Part 3 of the FLA Awesome Disaster Trip: Key West Arrival

            So here we are on our way down to Key West.  We had just enough money to party with and the final leg of our trip would still be fun, but now there was an added sense of challenge.  We had two nights to live it up but no money to also buy a hotel stay still be able to fund the trip home.

            Another thing we had to go cheap on was our food costs.  We had to strategically spend money on food that was cheap and would fill us up at the same time.  Most of the time we stopped at Subways as the Five Dollar Footlong deal was brand new at the time.  On the long drive south we stopped at a random Chinese buffet to try and stuff ourselves.  The only issue here was that the food was disgusting and sometimes hard and stale.  The food was almost inedible but the reoccurring theme for this leg of the trip was that desperate times call for desperate measures.  Well we ended up pulling off a good old fashioned dine and ditch for the greater good of the trip.  The workers at the buffet lunged out like they really were ninjas by nighttime.  They chased us all the way to the car and the Focus almost didn’t make it out of the flooded parking lot we were in.  As the car was trying to not to stall out as it drove about 6 mph.  Then they hopped in their cars as the chase took toward the near highway.  My adrenaline was pumping and I was amazed that they were still so persistent in getting the money from us.  My friend who was driving my Focus ran through two very risky red lights.  He looked both ways without stopping and drove right through, which is how we finally evaded the buffet ninjas.

            After stopping off for a quick fishing break, where we caught a gigantic iguana on accident, we made it to the southernmost island of the Keys, Key West.  The game plan here was to pull an all-nighter since we did not have a room to sleep in.  We would catch up on sleep during the day on the beach.  My idea was to park our car at a hotel.  We found a Bestwestern and we would often have to fully change our clothes right in the parking lot.  As far as bathing we would spend sometime in the Jacuzzi with some shampoo and conditioner tucked away in our hands and then it was sponge bath time in the bathroom.  We would also use their bathroom to get ready before we went out.  This may sound a little gross but I stress the fact that desperate times called for desperate measures. 

            At night Duval street came alive.  In Key West it is legal to drink on the streets and this is one of the best parts of the beautiful island.  To save money we did most of our drinking during our pre game.  We would take Jager Bombs over and over while standing in each door of the focus and using the roof as a bar stand.  We called this area “Club Ford” in reference to our hotel room for the night that was conveniently located downstairs- “The Focus Resort”.   We lost one friend during the night but found him the next morning, at this point of the trip nothing really shocked us until the next night.