Florida Keys

What can I say about the Keys? Ever since I can remember, it’s been intriguing to me. Ernest Hemingway and his cats, friends getting married there, songs mentioning it, and so on. It’s pretty far away from anywhere so it wasn’t really in my list of places I’d ever go, as interesting as it sounded. But since this current roadtrip has us in Florida for over a month, we figured it was time.

We were in the Keys on the anniversary of Hurricane Irma and many things were in only just reopening so you can imagine the extent of the damage inflicted on the islands by the storms one year ago.

The RV Park we were at said they didn’t have too much damage and only had to close for about a week. It was a pretty cozy spot, but had a great pool that we made very good use of.

The weather held out pretty well. We saw the sun every day but also saw our fair share of overcast days.

So, what do Arnolds do when in the Keys? Cheap things!

We took our own walking tour of Key West, ambling past Truman’s Little White House, Ernest Hemingway’s house, an historical sculpture garden, the marina, lots of drunk people, a key lime pie shop, some tourist souvenir shops, the southernmost point in the US where to the chagrin of our children we stood in line for a picture, the end of Highway 1, and a smattering of other interesting sites.

Al took the kids to Robbie’s Marina to feed tarpon. After they came home, we watched a Chasing Monsters episode about tarpon and I am a bit appalled people are allowed to lean out over a dock with little strips of fish in their hands for a tarpon to grab.

Al and the kids also went to Fort Zachary Taylor while I worked at a local Starbucks and we later went to the beach there as well.

Another nice beach find was Bahia Honda where we were able to snorkel a bit. We saw barracuda, tube fish, lobsters, lionfish, and various tropical fish.

We wrapped the whole thing up with a stroll through Mallory Square to see the sunset.

All in all a very satisfying adventure.