, it sounded like we’d be able to maybe see ten feet in front of us, which wasn’t exactly heartening, but just being under the water was something I really desperately needed, so I figured hope for the best and at the very least I’d get some zen time in with the fish. But when we arrived at the site, the blue water was literally coming in right underneath us, which meant visibility of about forty feet when we descended, and it only got better as the dive went on. There were jewfish and parrotfish and angels and eels and even a little swim-through below deck, where big snarled bundles of cable and random engineering detritus make for a slightly spooky and very darkened artificial reef.

Even better was the second wreck of the morning, Joe’s Tug, which sits in about 65 feet of water, in the middle of a large coral field. Here, we saw a (rare, for the area) stonefish, boxfish (or cowfish, I can never tell the difference), spotted eel, huge schools of yellow snapper, and more angels, surgeonfish and wrasses than you can shake a stick at. Also some barracuda, living up to my informal nickname (Mexican Standoff Fish). They’ll just hover there, staring at you. You swim at them, they don’t move. You swim away, they follow. Turn around and they’ll stop again. They’re like that dude in the thrillers who’s following you, but only walks when you’re walking. As soon as you stop, they stop. Creepy? A little, but they make me laugh. They might have lots of teeth, but I’m still bigger.

Finally, yesterday morning, after a proper bender with Jocelyn at the Green Parrot Monday night, I got up late and hopped in my rented Mustang convertible to drive (as fast as possible) to Miami. True to form, I made the flight with all of two minutes to spare, and arrived in (COLD) Chicago on time.

Conclusion: it was a good trip, a much-needed break, and now I’m as ready as I’ll ever be to finish the packing and get all moved and shit. Bored? Come on over and help me out! Want to see the pictures from the birthday and the trip? You’ll have to help me pack, because I’m not posting them until that’s done. I would call it blackmail, but I’m not sure how much of a draw that really is…