Key West Diary 5

One of our sight seeing trips to downtown Key West was to visit the Butterfly Conservatory. We have visited places like this but, this one is by far the best. They not only have several hundred types of butterflys but an assortment of exotic birds as well. It was just a neat experience!

Pictured below are the resident Flamingos. They are pampered and well fed. Their diet is rich in the ingredient that keeps their plummage the bright red/pink you see here.

My scientific names for the many beautiful butterflies.........

......the black white blue butterfly.....

....the black orange butterfly......

........the brown and white butterfly.....,

.......the black and yellow butterfly......

.....,butterflies on a friut plate......

........the orange butterfly..........

...the black orange and white butterfly...

...the black and white striped butterfly....

...the black white and yellow butterfly....

.....the brown circle butterfly.......

......the black white orange butterfly.....

......the brown circle butterfly perched on Sara's head. When this butterfly opens his wings, they are a brilliant irridiscent blue, but I couldn't get him to cooperate....

......one of the exotic finches living in the conservatory....

........butterfly on a wall......

Inside the conservatory.

After a hard day at the conservatory, a little natural coconut milk goes a long way to perk a guy up!

Next stop was to visit Earnest Hemingway's House. He lived here for nine years. He wrote more than 50% of the novels that he would write during his lifetime, here.

His house is one of the largest houses in Key West and was originally built in the 1890's for a ship captain. It also sits on one of the highest points of land in Key West, 18 feet above sea level.

In the garden, the watering trough laying on the ground is actually one of the men's urinals taken from Hemingway's favorite bars, Sloppy Joe's. He thought it would make a great watering spot for his beloved cats. His second of four wives didn't think much of the idea and had a huge olive jar imported from Spain and the edges of the urinal decorated with tile from Cuba to disguise what it really was.

His second wife also had the swimming pool dug on the property, while Earnest was away on one of his fishing trips. The entire property was purchased for $8,000. But, the cost to have the pool dug was $20,000, because under just a foot of soil was nothing but hard rock and coral that had to be dug out with sledge hammers and spikes.

Hemingway joked with his drinking buddies "that damn pool cost me my last penny", so his wife had a penny embedded in the wet concrete to prove it!

Today the pool is still the largest pool in Key West.

One of the famous six toed cats. When Hemingway was living here in the 1930's, there were 52 cats living on the property. They maintain that number today and the cats are free to roam the property.

Hemingway's writing studio is in a separate building in the back yard of his property. 

They have left it exactly as it was when he lived and wrote here, with his original desk and Royal typewriter.

During this same day, we visited the Hemingway exhibit at the Historical Art and History Museum. This is a bronze statue of Hemingway all decked out in his fishing attire.

A model of Hemingway's favorite boat, the PILAR. He had it custom built in New York and shipped to Key West. The boat now resides at the Hemingway museum in Cuba.

Sloppy Joe's bar was Hemingway's favorite drinking establishment. Now it is just a noisy, crowded tourist hangout.