Hi Ben,
Thanks so much for your reply. I really appreciate it.
My local install seems to work like a charm from the first go. At least I haven’t been able to find any issues with it so far.
So just make sure I could give you the latest information I decided to rebuild my droplet and do it all over again.
I honestly have no idea what I did differently but the build completed this time. So, great result but it still bothers me that I don’t know what was wrong or what is different now. 
That said, I don’t think it went completely according to the docs. I’m using Multisite and it looks like the deployment does a wp core install. So somewhere in the deployment process I got an error saying that the wp_blogs table didn’t exist and the deployment stopped. I had to ssh in, do the wp core multisite-install to add the missing tables and then redeploy. After that the deployment completed where I expected to get that error mentioned above.
The docs also state that the deploy doesn’t install WP. Yet it did give met the WP tables for the single site install, that I only had to upgrade. When this was done I got a working site running twentyseventeen.
So it seems like I’m up and running, next step for me will to be to setup my production environment.
Thanks again.