Update! I just learned an e-acquaintance of mine was so inspired by this cake and its gayness that he baked one for his own Very Gay Wedding in Provincetown this week. Congrats to the happy couple!

And then when a dear high school friend came to visit recently, we made this Smith Island-style cake with eight layers:

Check out recipes and more info for this one at Eat.Swim.Shop!

Apparently, I have a preferred angle for cake photography in my kitchen.

My dream was finally fulfilled last week!

Here is Elvis’s living room!!

After that, though… things just got a little less… opulent. In general, Graceland was modest in most of the ways I expected it to be over the top, but it went over the top in ways I didn’t expect. Take a look at this kitchen:

Y’all, that is Elvis Presley’s kitchen. The KING of rock & roll. And he went with Formica countertops, lamps with fruit on them, and a… carpet?

Good appliances, though. I assume. For the time. Which, in case you couldn’t tell, was THE SEVENTIES.

Here’s the (again, remarkably modest/70s-tastic) office where Elvis’s dad handled all Elvis’s business.

There’s also a whole trophy building with a sampling of Elvis’s various gold records and other awards:

My favorite part of Graceland was the fashion. There are a few exhibits sprinkled throughout the property (it’s the mansion grounds and then a whole strip-mall situation across the street) on Elvis’s sartorial elegance.

You can actually purchase replicas of some of the jumpsuits for several thousand dollars — totally worth it!

Before touring Elvis’s private planes, you have to go through airport security:

Did you know Elvis had this TCB logo made up in the 70s to represent taking care of business… in a flash?! Neither did I. Clearly, it was an invention of 70s, jumpsuit-and-cape-wearing Elvis rather than dreamy 50s Elvis. But apparently he was way into the logo. It’s on a bunch of stuff, including one of the planes:

and on Elvis’s (alleged) headstone:

Finally, I leave you with this:

Well, while we were off gallivanting in Florida, the Garden Fairy visited our house. We returned to this:

Check it out! My tomatoes have stakes! There is mulch! There are now watermelon and marigold plants!!

AND the Garden Fairy also did this:

YAY!!! I am so excited. Now all I have to do is keep everything alive!! Thank you, Garden Fairy (aka Mom)!!

Also, I’ve recently learned that in addition to a couple of large pecan trees, we also have a fig tree!

And the fig tree is full of these:

I’m excited and hopeful!!

It was built under mysterious circumstances by eccentric sculptor/physicist Edward Leedskalnin in the 1920s and ’30s. He may or may not have built the castle to impress a girl and/or to work out girl-related anxiety. It’s all kind of unclear. But the Coral Castle is clearly awesome.

Some of our favorite areas were the dining room:

… the bedroom:

… and a place called “Repentance Corner”:

And in case all that isn’t enough for you, the patently awesome Billy Idol wrote a song about the Coral Castle and filmed a video there. Nice!

So we headed down to the Florida Keys!

Now, I have to tell you guys, the last time I booked a hotel on Hotwire, I ended up sleeping in a conference room with a Murphy bed, but I am so glad I gave them another chance because this time, they delivered me this:

This is the Coconut Palm Inn in Tavernier, Florida, on Key Largo. We had an adorable little room with a private screened-in porch overlooking the pool and the water. It was so lovely we decided to stay three nights!

To the right of the hammocks above, there’s a little breakfast bar thing where the inn serves breakfast on the beach every morning. When we arrived, it was past office hours, so our keys and info were in a little envelope taped to the door (in a much more obvious place than when we had a similar situation in Big Bend, by the way); we didn’t talk to anyone. But there was a little juice dispenser on the breakfast bar with orange juice in it, so we helped ourselves. However, it turned out not to be orange juice, but rather a very strong cocktail!! Long story short, a couple had gotten married the weekend before right there on that very beach, and they were trying to use up their leftover liquor from their wedding reception by sharing it with other hotel guests (luckily — accidental cocktail theft would have been really embarrassing!). It turned out that the groom’s mom graduated from Delta State in 1972!! Small world, right??

Key Largo is the northernmost Key you’ll find on Highway 1, which we took down from the Everglades area, so we drove south to explore a little more.

One of the first things we did was meet Betsy, possibly the world’s largest lobster:

As you can see, Betsy is a Florida lobster or Caribbean spiny lobster… she’s native to the Keys. She lives in front of an art co-op!

Next, we went to visit some tarpon!

Tarpon are the cool-looking fishies you see above. They congregate at this one particular pier in Islamorada, and you can buy a bucket of fish to throw to them. Legend has it that the owner of the pier rescued and rehabilitated an injured tarpon there, then set him back in the water when he was all healed up; the tarpon kept returning back to the pier to get food, and I guess he told all his tarpon friends and now here we are!!

The water is very clear, and the tarpon are pretty aggressively interested in getting fish, so it’s a really unique experience. The tarpon will actually jump up out of the water to grab a fish out of the air or someone’s hand (and you have to be careful — they bite!!). We kept our hands a safe distance from the water, but others are more daring:

Thanks, tarpon!

Of course, tarpon aren’t the only wildlife in the Keys. There is a whole deer sanctuary for the special breed of Key deer:

The Key deer are endangered, but they are protected. They’re small — around the size of a German shepherd. Cute!

Key West (the southernmost Key) boasts a flock of wild gypsy chickens.

The southernmost point in the United States is in Key West.

Okay, so, technically this monument is not located exactly on the southernmost point, which is actually on a military base inaccessible to civilians, but it’s still pretty crazy to be closer to Cuba than to Miami.

I should mention that in our time in the Keys, we had a lot of really great food. We particularly enjoyed the Old Tavernier Restaurant in Tavernier and Island Fish Company in Marathon. Also, we got key lime pie at almost every opportunity (which added up to a lot of key lime pie!!). I really liked the pie at both Kermit’s Key West Key Lime Shoppe and at the Blond Giraffe Key Lime Pie Factory, but since the woman manning the Blond Giraffe was the rudest, meanest, most horrible customer service person I’ve ever met in my entire life (!), I have to give the edge to Kermit.

Thanks, the Keys!!

It was really hot out, but we did walk a couple of trails to check out the landscape and some impressive wildlife, including many anhinga:

We saw a ton of alligators, both young…

… and mature!

These guys were really huge!! At least twice the size of our friends on Avery Island.

We also communed with turtles…

and a woodpecker!

Thanks for your awesomeness, the Everglades!

It’s a ride, too, of course. That’s how we found out about the behind-the-scenes greenhouse tour called… Behind the Seeds! It’s one of those little extra activities at Disney World. They use some exciting new experimental gardening techniques! For example:

These Brussels sprouts aren’t planted in any soil!! They move through on the track (they are hanging from above) while the enclosed area sprays nutrients and water directly on the roots.

Some plants are arranged in stacks:

They do a lot of this space- and resource-conserving kind of planting. It is very interesting! Everything moves around and gets sprayed with nutrients and water through an elaborate-looking pipe system.

Our tour guide told us that the food they grow in the greenhouse makes up… 2 to 3 percent of the food in the park. Still, that is a LOT!

We got to release some ladybugs onto a strawberry plant:

And we got to sample some cucumbers from the greenhouse:

Our particular cucumbers were not shaped like Mickey Mouse, but they do put some cucumbers in these little tubes to make them grow that way:

And it’s not just limited to cucumbers…

Thanks, tour guide Brandt from Birmingham, Alabama!

Brian’s mom surprised us all at Christmas with plans to take the whole family on a magical adventure to Disney World!! We all realized May would be a good time for everyone, so after a few months of planning, Brian and I met all my new in-laws in the happiest place on earth. We spent 8 days together exploring the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, and Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure. Whew!! Obviously, it was awesome. It was a very busy trip, so there wasn’t time for tons of photography, but we do have a few photos to share!

From Epcot, where the Epcot International Flower and Garden Festival was in full swing:

The tea garden was one of my favorite displays. Big teacup-shaped planters were filled with the plants in various Twinings tea blends. So clever!

This was in the UK area of the World Showcase. There was a similar display with different French perfumes in the France pavilion!!

Here’s one from Universal Studios (a real BTTF DeLorean):

And even better, look at what happened to Brian on a roller coaster there!!

It was an amazing week!!

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It was just a couple of weeks, but we had many adventures and took lots of pictures. On our way, we met this rooster made of car bumpers in Brundidge, Alabama!

Now, prepare yourself for a victorious moment…

We now have photos of state signs for all 45 states we have visited! One giant, 45-image post coming soon.

Did you know that when you go to the Florida welcome center, they give you OJ?

Thanks for the refreshing and nutritious treat, Florida!

They take their citrus pretty seriously down there. When we went south, we drove down the coast so we could see this:

Then, when we headed back up north, we took a different route to avoid tolls (which, incidentally, they also take pretty seriously in Florida), and we ended up driving through a bunch of groves:

This kind of reminds me of that one ride at Epcot where you fly over orange groves and you can smell the oranges. Wait, what? Epcot?! I’ll get to that…

Anyway, we also met Swampy, the world’s largest alligator, on the road!

Florida takes its alligators seriously, too. More on that soon!

I bought some plants.

It’s a dream of mine to have a functioning vegetable garden, but I’ve never really been in a good position to try it out. With our new yard, though, I’m hoping I can make it happen. Since I don’t know anything about anything and am completely intimidated by gardening, I’m glad that my mother is arriving soon and hopefully will take the lead on a gardening project!

For now, I picked up a few new friends at the Future Farmers of America sale a couple of weeks ago and put them into pots.

My dreams are in these pots, you guys.