I started this blog to record this trip. My friend Ken Shane suggested it. He would set it up and manage it for me. A new medium, on a slightly different wave length. I had never read a blog (still haven’t), so I have probably done it badly. I took it as a sort of challenge—to take the day-to-day and make it entertaining. All us writers are only entertainers after all, sideshow hawkers peddling distraction.

An obvious point of this journey was to escape the miseries of New England winter. In this it was eminently successful. It was snowing the day we left Rhode Island, but we had no idea how record-breaking miserable the weather would become in the ensuing weeks. I have avoided drawing attention to the contrast. Schadenfreude is not among my guilty pleasures. And it was chilly in Key West. I had to wear long pants.

In Linda’s Jacuzzi. (Photo: C. Payne)

This blogging is sufficiently self-aggrandizing without rubbing it in. What else is this exercise but the blogger’s self-assertion of his personal significance? I am important. My opinions and observations are worthy of someone else’s attention. But then, isn’t that the message of all this new “social media”? The hubris wave lengths have become hugely profitable for their purveyors. No need to create a market for ego, just pander to it. Every child who ever pled look at me is a potential addict in this lottery for acknowledgement. The result? A universe of mundane revelations seen through a thicket of selfie-sticks.

At the outset I promised to be honest. It has been great living in gym shorts, T-shirts, and flip flops. Some days the sun has been too hot to absorb for long. The food has been great, and the constantly changing company of tropical birds a pleasure. Back home our empty house is snowed- and frozen-in, my pickup truck buried until spring. I’ve been glad we haven’t been there.

Tomorrow we head back north in gradual increments, retracing traversed country, back to the past where the future lurks. Who knows if we will return this way again?