Key West

                                          The end of the line, Key West Florida

 Thursday Feb. 12, 2015

Today we moved down the road to Key West. US1 from Marathon travels mostly on long bridges over blue water. It is very scenic and the 45 mile ride ended almost too soon.

Everything in Key West is tightly packed together and Boyds Campground is no different. That said it is surprisingly nice, some of the Keys campgrounds we’ve looked at on the way down are not much more than parking lots. Boyds has grass, some screening vegetation and Palm trees; and that makes all the difference. It transforms several hundred tightly parked RV’s into tropical paradise.  

 It would be about a long bike ride to downtown Key West so we drove the jeep to Duval Street. We got lucky and snagged a parking spot (metered at $2.00 an hour) and then did a self guided walking tour, mostly of Duval Street. We walked all the way down to the water and the southern most point in the continental US. This is tourist hokum to the ninth degree, not only is Key West not part of the continental US, (it is an offshore island) it is not the southernmost point of the United States. That distinction goes to Hawaii. To cap off the deception, the concrete marker is not even on the southernmost point of the island, but is in a cove with more southerly land on each side of it. Nevertheless we waited in line with all the other tourists, making arrangements with those next to us to be each others photographer and took the requisite photo. 

 

You see all sorts of strange creatures in Key West and some of them are not human. Chickens run free in town, twice we saw traffic stopped for them. Once was for a hen and her chicks crossing Duval Street and the other was for a cock fight by the southernmost monument. While eating lunch at an outdoor patio at Mango’s restaurant, hens and roosters wandered freely under the tables looking for crumbs. (Crabcake sandwich and fries $14, Pulled Pork sandwich and fries $14)

As for human strangeness we didn’t see a lot out of the ordinary. Reputed to be a very tolerant city it is supposed to have a collection of alternate lifestyle personalities, (is it politically correct to say that?) crazies, (I’m sure that’s not p correct) artists, old hippies, Jimmy Buffett/Ernst Hemingway wantabe’s, snowbirds and sailors. Mostly what you’ll see are other tourists, they’re everywhere.

I don’t mean to sound negative but the authentic old Key West is no more, it’s actually been gone for a long time. They’ve done a good job of protecting the architecture but the atmosphere is tourist trap, much the same as New Orleans, Beale Street and even downtown Nashville. That’s not to say you shouldn’t visit any of these places, time marches on, and today’s tourist trap is probably better than the old days anyhow. Today for $20 bucks you can buy a souvenir hat at Sloppy Joes, I’m sure that Ernest Hemingway couldn’t buy one when he hung out there.

One of my coworkers from Chrysler saw a posting on facebook in which I mentioned I was in the Keys. John Fraser and his wife Joyce have been snowbirding in the same RV park on the Cudjoe key for 12 years, lucky them! Millie and I drove up from Key West to visit with them on Saturday. It’s always nice to see folks from the old plant.

We will go back into town in the evening before we leave Key West. We haven’t yet been there to observe the sundown experience at Mallory Square. After that we start working our way north, but not too far, just back to Orlando where we will spend another month. 

Captions: Millie and I have each years travels printed into a book. It's for our reference and remembrance as much as it is for anyone else. The publisher does a terrible job with picture captions, they end up randomly dispersed in the text. That's the reason you don't see any in this years blog. All of the street scenes in this post are on Duval Street, the church is St Paul's Episcopal. The picture of Millie was taken at Boyd's campground.