June 8 June 9 June 10 June 11 June 12 June 13 June 14	Thursday, June 12, 2008 We got another late start. We returned for breakfast at the Beach Café - yogurt, granola, and fruit again. It was a breezy day today. After eating, we returned to room to pick up camera stuff. Today, we would be walking. We headed north on Whitehead to the Hemingway House. Very interesting! There were a lot of cats on the property. We were told there were 51, all descendants of Snowball, one of Hemingway’s cats. The guide was full of Hemingway stories. Let’s see if I can remember some of them... Hemingway’s wife was quite fashionable. One of the first things she did to remodel the house was to remove all the ceiling fans as “too old fashioned”, replacing them all with heat generating chandeliers... The guides have questioned her taste for years, especially in the summer. The photo on the right below shows one of the tropical flowers we found on the grounds. The house has the island’s first in ground swimming pool, which is nine feet deep at the deep end. It was very expensive to put this in, costing almost three times what the house cost, mainly because the island has a thin layer of soil over fossilized coral, which is very hard rock. Also, there’s no natural running water on the island - all fresh water at the time was obtained from catching rain water in cisterns. Thus, the pool was a salt water pool. Salt water doesn’t stay fresh very long, so the water must be frequently changed. During the summer, it will stay fresh for up to two days, then the pool must be drained, scrubbed, and refilled, a process that can take up to five days.... On top of which, she removed Ernest’s boxing ring to make room for the pool. Oh, and she did all this while he was out of town... When he returned and found out how much she had spent on it, he pulled a penny from his pocket and flung it at her feet saying she might as well have his last cent. She turned to the workers, who were laying the flagstones around the pool and got them to embed this penny into the mortar. There it sits, to this day, plainly visible. She liked to point out that, of all his wives, she’s the one who got Ernest’s last cent... Near the pool is a fountain that is billed as the cat’s water dish. The basin for the fountain is a urinal from the original Sloppy Joe’s... The story is that, when Sloppy Joe’s had to move from its original location to its current location (the landlord had raised the rent from $3 to $4 per week and Sloppy Joe refused to pay the increase, so moved), Sloppy Joe pulled out the restroom fixtures, since he had been the one to install them. Ernest saw the pieces laying outside the bar and, figuring that he’d paid for it with all the beer that he’d bought over the years, asked to take it home. That was agreeable, so he hauled it home, leaving it between the house and the pool, right where his wife would see it first thing in the morning.... She was appalled, but he was adamant. He’d give up the urinal when she gave up the pool. Both stayed. Trying to make the best of things, she added a Cuban urn (shown in the photo on the left) and turned it into a fountain. Ernest figured the cats could drink out of that, saving him having to fill a bunch of small water dishes to scatter around the yard. Well, the wife had the last laugh. The cats don’t drink from the basin, but they will lap water from the side of the urn. She said her cats had too many manners to drink from a toilet... While driving an ambulance in Italy during World War I, Ernest was hit by shrapnel, which would bother him the rest of his life. While recovering in a hospital there, he fell in love with his nurse and asked her to marry him. She (at 26) thought the age difference too great (he was 19) and turned him down. Hemingway would use real people as the basis for his characters in his books and short stories. In one, he modeled a character after this nurse. However, she had a very bad death at the end of the book. Most of his writings would take 3-5 rewritings before he was satisfied with them. This particular chapter took 41 edits. Rumor has it he just enjoyed killing her off..... One of the cats likes to lay on the bed in the master bedroom. During one tour, one woman asked the guide if the cat was real. In a fit of pique, he said, no, they’re animatronic - they get them used from Disney.... The lady commented on how lifelike it looked. About then, the cat raised its head and yawned. The lady yelped! After the Hemingway House, we walked across the street to the Lighthouse (photo on the right) next. The story goes that Hemingway bought the house across the street from the lighthouse, figuring that, no matter how much he drank, he could always find the house.... We climbed to the top (88 steps). It was a very interesting view out over the city. That’s when we realized that there was a cruise ship in port - we could see it from there. The three photos above were taken from the top of the Lighthouse. The photo on the left is looking north along Whitehead Street and shows, among other things, the AME Zion Church, the old Customs House, and a cruise ship. The center photo looks down onto the Hemingway House. The colorful trees in this photo are Royal Poinciana or Flame Trees. The photo on the right shows a rooftop hammock at the B&B next to the Lighthouse. They also had a lighthouse keeper’s house museum that was pretty interesting. That’s when Carl discovered that he’d left his reading glasses somewhere. I’m almost positive he had them at the Hemingway House, as he was thumbing through some of the books in the bookstore. Who knows? On our way back to the Lighthouse entrance, we let a cat into the much cooler room... I mentioned it to the lady in the gift shop and she says it belongs. We also asked her if there was somewhere nearby, like a pharmacy, that would have reading glasses for sale. There is a CVS Pharmacy just down the street, so we walked over to there to replace his reading glasses. Since it was a little after 1, we walked up Duval Street to Sloppy Joe’s, intending to have lunch there. Every table was taken, so we walked back out. That cruise ship in port is adding to the crowds in town.... So, we walked back down Duval to a smoothie shop. They were lousy smoothies, but they were cold... The two photos above were taken on our stroll up and back down Duval Street. The photo on the left shows the rococco facade of the Strand, which used to be the movie theater, but is now a Walgreens... The photo on the right shows some modern gingerbread on an upper balcony, depicting sailfish. So, we returned to the Tiki bar for our afternoon reading with cold drinks. I had the same pair as yesterday (frozen margarita followed by a frozen mudslide) while Carl had a frozen margarita followed by a banana daiquiri. Our reading got interrupted a number of times. Once was a talkative fellow trying to pimp his favorite authors.... Then there were the people there for a destination wedding... They took over a couple of the tables near the bar and were very talkative. Just watching them, I think I figured out which was the bride and which was the groom. The rest were just boisterous.... After a while, we returned to the room for our afternoon showers, then walked back downtown to Kelly’s Caribbean Restaurant for dinner. It’s the southernmost brewery in the US. Dinner was okay. However, the location wasn’t that great. Our table was mostly in the sun and the large trees overhead kept dropping stuff on us... We split a red snapper dinner with coconut shrimp appetizers and had drafts. After dinner, we walked on to Mallory Square. In the marina near there, we saw a ship pretending to be a pirate ship. It was covered with just about every pirate flag available at the Pirate Soul Museum..... It’s actually a show that will be starting in July. They have one actor hired already and he was dressed (and swaggered) like Jack Sparrow... He was walking up and down Mallory Square for pictures. I resisted.... The three photos above show the pirate ship, pirate, and flags mentioned above While waiting for sunset, we watched Dominique and his Flying House Cats, a trained cat show. He was obnoxious, but the cats were fun to watch. I took the two photos above near the end of his act. The quality isn't very good.... I set up the tripod and got some more sunset shots (three of which follow). Then we watched some of the other acts going on around the Square. One was an acrobat - aged 50! Very good. We picked up ice cream cones on walk back to the hotel where we took our second showers of the day and headed for bed. It’s time to go home... Next...