Key West

Friday 22nd January 2010

We started off again from Homestead the next morning for Key West. We had to drive through Key Largo, which was why Paul had wanted to go to that particular park on our way to Key West, but we did visit another couple of NP’s on our way down.

The first was Long Key State Park where we went for a very pleasant walk through the mangroves and then along the somewhat odorous, dead weed covered shoreline where there are ‘covered’ picnic sites provided and a camping ground a little further along. Some of the campers had decided, however, to camp in the picnic sites.

A little further along, after passing along Marathon, we arrived at Seven Mile Bridge, the bridge spanning the seven miles of water between Marathon and Little Duck Key. Both ends of the original bridge, built by Flagler for his East Coast Railway, are still there although the middle section was destroyed by hurricanes and has now been replaced by a new road bridge, still called Seven Mile Bridge. When we parked the car a started to walk from the north end we were not sure if the original still spanned the whole distance but didn’t intend to walk that far anyway. It was not until we were back in the car and crossing that we realised we had walked nearly as far as it was possible to but were disappointed that we hadn’t gone as far as we could have.

The second park of the day was Bahia Honda State Park. Again there are long stretches of beach but this park had Atlantic beaches and a small beach that was, technically, in the Gulf of Mexico. The sun was very hot, as were both of us, and so Paul decided to have a dip; I would have joined him but the water felt very cold! We were going to attempt to get to Key West for the sunset but by the time Paul had dried and dressed we agreed that there probably wasn’t enough time to get there and so we decided to climb up onto another redundant Flagler bridge and watch the sun go down there.

Key West was nothing like either of us had imagined it would be, although quiet what I had imagined I’m not really sure. The island is approx 2 by 4 miles and is very densely populated. We arrived about 7 o’clock in the evening to find that the ‘boutique hotel’ we were booked into not only had no parking facilities, it didn’t even have a ‘drop off/pick up’ space. Paul left me at the wheel of the car while he went in to ask for some advice. The advice given was to park on the street, but make sure that it does not say either Resident Parking or Disabled Parking or Parking by Permit Holder Only or you can pay in the car park $13 for overnight. We finally found a parking space after about half an hour of circling the streets around the hotel with only a two and a half blocks walk. We grabbed a couple of bags and walked back to book in. She congratulated us on finding a spot and suggested that we did not move the car until we were ready to leave the island!

This has been the most expensive place we have stayed in so far and so when we found that the room was not only directly on the very noisy main road, but that you could barely move round the bed, then a motorbike roared passed, Paul ‘lost it’. He asked to be moved to a quieter room and she told him that the quieter rooms were more expensive! ‘Well I’m not putting up with that for two nights, just give me my money back and I’ll go somewhere else!’ She conceded and exchanged our key. Our new room was further back and at least twice the size, in fact, more like we were expecting.