The Florida Keys

The Florida Keys in December...I would have expected more ocean beaches, but there weren't many.

Key West is crowded and overpriced but has its share of curiosities--shuttered old clapboard houses like this one, surrounded by high fences and little patches of jungle.

What few beaches we found had very little in the way of ocean waves, perhaps because mainland Florida and the large island of Cuba block them. 

Ernest Hemingway's house was really the only thing on Key West that interested me. It's overrun with 6-toed cats, which are descended from his own little band of pet cats. 

Some of the tourist literature refers to this place as a mansion, which it is definitely not. I think it's only got three bedrooms--or maybe two bedrooms and a dressing room. But it had a sort of subtropical charm. 

Hemingway's bathroom...

The décor inside the house was surprisingly...feminine--for such a manly man.

Hemingway's kitchen...

His actual bed...

I always forget just how exotic Florida can feel...once you get away from Orlando and a little further south. Great communities of single-wide trailers, hidden behind overgrown banana trees and plumeria trees with all manner of potted palms and faded statuary on their concrete lawns. People of every color and tongue. Palm trees. Coconut trees. Dark places hidden open-air bars on narrow alleys. Rusted antique cars parked along the streets. Exotic birds. Eccentric people of every age and race, people who've fled there from all corners of the nation and of the globe, people who look like they have a story or two to tell.