Your Key West Innkeepers!

John & Connie Manasco
have lived in Key West for 12 years -  after retiring from their jobs in Fairfax, Virginia. We've been married for 24 years -  best friends for even longer - and have worked together throughout our entire marriage.

After six years of living in Key West, we decided it was getting too expensive to live here so we moved to the west coast of Florida, and settled in Cape Coral. Well, it didn't take long to figure out that we had made a terrible mistake and after just four months we found ourselves back in Key West.

It seems we just couldn't get Key West out of our system!

Shortly after returning, I took a job with RE/MAX Southernmost, as the Office Manager, and was shocked to find that Garden House was on the market. It had been a favorite bed and breakfast since we had arrived in Key West... but I had never really mentioned that to John. I would think about owning it every time we passed by and was totally shocked when he agreed to give up his days as a stock investor to become an innkeeper. Of course the original plan was that I would join him on a daily basis, but I loved my job with RE/MAX® too much to give it up so I decided to become a REALTOR®.

I wonder if my husband will ever forgive me! He was perfectly content being retired. :-)

Gone are those days of hanging out on Duval Street sipping margaritas, or sunning in the backcountry with good friends and a cold beer. Now John's days are filled with getting up early each morning to set up breakfast, cleaning up afterwards, and scrambling to handle reservation requests, baking, and housekeeping chores in between. Not to mention the dozen or more trips weekly to fetch supplies or the Saturday afternoon grocery shopping. There has certainly been very little leisure time over the past five years, as renovations have been underway since buying the guest house, and everything from air conditioners to pool pumps have needed fixing or replacing. We've been through the changeover in staff, the injuries on the job, and the realization that it's true that women are from Venus and men are from Mars, and somehow we've come out of this relatively unscathed.

There is no doubt about it... being an innkeeper is exhausting, but it is also very rewarding. The people that you meet that touch your lives in such special and magical ways will always make it worth the effort. And... how can anyone complain when their daily lives are filled with 80 degree weather and 5 o'clock happy hour? :-)