Wine Down: Keys Trip

I have spent the last 4 days of my Spring Break in the Florida Keys having a blast. My sister-in-law, Erika, and I both had the same Spring Break this year so we decided to take a short trip to Marathon to visit her mommy. Having family that lives in the Keys is win-win because you get to visit family and go on a mini vacation at the same time. Jared was going to have to work on the days that we were planning on going, so he wouldn't be able to come with us. However, about a week before our trip he found out that he would be able to get off work so he would be joining us after all. Our trip also happened to fall on my mother-in-law's birthday. Since we thought Jared would have to work, my mother-in-law, Gina, didn't think that Jared would be coming along. When I found out otherwise, we decided to keep it a secret from Gina and surprise her. So for the past week, Gina, Erika and I have been planning all the things we were going to do while we were in the Keys...Erika and I secretly knowing that Jared would be joining us and Gina having no clue :)

Thursday, March 31

Erika drove over to my house from Tallahassee on Wednesday night. We got up bright and early on Thursday morning to pack up the car for our trip. The weather was looking pretty bad, but the radar showed that the bad weather only reached down as far south as Cocoa Beach. So we figured that we would just suck it up and drive for 2 hours in bad weather and then the rest of the trip would be fine. As we were packing, it started hailing at my house...yes hailing. I haven't seen hail in a long time and we sure weren't going to drive through that and get my car all dented up.

The weather finally calmed a little and the hail stopped, and we managed to leave Jacksonville about 2 hours later than originally planned. The first part of the drive was terrible, but luckily Jared was driving. There were tornado warnings and intense rain; we even passed by cars that had flown off the road into the woods. Eventually, we got through all the bad weather and made it to clear skies. We stopped in Ft. Lauderdale to have lunch with Jared's best man, Mark McGuire, all the while Erika and I kept having to lie to Gina about what we were doing in order to keep the surprise :)

We finally arrived in the Keys and made our way to Marathon. We had a few hours before our dinner reservation and the big surprise, so I took this opportunity to enjoy a beer and relax on the hammock in Gina's backyard. I was soooo happy to be on vacation!

We made dinner reservations at Frank's Grill, where Gina works a few nights a week. She knew that Erika and I were coming to dinner that night and we were even sneaky enough to make our dinner reservation for 3-4 people just in case one of Erika's friends wanted to join us last minute...or Jared :) We walked into the restaurant and Gina was busy doing stuff. First, she saw Erika and I and got all excited and then she spotted Jared and started crying. It was precious. We had a great dinner and then headed off to the bar, Gina was going to join us later after she got off work.

After dinner, we went to the bar at Key Colony Inn to get Erika's favorite drink, the cappuccino martini.

Once Gina got off work, we decided to relocate to a bar closer to her house. I love that everything in Marathon is 5 minutes away from everything else, since I have to drive over 20 minutes to get anywhere from my house. We met up with Gina at the Brass Monkey...or as I like to refer to it...the bar in the K-Mart parking lot. I guess when you live on a island, and have limited land space, putting a bar next to a K-Mart is logical. Despite its sketchiness, we did have a really good time...plus there were some rather entertaining people there.