Aunt Aggie's Adventures: Prepping for Visitors + Trucks in Key West

Today we are preparing for our second set of visitors: George's sister Nannette, and Donny and Jenny Jackson. These three are family, but Donny and Jenny haven't visited Aunt Aggie, so we want to make a good impression. We washed the grime off the outside, changed sheets, cleaned the bathroom, vacuumed, and also did a new task: wiping down the woodwork in the salon with Murphy's Oil Soap. I got fussy toward the end of the cleaning because a dockhand had walked on the wet floor on his way to do a pump-out. The floor was tracked with dirty shoe prints. Ugh! Yes, I am grateful for the pump-out every Tuesday. Next week we need to wait for him to finish before we clean outside. We washed it off again and walked over to lunch at the Rusty Anchor.

We had walked through this restaurant in order to find the fishmonger, but we'd never eaten there. Today we had the lunch special, beef stroganoff. Yes, it is an odd dish to order here, but it tasted great. It was a bowl of satisfying gravy, noodles and beef strips. I don't know when I've eaten any beef, so it was a nice change from seafood.

After lunch we walked out the back door and waited with another couple for a chance to buy fish. We asked for 2 - 3 pounds of yellow tail snapper. When the owner weighed our bag of fish, he said we owed $63. What? Last week the fish was just $20. He had three pounds of fillets on the scale. Last week we bought one fish for $20 and then had it filleted. Oops. He took a couple of fillets out, and we paid $46 for double what we need. Back at the boat we divided the fish into two packages - one for tomorrow and one to freeze for next week. We need to be careful with our ordering because we really like this fish and appreciate the ease of buying. It's so fun to walk over there and buy fresh fish. There is a language barrier making the transactions tricky. We will do better.

Beautiful yellow tail snapper waiting for buyers.

As we have toured Key West, we noticed several decorated trucks parked at corners. I've seen other municipal art on this trip. One town had decorated dolphins at street corners, for example. Trucks seem rather large for art. I wonder how this started. That's a question I will investigate as I walk around this week with Nan and Jenny. Here are the three trucks we've seen so far.