Tourist day (resuming Miami posts)

So after the memorable (for the Alabama fans) game, we had ourselves a little tourist day to distract Sean.  I had planned this all along of course, long time ND fan here, I knew how it was going to go.  Anyway, we decided to go down to Key West for the day.  There was one problem: confusion over toll roads.  When we rented the car the guy was pretty sketchy about how to pay for tolls.  He was trying very hard to sell us the flat rate toll thing which made me think it must be like adding additional insurance to the car.  So I started asking questions about it and he totally backed down (got sick of me) and we left it with the option to add on the toll package afterwards if we ended up using the toll roads.  So then we were totally paranoid about using the toll roads (you can't pay cash for them) and found the alternate route down to the keys.  It took ages and ages and we were getting slightly annoyed about our wasted time until I saw a sign for the Coral Castle.  Yes, something I saw a show about a few years ago, which is amazing considering how little random TV I get time to watch.  So to salvage this waste of time we pulled in and paid $13 each to tour this place.  Yes, it was 10 cents a long time ago.  Shaking my fist to inflation.

 I won't bore you with the whole long story, or perhaps  you've seen the show yourself, but this rather eccentric guy spent most of his life making this castle thing out of coral blocks.  It was a feat of engineering magic, blah blah, and this was the sun dial he made.  It totally worked.

 An overview of the castle, he did this all by himself... cut the coral blocks from the ground and put them in place.  What the heck, I know, it took a long time, go find the show and watch it.

 Oh, and he was a little guy, this is supposed to be a life sized photo of him.  My husband, the giant.

This is one of the gates he made that was perfectly balanced, weighs 2 tons or something.  There is a video on youtube of a child pushing it with one finger.  I will spare you the rest of the photos, give you a reason to stop there yourself.  On the way back from Key West we took the toll road home to save a lot of time and we tried to tell the guy when we dropped off the car that we needed to add on the toll coverage but he said they'd bill us for it.  Hmm, can't wait to see what those charges are.