Key West and the Great Seafood Gluttony

Seafood, seafood, key lime pie, and more seafood...

This is how I expect to spend a day in Key West,

And I was not disappointed Sat., when we attended

The 7th Annual Florida Keys Seafood Festival

In Key West....

First, we slurped down conch chowder

And conch fritters....appetizers really...

Then we went back to the line of food booths

And grabbed a grilled lobster plate to share...

After eating and checking out the arts and crafts booths,

We drove to Fort Zachary Taylor State Park...

America's southernmost state park.

(And a part of the Great Birding Trail.)

Before visiting the fort, we watched what I believe was some part

of the Ft. Lauderdale to Key West Regatta...

I found this lone sandwich tern on the small beach in the park...

While visiting Ft. Z. Taylor,

Ru discovered an odd couple

When he looked out the cannon portals....

The iguana was quite large,

And so was the "great egret"....

When I see this photo,

I keep thinking of

The Owl and the Pussycat!

I remembered seeing the white morph photo

Of a great blue heron in the Stokes Field Guide,

So I was anxious to get back home and see....

I'm pretty sure this is indeed a great blue heron

With the white morph going on...!

...Looking down the row of cannons...

This fort contains the largest cache

Of Civil War-era seacoast cannons

In the United States...

Also puttering around the "semi moat" below the fort

Was a female ring-necked duck...

And what I thought was a common merganser...

But it's a female red-breasted merganser, a lifer...

I only saw the one merganser paddling around with

Several blue-winged teals...and coots...

This male/female teal pair are under mangrove roots...

Back on the road, we went to Conch Republic Seafood Co.,

For more seafood...I had fish and chips...

...That is, after we ate slices of key lime pie

From Kermit's...we ate at both places

Six years ago during my first visit to Florida...

We also strolled the boardwalk outside the restaurant

(And other restaurants)...

Several brown pelicans were floating

in the marina...

This one is an immature... 

Key West is known for the free-roaming roosters

On the island....

This is a quad of black-breasted reds...

That's hubby w/ a large stuffed frog named Jingles,

A Christmas gift from our daughter...

Ru decided we were going to use it

For our travel photo mascot...

So here he is at the southernmost point in the US...

Key West is well-known for its gorgeous sunsets...

We were on the road heading home when the sun went down,

But stopped along Seven Mile Bridge

To take not-so-great photos, but...

It was a beautiful sunset!

A great ending to a really nice day.