Tommy T. is feeling poorly, and I’m filling in for him. Let’s all send him our best wishes for healing.

I mentioned back in the fall that I had finished planning our first vacation in 9 years, and we actually took it earlier this month. Wow. We planned the trip back in September when there was no Omicron outbreak, and we ended up canceling our trip to see my family for Christmas because of Omicron, so we had to do some serious thinking about what we were going to do.

The day before we were set to leave my parents called us to make sure we were still planning to go because they thought our Covid-related mitigations (quarantining before we left so we knew we didn’t have Covid, N95 masks worn any and every time we were indoors anywhere other than our hotel room, and 100% of our meals and activties taken or done outside, and quarantining upon our return home) were reasonable and workable.

I was worried about the flight down in terms of crowds and people acting out on the plane, but the airport was manageable, and the flight was uneventful. We picked up a car at the Key West airport, and were at our hotel in 5 minutes. We checked in, changed our clothes, and went outside and took our masks off. This is what greeted us as we opened the sliding glass door to our balcony:

The weather was warm and we ate every meal outside, almost all of them water/dockside. What a treat in January!

And we ate mostly at small fish shacks, where the fare was fresh catch, which made everything even better.

Well, except the night we did takeout from the amazing Cuban restaurant down the street.

I befriended the hotel’s resident head rooster, Charlie, who joined us for breakfast on our last day. He is one beautiful bird:

And while we were on Big Pine Key, we saw some endangered Key deer, which was really cool.

It rained part of one day (when it was snowing back at home) and I got see a tropical thunderstorm complete with mammatus clouds:

I am SO HAPPY we went. For the first time in years I didn’t have any chores to do because there were no chores for me to do. I am also happy to say that we did nothing of note. We drove the length of the Keys, ate outside at fish shacks and local dives, drove to look at the outsides of houses for sale to see what neighborhoods and islands we would like to eventually move to. From a travelogue point of view, it might seem boring but from a restorative point of view after dealing with a bunch of huge life hurdles over the last 3+ years, it was perfect. I’m so happy we were able to make it happen. Joy be with you all.