Fantasy Festival 2009

As I mentioned in a previous blog, Jeff and I went down to Fantasy Fest for our first time for the pinnacle event, The Captain Morgan Fantasy Festival Parade. Although a big festival for Key West, coming from Louisville, Kentucky and dealing with the Derby Festival every year with crowd numbers well into the 100,000's, this crowd didn't seem too bad or too big. We arrived in Key West around 5 PM and parked the car very close to where we would have on a normal day and paid about the same amount. A quick walk down Caroline to Duvall and we were in party central. And talk about an eye full! Everywhere you turned was someone in costume or body-paint with varying degrees of nudity. The one thing we figured out right away is that you don't have to be THIN, YOUNG, PRETTY, or even TAN to walk around mostly naked during this festival. The costumes ranged from comical to wild to bizarre...with everything in between. We saw women of all ages, topless, with their breasts covered in paint in a wide variety of themes...pumpkins, apples, flowers, butterflies, flames, cat's eyes, or just splashes of color airbrushed on in littering swirls. Some of the painted had props to complete their ensembles as nurses, flight attendants, belly dancers, football fans, devils, angels, Daisy Duke [with short shorts literally painted on], vampires, witches, tigers, and several Eves made appearances with fig leaves painted in place. Men were dressed and painted as well as vampires, demons, devils, construction workers, indians, Homer Simpson, Aunt Jemima, Beetlejuice, the Riddler, Santa, the Pope, just to name a few.

We ended up staking out a great place to watch the parade -close to Captain Tony's so that we were close to a bathroom and refreshments. Then we just took in all the sights. I played photographer while Jeff stopped different interesting characters to take a picture. Everyone was in good spirits and everybody wanted to have their picture taken. One guy, dressed only in a strategically-placed, miniature hardhat stopped to ask if he could have his picture taken with Jeff [whom he referred to as "a sexy, little fireplug"]. What a HOOT!

The parade had about 50 some odd floats with different themes and sponsors. Most floats were accompanied by loud music & manned by costumed and nearly-naked people throwing beads into the crowd. Jeff and I caught our fair share. The parade ended on an odd note with a group of Jesus freaks letting us all know if didn't change our ways we'd all go to hell...and even that was entertaining.

At some point, we decided we'd had enough [talk about sensory overload!] and headed back to the car so we could grab a little dinner and head back to Marathon.

Once we were back at the car, I slid the camera off my wrist and set it on the car to take off my backpack. And that, tragically, is the last we've seen of the camera! I must have left it there as we drove off and it fell off somewhere. I've placed ads offering a reward for the return of the memory card...keep the camera...but have had no response yet.

So - no photos!

I did a little looking around on the net and found photos that others have posted. I chose photos for the slideshow that are either people we actually saw or are similar...just so you could get the flavor of the evening. This album [click on slideshow for an easy way to see all the photos]has a lot of good shots of the parade and this one has more pics of the night.

Despite losing the camera, we had a FANTASTIC time and are already making plans to go next year.