If you see Kay . . .

Sorry, but I couldn't help quoting Barry Cuda's song from Sloppy Joe's.

But you weren't gonna see Kay or anyone else along Duval on Monday afternoon. Blue skies and noo-body. During cocktail hour Monday, there were five people, total, at Willie T's, two at Mangoes, none at all at Margaritaville, while Ernesto dallied a few hundred miles southeast.

Most hotels closed, flat. Shawn and the crew got a wink and a nod at their digs, but that was a rarity.

Unfortunately, it turns out that those who fled, did so directly into the storm's new projected path. Rather like Andrew, in 1992, when Keys folk who evacuated to the official shelter near Homestead, on the mainland, looked up in some dismay to watch the hurricane rip the shelter roof off, though it left the Keys relatively untouched.

But as the weather folks are fond of saying, there's no outguessing hurricanes -- except to plan for one category bigger than anything that's forecast.

Miamians, by the way, have finally begun preparing in their own delightful way: blocks-long gas lines, fistfights over supplies and the like. Yet another reason I tend to treat it as a tunnel: something to be driven through, if absolutely necessary, but not stopped in.