Friend's birthday Key West style...

The first time I went to Key West this year was in September for my good friend Stephanie's birthday party. We live in Fort Lauderdale so it is just a short 4 hour drive south for us! The first half of the drive from Ft Lauderdale is pretty uneventful but once you get into Key Largo is becomes much more exciting! You drive on the Overseas highway which includes the 7 miles bridge over the ocean...which is a one lane road so if there is an accident you are screwed!

We arrived late on a Friday afternoon and immediately found our way to the hotel pool which was just outside of our ground floor room. We stayed at the Doubletree Hotel compliments of a con artist (who would be arrested several months later), but that is beside the point of this blog.

The weekend pretty much consisted of lots of good seafood, drinking, and late nights on Duvall Street followed by "recovery" mornings laying by the pool drinking tropical frozen beverages...

To add to my list of dodgy hitchhiking experiences, our last night in Key West only me and one other girl wanted to stay out after everybody else left. Our hotel was on the other side of the island so we would have to take a taxi back. We both ran out of cash so we're like let's just hitch a ride back to the hotel. So of course the first car to stop was a small Honda with three Mexican inside, not that I have anything against Mexicans...but that just so happened to be who stopped. We get in the car, I am wasted as, trying to speak Spanish that made no sense.

When we get towards the other side of the island I tell them where to turn but they go straight. They said they were taking us to their house...um, no thanks. So me and the other girl look at eachother like "let's get the f*** out" so when we came to a red light we jumped out of the car and started walking back towards our hotel. Then the guys got out and started following us. I saw a police car driving towards us so I started waving my hands for them to stop. They stopped and then asked if we were buying crack. It took a bit of convincing them that we were not and we were just trying to get back to the hotel. Apparently the area we were in also happened to be Key West's crack haven? The cops let us in the back seat and drove us to the hotel. Oh, the best part...when the cops asked the guy that was following us for his paperwork, he ran!