Now we've got nine days in North Miami, and only need one of them for Thanksgiving, so what do ya do? Ya pack the rental car, and head 3 hours south to beautiful Key West!!!! Now I must admit, I've always heard about Key West as some mythical paradise filled with busty women and luscious tropical drinks (Thank God I'm of age!). But of course when we got there, I was forced to write a little bit of a reality check... Now don't get me wrong. There were plenty of beautiful women everywhere, and the tropical drinks were great, but there was another side to Key West.

It is at both times, a very beautiful city, and yet it has a certain ugliness to it. Most of the houses (Off the main drag anyway) have rotting steps, or peeling paint, or broken fences, or... well, you get the idea. My best guess is that the tropical weather and salt water, just must wreak havoc on them after a while, and that the majority of the people couldn't afford to repaint their house ever few years, or redo their deck. There were poor in Key West of course, silly to think that there wouldn't be.. and a lot of people speaking in Cuban, and French (Cuba's only 90 miles away, and apparently Florida and Key West are a big vacation place for French speaking Canadians).

Night falls, and Duvall Street (The main drag) literally just comes alive.. At the end of Duvall, every night on the pier is something called the sunset festival, where local entertainers (Ranging from bums to amateurs on their way to stardom) perform in various ways.. They also have various booths set up selling all sorts of hand made crafts, or edible delicacies such as Conch Fritters. It's basically just a flat pier so there are often 4-5 performers there, and their acts range from making paper boots out of phony twenty-two dollar bills, to spitting fire, juggling knives, or even trained cats! As for the rest of Duvall, (which also happens to be the longest street in the world.. it runs all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean) the shops all stay open late, the bars start getting packed, and all different types of music can be heard oozing out of their doors. It is a very fun place to spend a night or two, but I don't personally think I'd want to live there.

Below, I've listed some links to some of the places we visited. They have several pictures (I highly recommend checking out the Sunset Festival page, there's .jpgs of a guy who spits fire!) as well as a little history about what each image was from!