Abbey Brewing, Miami Beach

Image stolen from another beer snob somewhere...

You round the corner, and the whole block looks abandoned. An eclectic array of particle board and blue plastic covers busted windows and slack-jawed doors. The street is quiet, so far off the beaten path not even the locals wander around without significant glances over tense shoulders.

You'll pass it by at first; we did. It looked like another forgotten store, abandoned, lonely, neglected. But peak your head in through the dirty door that reads "Abbey Brewery" and you will be pleasantly surprised. Inside are not the disheveled innards of a building under-review; instead, a wooden, Scottish-style bar sits tucked away in a bedroom-sized room with high ceilings and high alcohol content.

The brewmaster is a dude with a beer brewing kit and connections to a brewery in Melbourne, Florida. The beer is the only reasonably priced suds you'll find this close to Ocean Drive, and the quality of said beer surpasses anything in a 10-mile radius. On tap is also a seasonal cask ale and some funky tastes from Europe. You'll swear you were lost in Scotland (because I swore I was, and I actually HAVE been lost in Scotland on several occasions!), though the accents are a little off. And it's a refreshingly far cry from the Armani and $16 gin and tonics and blindingly fake tans a few blocks over.

So take a stroll along the 1100 block of 16th and keep an eye out for a place that kinda maybe sorta looks abandoned and scary. But peak your head in; everyone's friendly!

The South Beach Diet

March 22, 2010


A rainy morning turns into a torrential afternoon. We stare longingly out of our hotel window, hoping for a break.

We sneak from overhang to umbrella to overhang, dodging drops and cigarettes and puddles.



The torrential afternoon turns into a brilliant evening, upon which I discover my parents, already in Key West, have actually beaten us to a beer. But we beat them to a hooka.

On the Road to Nowhere

March 21, 2010: Arrival in Miami Beach, Florida

To say I had the wedding travel jitters would be an overstatement. Perhaps it hadn't sunk in yet, that this would be the last time I would drive through Lander unmarried, the last time I would board a plane unmarried, the last time I would arrive somewhere and pick up my luggage unmarried. The last time I would be a Kat Byerly. The last time I would introduce this man as my fiance.

But it felt like a normal trip, a normal plane ride, a normal late-night dinner, a normal hotel check-in. It still felt a little weird to think of this as any different...

Changes

It's a time of transition, of change, of metamorphosis. Our wedding was outstanding. It was not hitch-less, by any means, but it was perfectly us and was a send-off into the rest of our lives as changed people, new people. I will get into that at a later date, but I wanted to say a little something about all the changes in Lander.

As we returned home, out first home as a married couple, our first home as Husband and Wife, there are new things to discover about the town. The mountains were covered in new snow. Our backyard was covered in new grass. Our floor in covered with new tile. The weather swings back and forth in its traditional orbit of springtime, 60 degrees paired with heavy, roof-creaking snow, and back again.

Restaurants and businesses are coming around with new signs, signs declaring their new summer hours. A new Safeway has opened in Lander, rumored to be the biggest in Wyoming. It is all its cracked up to be, with fresh flowers (I picked up some calle lilies and irises), fresh fish, and naan. Seriously, naan! A new bar, The Forge, will open up this month. An old coffee shop is looking for a new angle (we're rooting for wine bar) to compete with a new coffee shop in an old hamburger drive-in joint. A new diner just opened in an old truck stop. And signs on Main Street direct desperate Lander shoppers to a new clothing boutique, promising women new, over-priced clothing options.

What's next for our small town? What new changes?

It will be nice to be here for the summer, without the pressure of weekend commuting back and forth to Ft. Collins, to see the changes that come.

Back to the Island

Maybe we'll just stay?

Our wedding site: The Hemingway House and Museum in Key West, FL.


Happy marriage to us!

A Tale of What Looks Like Two Different Homes

Somehow, the endless, wide-open plains of Wyoming have led to a trend of making small, square, close-off homes with little thoughts of aesthetics. This is the photographic journey of our search for open space and Mediterranean tile in a tiny mining cabin in Wyoming.

We're missing some "before" photos because the place was kinda ugly and smelled like dead carpet. It wasn't trailer-park green, but it WAS that semi-shag, dirt brown stuff from the early 90s...

Step One: Tear everything down!

Step Two: Make sure the whole house does not fall on top of you (the wall was load-bearing) and use ladder to get upstairs

Step Four: Reassemble stairs and glare at the ugly carpet. Here is a decent shot of what the carpet looked like, and what the living room looks like with no wall

Step Five: Pay people ridiculous amounts of money to lay tile in the living room because you're not sure you should be laying tile with your partner weeks before the wedding. We might not have survived if we did it ourselves. This also involved tearing up rotting subflooring and the completely black-from-mold setting that the stove was sitting on.

Step Six: Open all the windows in the spring air, stain all exposed wood, and return exotic patio furniture to its rightful place in the living room!

We have done some trim work since but haven't had time to really take photos; instead, we're island bound!

This Is Not Normal!

This whole saving daylight or not saving daylight or killing daylight or whatever it is we're doing right now is really messing with me. Getting up before the sun rises is not natural.

But sometimes you can see this as you're pouring your morning coffee and pretending you don't exist yet: