Monday, April 11, 2016

Cedar Key, Florida

Pam came to me the other day and said she wanted to go to a fine arts craft fair.  Guys, you know what I'm talking about here.  In a situation like this, it is perfectly allowable to whine, to cry like a little girl, or to feign a heart attack.  Nothing worked.  All I got was "the look".  I actually saw lightning bolts shoot from her eyeballs.

I checked out Cedar Key on Google Earth.  It was about an hour and a half from where we are in the Ocala area.  Not too bad of a drive, but our Kia was long overdue for an oil change, and seeing how I'm so busy saving the world on Facebook with my brilliant political insight, pithy comments, and squabbling over if Sasquatches can cloak and that's why one rarely sees one, I simply didn't have time.  Too busy.

I tried the mechanical ruse.  That might work.

"We can't go.  The Kia is overdue for an oil change," I stated flatly.

"We'll take my Miata."

"All that way?"

"We'll put the top down.  It will be fun."

"I won't have fun and you can't make me."

Nope not going.  I'm the man in this family and what I say goes.  I am the King of my Kingdom.

So the next day we're on our way to Cedar Key in Pamela's Miata with the top down.  It was a nice drive on a beautiful spring Florida day, but man that car is tiny.  Pamela was driving.  She promised not to drive like she usually does and to drive like a normal person.

As we approached Cedar Key, we could smell the salt air.  We miss salt air.  Then we saw water.  Salt water.  It looked shallow.  You know how, when you've been cruising long enough, you get a sense of water depth by the flatness of the shoreline?  That was it.  We swallowed the anchor, but we still remember stuff.

We pulled into the tiny town of Cedar Key.  It was a quaint old Florida Gulf town.  But it was crawling with tourists.  You'd think they'd all have something better to do than to go to some crummy fine arts craft fair.  Stupid tourists.  And look at all of the old people here.  Sheesh.  We had to park far away, but Pamela found a spot right on the water.  The first thing she did was to get salt water on her feet.   Here are the photos.


Here it is.  

Now this was pretty cool.  A guy cut down what I think may have been a live oak and then put all of those carvings in it.


They have friggin' pelicans here.

Lots of friggin' pelicans.



This light pole was pretty cool.  There are about 350 dolphins that reside here, although I didn't see them.  I took this from the balcony of a watering hole where Pam and I stopped for two craft beers.  The bartender opened the bottles and then told me the price.   $11.75.   If he hadn't opened them, I would have put them back.



Two women were walking their goats there.


I don't know what that thing is dangling off her butt, but I loved the tee-shirt. 


On the ride back home.  The Ocala area is the horse capital of the country.


Get a load of the size of this rig!  Holy crap.

I took a selfie in the reflection of the back of the big rig's trailer.

This would be a good cruising destination, so I looked it up on a nautical chart.

Nope, looks too shallow.  But many of you cruisers winter over in Florida, so it might be worth a road trip.  We're going to go back when they're not having a stupid fine arts craft fair to check it out.  And I wanna get a couple of more $11.75 beers.