Kaimusailing

I reserved a car for my trip down to Cedar Key and found out more about the place. It almost seems like everybody else has been there except for me. I will try to book a B&B for at least one night.
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I had returned to Southern River Walk in St. Marys with Geoff and Karen and then had salmon dinner at their waterfront home. The next day they invited me to attend the ribbon cutting ceremony for the new transient marina dock at the St. Marys waterfront. I think it is called the Gateway Marina. There are a few flaws in the design, but the town fathers are very happy to have it.
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I learned that a tall ship that was expected at the new dock had been delayed and was surprised that it was the ship that visited Crisfield just before I left there, the Nao Trinidad, the replica of Magellan’s flagship.
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The experiments with instant tom yum paste continue and now we have a simple soup using Snow’s minced clams. ¼ cup of brown rice is microwaved with 1 cup of water and the juice from one 6.5 oz. can of clams. ½ to 1 tbsp of instant tom yum paste is added. The rice mixture is microwaved until it boils, then brought to a boil about every 5 minutes, takes 1 ½ to 2 minutes with 1100 watt microwave oven. Total cooking time varies but it is done when the rice is no longer crunchy. A half teaspoon of sesame oil is added at the end. This produces 1 serving. There is only the microwave bowl and a spoon for dish cleanup. Hot sesame oil can be used, but the tom yum spicing is hot and more can be added if more heat is wanted.
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Roughrider Lynn and her new partner showed up and we had coffee. My role as chronographer of the boatyard was put to the test and I was able to fill her in on what little I knew of recent history.
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Just as featuring chicken mole on their specials menu started mole mania, Southern River Walk featured clam chowder and now we have clam chowder mania. My younger sister asked for some clam chowder recipes. My trip to Cedar Key to visit with my daughter features Tony’s clam chowder, proclaiming itself as the world’s best. I found that Publix carries Tony’s. The canned chowder is not considered as good as the restaurant’s made from scratch version. I resist the urge to make a batch, I will be having the real thing very soon.
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Very soon has arrived and gone by. I am back in St. Marys in the boatyard. I can report on the clam chowder and other things.
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My “smart” phone and rented Honda CRV did not get along, and so, I ended up driving through most of Gainesville, and it is a big place with lots of stop lights, unusually slow Floridian traffic, and a frantic navigator who is trying to make a course to the West Southwest.
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I made it to Cedar Key and Tony’s clamchowder restaurant. My daughter was waiting for me there, and jet lagged, already ordered and consumed a bowl of Tony’s clamchowder. She later said she ate it all at once. She was hungry. It was good. I had my bowl and it was good. It had been my immediate goal, to get to Cedar Key and have Tony’s clamchowder. So, now what are we going to do.
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We walked around the harbor which is a short walk and peeked into a few places. There was an art store, but I did not like any of the art. There is a kind of touristy art that an artist turns out to sell to tourists, visitor’s cash flow. I’m not opposed to art that is created quickly, I actually like a lot of art that is created quickly.
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One important aspect of this visit was ice cream, the kind you find in an ice cream store with special mixes of flavors. I avoid carbohydrates, but not these. Alas, our rental unit was next door to a restaurant, and below it, a touristy knick knack store that had such ice cream. You could see it in the window. Gaping tubs of delicious ice cream. But they were closed.
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We checked into our rooms and the lady loaned us an Apple charging cable for someone’s iPhone. We were in a suite, the highest vantage point in Cedar Key, great view. The suite was very nice and can be seen on the Harbourmaster website, the suite is called Sea Pearl. The site has a virtual walk through. I booked the suite as soon as I went through the virtual walk through.
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Sometimes we will like a place because it is quaint, by the seaside, and beautiful, but my daughter likes Oxford, in the UK. She is an example of why someone would like that old academic town. Having her around puts gems of discussion into the air. But I have to explain.
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If you were in an academic town, drawn there by the intellect, you might want to take a vacation to somewhere else, where they have perfected clamchowder, where there is the perfect art of nature’s sunset in the Gulf of Mexico.
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For me it is not the place, it is the people. Cedar Key is full of very friendly people.
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If I recommend Cedar Key, I will break one of the rules that should not be broken. Don’t recommend anything you ever want to see again. Maybe I would like to visit there again and have lodging vacancies. Don’t go to Cedar Key. There’s nothing there. At this time, the week before Christmas, there were visitors, but not too many.
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We were upset that the ice cream shop was closed, but when my daughter wanted pancakes for breakfast we found out that the place we had picked out to have pancakes stopped serving breakfast at 11AM and we got there at 11AM. It turned out there was nowhere else serving pancakes although other breakfasts were available. I had a toasted bagel with lox and extras.
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We wandered on 2nd Street and found an art shop that was amazing with a gallery on the second floor and a display of metallic sculpture. Downstairs was the shop, full of inexpensive but beautiful art. The proprietor was an artist and had many of his objects on display, mostly hand painted fish sculptures.
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Sadly it was time to leave and for me to try to get back to the St Marys post office to pick up my mail forwarded from Crisfield, originally scheduled to be forwarded on Nov. 10th, so about 6 weeks of waiting for it. The US Postal Service is not the only one to blame.
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Now my vehicle was connecting properly to the phone and my Google maps navigation got me there in less than 3 hours. I picked up my package which looked like it had been through the wars. Inside were medical bills and a medication that I had been without for quite a while. I was happy to see that the Veteran’s Administration and Medicare had paid off the bulk of my large hospital bill. I wisely had stonewalled the orthopedics who were trying to charge me for a walker, saying that medicare wouldn’t pay for it, but now they were forced to submit it and medicare did pay for it, but only about half of the bill was allowed. Orthopedics had to accept that and I had no obligation for the remainder. It was that way with most of the many items I was billed.
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Cedar Key has great clam chowder and it is the #1 spot for farmed clams in America. That makes sense. We up near Jacksonville have local Mayport shrimp, so we should be making shrimp chowder or soup. I’d rather use rice than potatoes, so I will use a shrimp recipe that uses rice. While doing laundry in the laundromat I found an Alton Brown shrimp gumbo recipe. I jotted down the ingredients and shopped at the nearby Winn-Dixie for them.
Fold laundry, return to the boatyard, get ready to make shrimp and andouille gumbo. Before I could even raise a spoon a text tempted me to go to The Point, the closest bar. I was further tempted to enjoy a salmon dinner made by chef Geoff. When I suggested he join us at the Woodshop for a Christmas gathering, he said he was hoping I could help him cook for the visiting tall ship for a Christmas Day feast. I didn’t have to make up my mind about that one. I had purchased pizza stuff with the idea to have a pizza day on Christmas in the Woodshop, but I hadn’t told anyone about this, and now we’ll just have to have pizza night on some other day.
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We returned the rental car to the Jacksonville airport and got to the Fuji Buffet, a Chinese or Asian themed all you can eat place. It’s not bad. I found out half of the sushi I tried really wasn’t anything I would have wanted. Next time I’ll stick to something else.
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The traffic down I-95 was stop and go, very slow, but there is a trick when you get about 6 miles from the airport exit, take Pecan Park Road. It drops you off right at the airport and right next to my off airport car rental. Fox.
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After lunch we went North to St Marys again to visit Doc, of Doc’s Chop Shop, at a nursing facility going through a similar experience with hip replacement as I went through up in Maryland. He will be walking on Christmas Day, I suspect.
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I used a mix to make the gumbo, not bad, salty, but that was not my problem. I started by prepping a green pepper and made the same amount with celery, then diced 3 white onions. I had sliced a pound of andouille sausage into a large skillet with some very nice olive oil. I added the diced veggies and lit the flame. I opened a small can of crushed tomatoes. I was adding water to the immense skillet when I ran out of room, the skillet was full to the brim. The tomatoes were already in and the sauce began to form. I didn’t think I had to add anything to it, but I added the Cajun Creole gumbo mix. There was definitely no room for shrimp or rice. It tasted great.
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I had to make the rice separately. I chose to use 4 individual bowls with ¼ cup rice and a cup of water in each and microwave them one at a time, 4 minutes first pass for each one, then follow suit with 2 minutes each, and after about an hour I had four bowls of brown rice, cooked perfectly.
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I guessed I had about 8 helpings, so got out 8 zip lok bags. I put ¼ cup of the gumbo mixture into each one. Then I had room to add the shrimp to the remainder in the skillet. After a couple minutes I portioned the remainder into the bags, then I portioned the brown rice into the bags. I ate one of the portions, more salt than I would have liked, but very tasty. I put the remaining 7 bags into a gallon zip lok and put that into the fridge.
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The image is a photo taken from the Sea Pearl suite at Harbourmaster’s in Cedar Key and includes Streamer’s Restaurant. I recommend the suite and the restaurant, maybe the best in Cedar Key.