beautiful things

Mmmm... dinner NY style

Mmmm... City Bakery

Pavlova

One of my favorite desserts in the city - pavlova at Balthazar's...

Memories...

Ah, memories of vacations past... well, this one just past in particular! We had a really good time and leaving was hard. It's fantastic to go somewhere warm in the middle of winter, but it does make coming back that much more excruciating. Not that I'm complaining, because how lucky were we to be able to be right on the beach? Very!

The full set of photos is up at flickr but here are some highlights.

A snapshot from the drive there and our first view of the resort at reception: we flew to Fort Lauderdale (long story to do with a long standing credit on Jet Blue that we needed to spend) and it was about a three hour drive. Once you get to the Keys, US1 continues as this long main road over 100 miles long with something like 42 bridges connecting the main string of islands. One of the bridges is 7 miles long! The bridges are mostly just stretches of road over shallow water (rather than Brooklyn Bridge style long spanning bridges - this is a good photo) and make for a beautiful and interesting drive. There are also lots of unconnected islands accessible only by boats... but staying on one of those is a lot more costly!

The view from our back porch the night we arrived, and then the next morning: it was very dramatic as you don't get a view of the beach until you enter and walk through your unit. I practically burst into tears of joy and excitement it was so beautiful and close! I love the beach, and I love being by water. My English boarding school (yes, did you know I went to boarding school?!) was on a cliff overlooking the sea. It was really quite spectacular (even though the school itself looked a bit like a prison) and after my four years there it's kind of in my bones or something.

Here's our unit (a 2 floor 2 bedroom beach house) and look how close we were to the beach! We were on the beach!

The beach itself wasn't a beach beach with waves lapping on sandy shores. But that was fine by me!

There was a sandy pier so my husband could go fishing while I relaxed in the hammock!

Ok, so mostly I was on a beach chair knitting... and yes, on a couple of days it was a little more chilly! On those days it wasn't so much chilly as windy and thus not entirely swimsuit weather, but out of our six full days there, three were definite bikini days. And yes, those are the anemoi mittens by Eunny Jang you see there, knit as a birthday present for Kymm. Uh, yes, her birthday was last August, why do you ask?!!! (They are inside out in the top right photo.)

There were some beautiful sunsets, and it was fun to play around with my iPhone (on the left) and regular camera (on the right). The corresponding photos were all taken within a minute of each other, except for the palm trees where there's a ten minute gap.

I also made good progress on uniscarfity which feels like it's been going on forever, what with swatching for it almost a year ago. I love how the colors are working together, and I love the texture of the double brioche stitch, but wasn't entirely certain about the stripes where I've been switching colors. I'm becoming more convinced, especially now that I have a second set of stripes, but I'm still not exactly sure how this will look overall as a scarf. I've planned it so that each of the four colors has a section with each of the other colors, a total of six sections.

When it was sunny, it was absolutely gorgeous.

When it was windy, we didn't mind putting on sweats and sitting on the beach anyway!

Mostly, we stayed at the resort during the day, venturing out at night for dinner. Here we are at Porky's eating fried key lime pie! We found a lot of places had "one man bands" - a guy on a guitar singing with "karaoke drums". Porky's was no exception. And the key lime pie was delicious!

We also did a day trip to Key West. We had lunch at the Half Shell Raw Bar, stopped off at bar on Duval Street and had dinner on one of those private islands we couldn't afford to stay at. Unfortunately it was a windy day so we weren't completely out in the open and I didn't get a very good photo but the food was excellent and the whole experience of going out to one of the islands, although only a 10 minute boat ride a way, is one I'm glad we didn't miss.

By the way, the private island I would want to stay at more is this one. We drooled over this website before, well, looking at the price tag (my husband has good taste - finding good vacations is one of his superpowers!) I later found out that we could have dined there too. The moral of the story? If you can't afford to stay there, see if you can dine there!

Ok, back to the place we did stay at... breakfast was included so we ate at the resort restaurant most mornings (and one evening). The restaurant was excellent but, because we had a full kitchen, we were virtuous and brought groceries and made sandwiches most times for lunch.

And then of course was our beautiful last lunch at the Morada Bay Beach Cafe. The perfect end to a beautiful vacation.

Meat glorious meat

No offense to vegetarians, but I love meat. I'm not proud of it, but it's a fact. And tonight, we had quite a feast of it at Fette Sau in Williamsburg. It was awesome! Between us we got a rack of pork ribs, 1/4 lb pulled pork, a sausage and 1/4 lb flank steak. The pulled pork was amazing and I'm a sucker for ribs, especially when they don't come pre-slathered with barbecue sauce. In fact, I prefer not to have any barbecue sauce at all.

Then we came home and had creme brulee ice-cream - the perfect meat chaser.

Yum.