Two more days until we make the move to Key West.

We have tried to strategically pace our food reserves, but uneven quantities of some items combined with a questionable timeline has left us with an imbalance of nuts, mustard, frozen shrimp, tortilla chips and strawberry preserves. Although that might make up one of the tamer Chopped baskets, we don’t have culinary prowess to pull that off in the kitchenette. Nostalgia has complicated the fridge situation as well with final runs to some favorite eateries.  Shout out to India Harvest and Portillo’s.

Today we completed repacking all our luggage, making some last-minute choices. (Subtract printer/scanner, add Wahl clippers and Reef ID book.) Tomorrow, we make a final run to take all the supplemental hotel accessories (cutting board, sharper knives, paper shredder, etc.) to the storage locker.  We will also sell the other car which means we will own neither a residence nor transportation.  Leslie has gravitated toward calling us sea gypsies.

YouTube TV turned out to be a terrific cord cutting choice for us.  It has just about all the channels hosting the programs we enjoy for about half the price of traditional cable/satellite providers and everything is cloud based, so we can move from location to location without missing a recorded program. Schitt$ Creek has resonated a bit lately given the hotel situation.  Dexter has also started to creep into the binge category which is, again, oddly tied to our living situation with the flight to Miami on Saturday.

CDC Cases By County - Florida Stats on June 17, 2020
As a stepping stone, Florida gets us closer to Bonaire, but comes with some increased risks.

There is a bit of nervousness given the reported spike in Florida Covid cases.  We plan a very quick airport-to-rental-car transition and make the 165-mile drive to Key West where the CDC’s Cases and Deaths by County shows the Monroe county case rate per 100,000 residents to be78% lower than Miami-Dade.  In terms of case concentration, Miami-Dade appears to have 27.8% of all cases in Florida, where as Monroe county has just 0.2%.  Then there is the start of what NOAA is predicting to be an overly active hurricane season…but that is fodder for another blog.

As always, make smart decisions and if you have the ability to positively impact someone’s day, do so.