Two days after Smartini finally made it to Marathon in the Florida Keys, our first real guests showed up for four days. (Sorry UCB, Curt, Sondra, Robin, Cathy, and anyone else who’s spent the night on Smartini – until we made it to the Keys, it hasn’t felt “official”. Very much enjoyed, but not official.)
DedeAnn is Fran’s best friend since middle school in Southern California. Heather is one of my absolute favorite humans on the planet for reasons too numerous to list. They live in Fort Collins, CO, coincidentally where Fran’s sister Ingrid lives, so we get to see them whenever we visit there, but it’s not often – once or twice a year at most. We’ve been eagerly looking forward to their visit, especially since neither of them had ever been to the Keys before.
They came during the hottest, most humid time of year, and we’re still having intermittent generator issues (translation: not as much air conditioning as we all would have liked), so they got the full Keys experience. But they pretended not to notice, and we all just sweated together!
We took Teeny (short for Smarteeny, our new dinghy) out to the Sombrero Reef Lighthouse for some snorkeling. Fran took them under the Seven Mile Bridge to the bayside of the Keys for some snorkeling and a tour of the area. We drove to Key West for a whole day, and on their last morning, we visited the Sea Turtle Hospital. Not nearly as long a visit as we would have liked with these two, but we’re happy to have any time we can get with them!
(Click on any image below to open a slideshow of all images.)
I’m glad you got to go out to Sombrero to snorkel some! When we there in June the seas for the whole week were 4-6-8 feet, so no snorkeling that week. I usually rent a 29′ boat but not that week, though we did finally get a guide to take us out the last day and a half for some fish!
Sure hope you get the generator working better before heading to the islands
Bob, we’ll definitely get back out to Sombrero. I’m sure we can get some bugs and hogfish out there, once the pressure of early lobster season lets up. Since we’re going to be in Marathon for several months, I’m seriously thinking about buying a well used center console that we can get out in much better than in Teeny, and then just sell it when we’re ready to leave for the Bahamas. It took Teeny almost an hour to get out there, with 4 of us in it! BTW, we’ve been to Burdine’s twice already, and absolutely love it!
We had such a wonderful time! Would not have changed a thing, except a longer stay. Love you both so much!
Heather, it was fantastic having you guys! Next August – Bahamas! And the A/C will be working, I promise!
rbs and rfm,
Love your stories and adventures. Especially enjoy how everything has a name like “teeny” and “bob”. I’m sure over time each of those personified items will have stories of their own.
George, we debated the new dinghy name quite a lot, all plays on the “tini” part of Smartini. Teeny Tiny? Teeny Weeny? Smartini Tiny? Finally, we settled on Smarteeny, and we’ll just call it “Teeny”. Glad you like our choice!