Winner Best Travel Book
Finalist Best Graphic Design
Best Book Awards
Winner Excellence in Craft, Florida Outdoor
Writers Assoc.
v
quixotic [kwik-sot-ik]:
dreamy, impulsive, unpredictable, utopian, visionary, wanderer
Hurricane Irma — Guidebook Update
When Irma hit the Lower Keys on Sept. 10, 2017, as a
category 4 hurricane with 135 mile-per-hour sustained winds,
they were forever changed — but not necessarily for the worse.
The Keys — the land, animals, trees, reefs, and humans, are a most resilient bunch. While Irma's force made all of us creatures wander around dazed for a while, surrounded by a brown landscape of downed trees and houses, before long green leaves sprouted from drab branches, turtles swam in the bays, and the rebuilding began. It has been an amazing coming together of friends, neighbors and strangers, with the result proving our "One Human Family" motto is more alive than ever — and everyone is excited to share their joy with the returning travelers and tourists.
Many people want to know what they can do to help. The easy answer is, buy our guide and come visit! We are a tourism-based economy and visitors now are especially helpful. Plus, since the guidebooks are all stored at our house, every guide you buy now is certified to have been through the eye of a hurricane.
Just a month after impact, Key West was back to normal (if that's an adjective that can ever be used for Key West) and open for business. Irma spared it from the brunt of the storm. The rest of the Lower Keys took a little more clean up, but now most businesses are back open, a few are, well, simply not there anymore.
The state of things is ever-changing currently, and you can download the latest update to our guide here [link to come], so you'll know what to expect when you get here. And you should get here. The water is clear blue-green as ever and the wildlife — both human and animal — back out in full force.
If you want to know more about the whole debacle, check out our blog as well. Check back, too, because it's taking a bit to clean up here as well, and our time for writing has been a bit limited.
Radar screen shot of Irma's eye making landfall. The red pin is our house on Cudjoe Key, 20 miles from Key West.
Little did we know that our obscure Cudjoe Key would have its 15 minutes of fame. As we watched the news headlines from our evacuation hotel on the mainland, little did we know in just 12 hours Irma would turn unexpectedly, and the eye would pass right over our hotel, too. Bad luck? Nope. We're still here, and it's not every day one gets the life experience of standing in the eye of a hurricane.
