Celebrity Equinox

We had a really nice dinner with Susan on Thursday evening at Market 17. This restaurant's menus are entirely market-based and will change on a daily basis depending on what is available. Talk about constant inspiration for the chef. The menus also list the sources for the meats, seafood and produce that was used in that day's creations. It was funny that although we have stayed in the area many, many times, we had never really noticed that the restaurant was there right beside the Bridge.

               

 

 

On Friday morning, we wandered over to the Harbour Cafe for breakfast, as we like to do when we're in the area. Just like with Market 17, it was amazing how much more we could see by walking around instead of driving. Now there are even more little places to check out, from Irish to Mexican and Italian, no more than a few minutes' walk from either the Hyatt Place or the Hyatt Regency.

Once we were checked in and on board Celebrity Equinox, we started our regular wander around to get oriented with the ship and where everything is. Our first impression: it is a beautiful ship, and very nicely laid out so that there never seems to be a crowd anywhere (but then we haven't been at the outside pool on a sea day yet!). Lots of windows in the public areas and the seating is really thoughtfully done; there are little alcoves where a small group can gather, many of them partially divided from the corridor with lightweight curtains to give the idea of some privacy and hold the sounds from conversations inside the area.

                

The specialty restaurants, Tuscan Grille (Italian), Murano (Continental) and Silk Harvest (Asian), are all in one area and have their own bar.  It is a really nice way to elevate the specialty dining experience.

The hallway from the bar/lounge to the specialty restaurants

            

The Bistro on 5 is a great alternative dining venue for something light. They do really nice salads, soups, panninis and even crepes.  In fact, the specialty is crepes - breakfast, lunch and dessert types. Really good, too! And on the other side of the ship is the Cafe al Bacio, where you can get a selection of coffees, teas and pastries.

               

The Bistro on 5

                

Cafe al Bacio

The central foyer is actually called Entertainment Court. They have everything there from dance lessons to a table tennis tournament between officers and guests. The whole area is covered by a glass dome up at the pool deck so there's lots of light during the day, and the elevators are all glass-fronted, which some people we've ridden with have found a little disconcerting.

               

              

We've had dinner at the Tuscan Grille and Silk Harvest already, and have been very pleased with the food and the service in both. We purchased a package that discounts the cover charges for the specialty restaurants, so we have one more dinner in each along with one at Murano. Then we found out that, as suite guests, we also have two complimentary dinners, so we've added one more at Murano and another at Tuscan Grille. So we're not going to be spending much time in the dining room this cruise!

Dessert creme brulee at the Tuscan Grill

             

More food photos to come, of course.

Our suite is a nice size, facing aft so we get the soothing sounds of the ocean when we sit outside - except that sometimes people scrape the chairs on the deck above which happens to be the outdoor eating area of the buffet restaurant and it sort of grates a bit. Not a big problem, though. The only thing about where we are is that, as usual, there are only two elevator/stair lobbies on each deck, so we have to walk about 1/3 of the way up the ship to be able to get anywhere. We'll keep you posted on our Fitbit mileage!

              

We've been to a couple of lectures by an astrophysicist from the Austrian Space Forum. He specializes in development for manned missions to Mars and is as enthusiastic about his particular field as any of the other astrophysicists we've seen on 'The Universe' and similar programs on TV. He's hoping to be able to do some stargazing one night, and is also hoping for good weather where we may be able to see a couple of flyovers of the International Space Station.

Tomorrow we're in St. Thomas. We're doing a catamaran/snorkel/beach tour just for something different. Hopefully the weather will be better than the captain's forecast - clouds and some showers.  Right now it's a nice day, just windy and a very little on the rough side. More later...

 

 

First trip of 2014

And we're off again - just a short jaunt this time, with bigger things to come later this year.  This cruise will be on Celebrity Equinox, one of a class of ships we have not yet been on, although Larry does have a lot of clients who book them. Hence the main reason for choosing this cruise.  Of course, the extra cold and snowy winter at home gives anybody a reason for traveling to somewhere sunny.

It wouldn't be the beginning of a trip if there wasn't a cat photo! And it seems that Franklin has finally got the message from his predecessors - You are required to inspect the suitcases as they are being packed, if only to make sure that you are staying home!!

 

 

As we write, we are already in Ft. Lauderdale. The flight was, as usual, uneventful, although we are finding that having the Nexus Trusted Traveler cards makes the customs and immigration pre-clearance process, and even security, much easier to deal with.

 

It was a bit drizzly when we arrived (fortunately we packed the travel umbrella based on the weather forecast) and as we walked over to Duffy's Grill for lunch, but it seems to have stopped for the moment, although it is still quite overcast. Forecasts call for rain this evening and overnight, but a clearer day tomorrow. Let's hope they're right.

 

We will be meeting Susan for dinner tonight at a restaurant nearby called Market 17, right at the western end of the SE 17th St. Bridge. More on that later.

 

As always, we hope you enjoy following along from your spot in our camera bag!



Key West Sunset and Tour

Here we are, finally back again. After scouting out the nearby area on Wednesday, we picked out a couple of things we wanted to do yesterday and today and managed to get most of them in. We had booked a sunset cruise for Thursday and a snorkeling trip on the same boat for today - you'll see the photos of the sunset cruise later in this post, but unfortunately the weather didn't look too good out on the reef for today, so the snorkeling got cancelled. We'll see if it looks any better for Saturday and see what happens.

After breakfast we headed off down Whitehead St. toward the historical attractions. Our first stop was in the Truman Annex, which is now mostly private residences and condos, but started life as part of the original submarine base in Key West. President Truman's 'Little White House' is the main attraction here. Over his time in office, he spent almost 6 months here and used it as a substitute White House. In fact, it was here that he made some of the most important decisions of his presidency, like the order to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although he was the most associated with the Little White House, he wasn't the only president to have stayed here, although the last one was Bill Clinton. Now it is completely given over as a museum, almost completely dedicated to the time Truman spent here.

The whole area is very pretty. The homes are almost all made of wood and painted pastel colours - this sets off very nicely the tropical gardens all around them.

One of the most photographed signs. Route 1
goes from this point in Key West all the
way to Kennebunkport, Maine.

Our next stop was the Hemingway House, a few blocks down the street. The house was actually built by one Asa Tift who made his money as a shipwreck salvager in the 1800s. When he died the house had no owner and was left to decay for about 50 years. At that point, Ernest Hemingway's second wife's uncle 'bought' the property by paying $8,000 in back taxes and gave it to them. They had to put quite a bit into upgrading the place but you can see from the photos that they did a really nice job, considering it was the 1930s.

 

The main house

The pool - the largest one on the key. In the back, the
'cabana' with Hemingway's studio on the upper level

The studio, complete with his typewriter and favourite chair. His
routine was to get up at 6:00 and work until he had written either
700 words or for 5 hours, whichever came first. Then he'd have lunch
and head off to his favourite bar in town.

Another view of the house from the side lawn
which is now set up for weddings. A beautiful
spot, but maybe not the luckiest - after all, Hemingway
was married 4 times, and none of his wives left him
a widower.

Hemingway wrote about 70% of his work here, including 'To Have and Have Not', 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' and 'The Sun Also Rises'. He also performed some distinguished military service, as an ambulance driver in WW I and as a reporter in WW II. Along with posters from the movies that were made from his books, there is a display of his own military artefacts in the house.

Of course, no mention of Hemingway House is complete without some attention given to the famous cats. The Hemingways got a cat named Snowball from a sea captain. Sailors were generally a very superstitious lot, and somehow believed that a six-toed cat was an extremely lucky critter to have around. Snowball, of course, had six toes on her front paws and became the ancestor of many of the cats now roaming the property. The cats are apparently not all too friendly, but we have to say we didn't run into that at all. Maybe they just know cat people when they see them. Here are a few photos of the feline inhabitants at Hemingway's:

You may have to look a little more carefully to
find the cat -- Miss Hurricane Camille
is curled up on the pillow. She didn't even
twitch an ear when the group came through the bedroom.

Duke Ellington - he's the uncle to a lot of the cats currently
in residence. You can easily see his six toes.

Does this guy look familiar? He could be Franklin's
brother, but his name is Humphrey Bogart. No six
toes, though.
 

Once we got done at Hemingway House and walked back to the hotel, we had a couple of hours to relax and get ready for our sunset cruise. There were a few options of course, since the sunset is one of the big attractions in Key West, but we didn't want to get on the bigger party boats. The hotel offers a trip on a 60' sailboat that is berthed right on the waterfront. It turned out that we didn't have to worry about a big crowd - there were only 4 of us booked to go out. And it was a really nice trip. The only sailboats we've been on have been 80' catamarans, so this was a different adventure. But enough talking, here are the pictures:

The view from our balcony over the hotel 'beach' and the sailboat
for our sunset cruise

For dinner we tried another of the restaurants at the marina, also serving really delicious fresh fish. We've thought about it, and have determined that other than one dinner for each of us on the first weekend, we've been eating fish or seafood of some kind every day. No wonder our clothes still seem to fit as well now as they did when we arrived!

This morning, since our afternoon snorkeling trip was cancelled, we decided to ride the Conch Train around town, checking out some of the areas we hadn't visited yet. Even though we have the car, it doesn't make sense to take it out to drive only a few minutes, and then not know where to park it.

The Conch Train took us all around the Old Town of Key West, the original settlement. The 'new town' is actually built on material dredged from the sea to create the harbour, and increased the total key size from 1x2 miles to 2x4 miles. There are lovely old houses everywhere you look in town, and that's because the law says if you buy a house, you can't just demolish it and build something new, you MUST restore the original outside view.

The restoration can take some effort since the original houses were built by shipbuilders in the same way they built ships - without nails, so the structure could bend to withstand storms and high winds. Not only do the same methods have to be used (which can be a good thing in hurricane season) but the outside embellishments need to be the same as well. And when you see some of the intricate gingerbread carving on the railings and around the porch tops, you can see that bringing these houses back up to snuff can be quite costly.

Since the clouds that were threatening this morning have now cleared off, along with the two cruise ships that were in today - the Carnival Victory and Oceania Regatta - we will probably stroll back over to Mallory Square to watch the sunset from there before having dinner. Be back tomorrow with more from whatever it is we decide to do.

 

Driving the Florida Keys

Well, here we are in Key West after a two-day sojourn in Islamorada after leaving Ft. Lauderdale. We had been in Key West before, on one-day excursions from cruise ships, but we hadn't ever experienced the drive down the keys. It really is an easy drive down the Florida Turnpike to Homestead and then down US1 (the Trans-Ocean Highway) all the way down to Mile 0, almost at the western end of Key West.

Even though it wasn't a long drive, we decided to break it at Islamorada, south of Key Largo, for a couple of days. In his research, Larry had found a small place called Ocean House. It was rather difficult to find, given that there are hardly any road signs other than mileage markers, and on top of that, the resort was on the Old Highway, not the new one...After a couple of wrong turns, we got there, and were very impressed with what we found:

The guest rooms - we were in the Ocean Dawn Suite
on the lower left end

Ocean House was completely renovated recently and looks it. Lorelelei, the manager, Adrian and all of the staff couldn't have been more friendly and helpful. Of course, it helped that the only scheduled guests were us and one other couple in the 8 rooms.It was the perfect place to spend a couple of days doing practically nothing, and that's just what we did. Monica took a kayak out a couple of times but much of our time was spent around the pool. Here are a few more photos from the area:

Inside of our room from both sides - quite comfy.

 

The view from a kayak - beach and 'beachfront' areas
near the water, with the pool behind them

This covered cabana was a nice place to get out of the
sun but still be near the pool

On Tuesday we had lunch 'delivered' to our cabana tent by the pool.
Other than to take a dip in the pool and whirlpool we
spent almost all day out there.

After 2 days of doing practically nothing, we got in the car and drove for another 2 hours to get to Key West. We're staying at the Hyatt Key West Resort just near Mallory Square, where everyone goes for the sunsets. We've only been here since about 2:00 this afternoon, but we've already walked the length of Duval St., visited the Southernmost Point marker and walked all the way back to the hotel on Whitehead St (passing Hemingway House and the Truman Annex which we will check out in the next day or so) - managing to get in our 10,000 Fitbit steps.

Driving along US1, the Overseas Highway

Looking towards the west from our balcony. The sun's just a little
too far over for us to see the sunset - the next hotel
is in the way.

Boats anchored in front of a small island right across from us

A couple of the old houses in town

For dinner we checked out Alfonso's, one of the local restaurants no more than a five-minute walk from the hotel, bordering one of the larger marinas in the area.

There are lots of things we'd like to do in the next few days - we'll bring you up to date on them in the next post.

Florida - Fort Lauderdale

Surprise! We're away again, although without any exotic cruise destinations on the agenda; just a drive from Fort Lauderdale to Key West. And we must say it has been a bit strange so far to have flown to Florida and not anticipate boarding a ship. But, just to keep in the spirit of things, here's one of the ships we watched sail out, the Royal Princess:

Right now we're just hoping that the weather improves as we head further south. We arrived on Friday to a nice enough day, but very windy. Fortunately our beachfront balcony has given us good protection from the wind, otherwise it would have been impossible to sit outside. For these first thee days, we've been at the Lago Mar Resort, where we stayed with Monica's mother and Renate last year. We had a first-floor room with a walk-out patio last year and it was great - this year with the wind we're not sure it would have been used as much so we're just as happy to be a couple of floor up. Our balcony also offered better protection from the rain that we've been having off and on through the weekend.

And of course it was Thanksgiving weekend - that means lots of families getting together for the holiday. And in this case, also lots of kids. Not a real issue, but it made for a noisier Friday and Saturday afternoon and evening. Although we didn't get into the pool, we did manage a couple of walks along the beach. See the difference in the weather?

This is supposed to be a relaxing vacation, no all-day tours, no needing to be up at 6:00 for a 7:00 departure for anything (unlike our other trips this year) and so far we've managed to fill the time with visits to a couple of shopping malls - NO, not on Black Friday! We're not that crazy, although we seemed to have timed our visit to Sawgrass Mills perfectly on Saturday. We arrived while there were still parking spots in abundance, and we left just as it was starting to get busy with people having nothing else to do since it was raining again. So we can strike one or two more things off our Christmas shopping list.

For anyone who is following our Lifestyle Change blog at http://howwegothealthier.blogspot.ca, we're seeing how well we can keep up our Fitbit logs while we're away. For those not familiar with what we're doing, we're using our Fitbit trackers to log our steps and exercise, and the accompanying food log to cover calories consumed, trying to eat smarter and more carefully. Right!! It's hard enough doing that with the food we cook, never mind when eating your meals in restaurants every day. It is a bit of a challenge, but so far, so good. Monica's even got some ideas for recipes she's going to incorporate into the blog when we get home.

Salad of mixed greens with grilled pineapple, from
Aquario at the hotel

Surf & Turf at Trulucks's. Do you think they had a
run on broccoli? It was delicious, anyway.

On Sunday evening, we had dinner with Susan at Truluck's, a very nice seafood restaurant not too far away from the hotel and Susan's place. We had a great time and are hoping we can get together with her again when we're back from Key West.

Well, now it's Monday morning. Not particularly bright outside, but also without a breath of wind on the beach. Time to pack up and head down to Islamorada where we'll be spending the next two days. We should be there in the early afternoon, so expect some more interesting photos on the next post.