I get a frantic phone call when we are about 20 miles out of Key West from Angie.

“Look to your left, at 10:00. What is that?”

“It is a plane,” I said.

We had just passed a small airport and I was sure a plane was what she was freaking out about.

After several exchanges of “it is a plane, no it is not” I pull the RV over and Angie finally show me exactly what she’s talking about.

She is right, it is not a plane. It is some sort of white blimp, just hovering. And it seems to be at least a few miles up.

We figured it was some sort of weather experiment and when on our way.

Ironically, when we came back down to Sugarloaf Key yesterday, we picked a campground from which the blimp is clearly visible. I broke out the binoculars yesterday afternoon and got a good look. It is tethered. And that is pretty amazing considering how high up it is.

With the curiosity nearly killing me, I did some googling and found out what it was.

It is called Fat Albert, and it is located on Cudjoe Key. It is part of NORAD’s air defense network. it is literally tethered to the ground by a 10,000 foot cable.

One of the reports I read said that there were two of them, one for surveillance and one for broadcasting TV Marti - similar to Voice of America - into Cuba. However, reports indicate that Hurricane Dennis destroyed the TV Marti blimp in 2005.

Here is an interesting, but unconfirmed, story of how one Fat Albert broke loose during a storm and drug a fishing boat nearly to Cuba.

As we drove off the mainland and on to The Keys last Thursday, I have to admit I was unimpressed at first. The Upper Keys look like any beach town on the coast of the USA. It isn’t until you get down to about Islamorada that things start turning into what you’d imagine The Keys to be.

The first thing I noticed is the water is this unbelievably sharp blue-green color. Because the color is so rich, one almost suspects Florida is dyeing the water.

By the time we arrived, dinner was around the corner. So, the first thing we did was hit Mallory Square, where they hold the Sunset Celebration each night.

Friday we got up and headed into town for lunch at Jimmy Buffet’s place, Margaritaville. Pretty obvious that Jimmy’s gone completely corporate, as this place is clearly a tourist trap. We had the obligatory “cheeseburger in paradise” for lunch. I’d have to say it was…meh, pretty average. I wrote off the whole experience as something to do once just to say you did it.

Next stop was Ernest Hemingway’s home. I’m much more a fan of the man than the writing, as his real-life stories are much more interesting than anything he made up for his books. The tour guide was reading from a memorized script (including the jokes), so the tour was a bit dry. But here are some fun facts I remember:

+ Hemingway wrote half of his works in Key West, and all in the span of just nine years.

+ Pauline (his wife at the time) was a former editor of Vogue and thus was more interested in style than function. To that end, she had all the ceiling fans in the house replaced with ugly chandeliers, making the house incredibly hot during the summers.

+ They were both cat nuts, and thus the grounds are now home to about 60 cats - all descendants from Hemingway’s original six-toed cat.

+ The house, built in 1851 by Asa Tift, a marine architect and salvage wrecker, has never flooded or suffered significant hurricane damage. That’s because it is built out of solid limestone blocks and was sited on a hill 16 feet above sea level - the highest point in Key West.

After Hemingway’s house, we putzed around Duval street - the main strip of Key West - killing time until our sunset cruise on the Liberty Clipper.

The cruise, on a 125-foot schooner, goes out into the Atlantic, just off the southeastern coast of Key West, so you can watch the sunset unobstructed. (At one point the captain announced that we were now closer to Cuba than the closest Walmart.)

Here is a picture taken from the ship:

Mason and Max had an awesome time. Mason in particular loved the ocean.

On Saturday, we made the journey to the marker indicating the southernmost point of the continental United States, which we found out later is one of many white lies.

First, Key West is not part of the continental United States, but is an island off the continental United States. Second, the southernmost point on Key West is actually the Naval base behind the buoy. And third, it is 98 miles to Cuba, not 90 miles, which is written on the buoy.

Next stop was Sarabeth’s for brunch. This place was, hands down, the best restaurant we ate at.

The final stop was Kermit’s Key West Key Lime Shoppe for the key lime pie voted “best tasting” by the Food Network. It was pretty darned good pie.

We had to break off our Key West adventure on Saturday so we could head back up to Key Largo for swimming with the dolphins last Sunday (more on that in a future post). But we are just north of Key West now, in Sugarloaf Key, until Saturday. So I’m sure we’ll make one more trip into Key West before leaving.

Here’s the sunset at dinner last night:

Last night we got in just in time for dinner, and some light walking around Duval Street. We plan to take more pictures today, as we are planning on a full afternoon and evening of sightseeing. So I’ll cover Key West in more detail later.

Since my last report we’ve been to Lion Country Safari in Loxahatchee, which is attached to a KOA campground.

Their web site sucks, but the park does not. It is a very nice, clean, well-organized zoo and drive-through safari. Totally worth the trip, especially if you have kids.

The coolest thing, we thought, was feeding giraffes.

“Isolated T-Storms versus Scattered T-Storms”

and got back this.

Isn’t the Internets amazing?

(Isn’t it even more to my point that there is a Wikipedia page defining “Internets”?)

We crossed over the border into Florida late yesterday afternoon.

Here is the view through the front window of our RV:

We decided we needed to stay an extra day here, since the view was this good. So we took a vote - the lions in Loxahatchee are out and more ocean is in.

We spent Thursday night in Chapel Hill (actually, right outside in Carrboro). What a nice area. I told Angie we really need to come back sometime and stay for awhile to check everything out. (A full-timer I once met told me you need to be in a place at least a month before you really know it inside and out.)

I’ve always loved college towns, especially big college towns. There’s always something cool going on, or a neat place to see. For example, without even trying I found Weaver Street Market when I ran out for dinner supplies. Ended up dropping $160 dollars on all sorts of cool organic stuff.

Anyway, we spent Thursday there because it was close to the airport. Frank had a 6:00 AM flight, which meant leaving at 4:00 AM to be sure we got there with enough margin to get through security.

So our day started at 4:00 AM. I managed to catch a few winks when I got back from the airport at 6:30 AM, but then got up so we could hit the road by 9:00 AM. We needed to make it to Richmond Hill for the weekend and it is roughly a 6-hour drive.

In my infinite wisdom, I scheduled us to be on the road all weekend. But what I forgot is this weekend is the WritersWeekly 24-Hour Short Story Contest. We run it every quarter and need to be online from Noon Saturday to Noon Sunday.

The problem was we have to be in Loxahatchee, FL by Monday and there is no way that will happen if we don’t drive over the weekend. So we had to hump it here all day yesterday. We’ll leave here mid-afternoon tomorrow and hit Florida by evening. Then we’ll be back on schedule.

We try as a rule not to do driving days over 3 hours. The boys just can’t take it. And, of course, that means we can’t take it because of the incessant whining.

Fortunately, it wasn’t all that unexciting. We saw a big car crash:

that led to a major traffic back-up (in the opposite direction, thankfully):

and we saw the largest ethnic stereotype east of the Mississippi:

We got here about 6:00 PM and proceeded to have incredible trouble getting online. And satellite was out of the question because there are a clump of 60-foot pines blocking the patch of sky I needed to point the dish at.

The wifi here is from NomadISP. They have some sort of wacky networking. Things that normally work were breaking (and still are today). We began to get concerned that we would need to change campgrounds, or at least get a hotel room we could work out of, so the contest would go off without a hitch. But by late evening we were able to get a stable connection. And aside from a few burps, our essential services (web and email) are working.

There are a few things I’ve noticed on this trip that are very different than out first trip back in 2004. First, wifi is everywhere. The weird circumstance today is to find a campground without it. Second, it is pretty reliable. Crappy coverage seems to be a thing of the past. And finally, it is mostly free. In fact, we only encountered two campground where the wifi was not free; and those campgrounds both use NomadISP and both had flaky connections when we were on them.

Thunderstorms are rolling in tonight, so we plan to just hunker down and wait it out until we leave.

We found out about the Emerald Hollow Mine in Hiddenite, North Carolina, from watching Kristen Gum, host of The Travel Channel’s Cash and Treasures. She made it look like this place had lots of undiscovered treasure (that is the jist of her show, after all).

Well, the reality is a bit different.

Professional wrestling is fixed. Reality TV is scripted. And the Emerald Hollow Mine, while a fun way to spend an afternoon, is a pretend treasure hunt.

Here is how it works…

You pay $15 for a permit that allows you to dig up buckets of dirt which you then haul several hundred yards to the aforementioned sluice box and sift through it to find “precious” gemstones. (Back-breaking work, by the way.)

The fine print, of course, is that emeralds are at least 5 feet deep. So unless you spend a lot of time digging, and doing so in the right place, you aren’t likely to find any.

For the $15, you can also go creeking - which is sifting through the silt in the creek bed for gemstones. On my way to a bathroom break, I overheard two guys talking about the creek bed being “seeded”. I don’t know if that is true, but Frank found two big separate quartz pieces just lying on the bottom of the creek bed that looked like they came from the inside of a geode. It is hard to believe such big rocks like that aren’t in clusters and deep underground. And it is even more difficult to believe those crystals would have gone unnoticed for so long, given all the people that go over that creek bed each day.

If you want to take the easy way out, you can buy a $5 permit and then buy pre-filled buckets of dirt to sift through, some of which are “guaranteed” to yield certain types of stones.

My guess is the mine owners have already taken most of the truly valuable stones and are selling the scraps to the tourists. You can even take what you found and have it turned into jewelry by their on-site jewelry makers.

In a nutshell, Emerald Hollow Mine is Disneyland for rock nerds.

Now, there is nothing wrong with this as long as you understand that is what it is going into it.

The ducks here are particularly aggressive if you have some bread. Poor Mason was scared.

I had to hold him and watch Angie and Max from a distance.

But the whole experience allowed for some great close-ups…

We’re just hanging out today, catching up on work, doing laundry, and waiting for Frank’s plane to get in. We’ll leave in a few hours to drive up to the Raleigh-Durham airport.

Last night we had an awesome German dinner at the Edelweiss Cafe & Bakery in downtown Selma. Normally they are just a bakery and lunch place, but on Friday and Saturday nights they do a dinner from 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM. I had the Gulasch and Angie had the Bratwurst Plate. Good stuff. Definitely worth the visit.

Tomorrow we head to Statesville for the week to pan for our fortune at the Emerald Hollow Mine.

Unfortunately, we left Cape Hatteras about 11:00 AM to make our way to Washington, NC. Here is a shot from the bridge as we drove back up to the mainland:

We had a great early dinner in Washington at a place called Down on Main Street. They have a “secret recipe” for their crab cakes (which were very good, by the way). Max was impressed when the waitress told us that. Of course, he was even more impressed when we told him what “secret recipe” means.

After dinner, we gave our required tithing to the god of discount merchandise - Walmart ( though it felt like a lot more than 10%). One of the things we bought, though, was a fishing pole for Max. The campground we are at is on the local creek. Angie and Max when fishing while Mason and I did laps around the playground. (Mason hasn’t quite figured out yet that the playground equipment is for playing on.)

Max caught three fish. Here is the first one he caught:

Tomorrow we’re off to Raleigh - where we will pick up Frank on Sunday. He is flying in to spend spring break with us at an emerald mine. Geology is a hobby of Frank’s and we thought it would be fun for him to spend his vacation prospecting.

Funny coincidence - Frank found out today that his science teacher has been to this exact same mine. Frank even saw some of the emeralds the teacher found while there.

We arrived in the late afternoon yesterday and the winds were gusting to 40 MPH. Max had to wear his swim goggles just to keep the sand out of his eyes as he played outside.

When the wind caught the screen door and slammed it hard enough to take off a finger, we decided it was time for Max and Mason to play inside.

The wind buffed the RV all night. And there were even people here sleeping in tents, who I felt quite sorry for.

Today the wind is maybe half what it was yesterday, but still fairly strong. The white-caps make getting near the water a risky proposition.

That is if you can get to the water. The winds last night wiped out the stairs to the beach.

We spent the weekend visiting Angie’s sister and brother-in-law in the area around Quantico, VA. They took us into DC on Saturday on the Metro (or “T” as Mason likes to call it). I neglected to bring my pedometer along, so I can’t say for certain how far we walked, but it was probably about 468 million miles.

We took the blue line to the yellow line and got off at L’Enfant Plaza, which put us near the Capitol building.

We stopped off at the National Archives so that we could wait in line for two hours to see the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and the Constitution.

It was pretty moving for us, as both Angie and I are very patriotic.

We continued down the mall and passed the IRS building (yuck), the Department of Justice, and several princesses (or princei, not sure of the plural form)…

before hitting the Whitehouse.

After that was the Lincoln Memorial.

By this time we’d had enough patriotism and headed into Georgetown another eight blocks to find the Metro stop. We were starving and hopped the train to Chinatown, where we ate an awesome Mongolian meal at Tony Chen’s.

But the best story of the day involves Max…

So we are heading back through the Metro system and are waiting for our train at the Pentagon Metro station. Max announces that he has to really go the bathroom (this is after peeing twice already). So what do you do when you have a six-year-old that needs to pee, have less than 5 minutes to catch the train and there are no bathrooms in sight? Empty juice container, of course.

Thank God for wide-mouth bottles.