Travel Log: The Very End of the United States (Florida Keys and Key West)

From a very young age, I've found myself fascinated with maps.  I would spend hours studying road atlases (this was the 1980s), looking for cool and interesting locations, and I especially liked the idea of exploring isolated, out of the way places.  As an adult, and as someone who likes to travel (NOTE: I initially typed "lives", which was sort of a Freudian slip, now that I think about it), I've made one of my travel goals to explore some of these places.  I recently had the opportunity to knock one such location off my list - Key West, Florida.  The Florida Keys region is home to many unique nicknames; one of them is "Flagler's Folly."  There was a wealthy man named Henry Flagler who saw value in connecting Key West, Florida, to the mainland - even though Key West was over 100 miles from it (this was the "Folly").  His railroad, known as the Overseas Railroad, was completed in 1912, months before Flagler's death, having been wrecked by two hurricanes (these are common in the Keys) in the years-long building process.  Years later, the Overseas Railroad was replaced with an extension of United States Highway 1, a single, mostly two-lane concrete road which winds 107 miles from Key Largo (to the northeast) to Key West (to the southwest).  This road, called the Overseas Highway, is the only way in (and out) of the Florida Keys by car.  Coasting from island to island, with bridges every few miles, you sometimes feel like you're suspended over the water itself.

If you've never made the road trip down the Overseas Highway, and you're interested in a mixture of beautiful vistas, odd tourist traps, Americana kitsch, and delicious seafood, you should definitely make the trip at some point.  Speaking of food, let me get this out of the way.  If you drive down the Keys, recommended food stops include:

• Craig's Restaurant, MM 90, Bayside (What do I mean by this? Most locations in the Florida Keys, outside of Key West and Marathon, do not identify themselves via postal addresses - as you might expect, or might want to plug into your GPS.  Instead, as there is only one highway, locations on the highway are given by the mile marker ("MM") combined with the side of the highway, Oceanside or Gulfside/Bayside.)
• Keys Marina and Restaurant (35th street, Marathon, Bayside) - Amazing bayside views, comfortable seating and friendly staff.  If you eat one thing, get the Lobster Reuben.
• BO Fish Truck, Key West - this is the picture to the left; as the Yelp reviews suggest repeatedly, don't judge a book by its cover.  While slightly groaty-looking from the outside, this place was awesome in ambience and in the quality of the food, I had the Grouper Platter with a Key Limeade. 
• El Siboney, Key West - Key West is only 90 miles from Havana, Cuba, and sometimes it seems like the city relates more to Cuba (or some other truly tropical/Caribbean location) than the United States mainland.  More people ride bikes or walk than drive cars around the island; there's a casual attitude toward sidewalk consumption of adult beverages; and roosters are literally everywhere.  It's no surprise that at one point in the 1980's, the city attempted to secede from the United States (only half-seriously), calling itself the "Conch Republic" in reaction to a Customs checkpoint designed to attempt to slow the distribution of illegal drugs through the Keys.  Anyway, in no way is the Cuban influence in Key West more pronounced than in the incredible Cuban food present therein.  If you ever get to El Siboney, try the roast pork or the ropa vieja.  Drink some sangria and eat tostones.  The next day, repeat.

Driving down the Overseas Highway toward Key West, you get the sense that you're in a place unlike any other in America.  People in the Keys are different; they're quirky, casual, extremely friendly, and don't like to rush under any circumstances.  This last attribute was especially welcoming, coming from the hustle and bustle of the Northeastern Metropolis and needing a break from a few months of full work, sans vacation.  The drive itself would have been frustrating (two-lane highways provide limited opportunities to pass slower moving vehicles), had the ultimate destination not been so interesting.

Our home base was on a nondescript island called Cudjoe Key, approximately 20 miles from Key West proper.  There's not much on Cudjoe Key - a convenience store, a few restaurants, and a giant Goodyear-sized blimp the locals call "Fat Albert," created as a way to conduct surveillance of the surrounding waters (again: that pesky drug trade thing).  There are also a smattering of beach houses and cottages, such as the one my wife and I shared with some family earlier this week. Surrounded by blue-green water, so clear you could see lobster, octopus, and crab scuttling along the sea floor, with coral reefs and excellent snorkeling just a short boat ride away, it was easy to have the concerns of life on the mainland melt away.

Boating and fishing are the two main hobbies of people who live in the Keys (extreme consumption of alcohol may reside in third place, depending on your level of cynicism and/or who you elect to hang out with).  Our cottage had room for boats to dock (unsurprisingly), and we were fortunate to go on a boating trip with a friend of my dad and stepmom's, on his Carolina Skiff. 

There are literally hundreds of islands in the Florida Keys, but only about forty or so are populated.  For most of the good snorkeling, you need to go to an unpopulated island, such as Looe Key.  The boat trip in our family friend's Skiff to Looe Key was choppy, interesting, occasionally frightening... and ultimately unsuccessful, as everyone on the boat grew tired of the roller-coaster like feeling of fighting both the heavy chop and the stiff wind.  So we turned to the gulf side, to a calmer destination called Marvin Key.

Marvin Key is not known as a snorkeling destination - it's more of a place to lie out and relax.  But an adjacent mangrove bunch, on that particular day, proved to be a motherlode of snorkeling activity.  Fighting a strong current as best I could, I managed to see crabs, yellowtail, red snapper, a small barracuda, and thousands of smaller fish (who, thinking I was part of their school, assembled around me and floated in my direction, no matter where I went - this was the coolest part).  As awesome as it was to chill with marine life up close, snorkeling is not natural to me; I often feel claustrophobic because breathing feels artificial through a long plastic tube, as if I'm getting only 85% of the required amount of oxygen into my lungs.  It's impossible, though, to stay worried for long in the Keys.  Everything - the daily thunderstorm or shower included - blows away in a short amount of time.

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Most visitors to Key West arrive via cruise ship, and many of them spend their time getting tanked on Duval Street at one tourist trap bar or another.  To me, a cruise is a wonderful vacation - I've been on several in the past few years - but one of the downfalls of a cruise vacation is the chance that spending such a small amount of time in each port might lead a person to make a superficial, silly decision about what to do while in port.  I'm a bit of a travel elitist - prior to a cruise, for instance, I'll spend time researching each port, looking for something to do that's off the beaten path and offers a taste of local flair.  (If you ever find yourself in Grand Turk, I have two words for you: Jack's Shack.)

It strikes me that in Key West, Duval Street is by far the least interesting place to visit.  Every street we walked down had its fun stuff and its quirks.  But if you need to stay close to port for some reason, the adjacent north-south street, Whitehead Street, has much more to offer.  For instance, there is the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum is on this street (educational and fun, though somewhat controversial, as local nature conservationists do feel that Fisher was a plunderer who did more to hurt the surrounding waters than help them), as is the Truman Annex and the "Southernmost Point in America," which is also controversial because there are other places on Key West which are technically further south than the buoy you see to the right of this paragraph.  And if you feel like having a drink or three, you could do much, much worse than the Green Parrot, a dive bar which nonetheless offers a wide selection of beer on tap (ranging from local Key West breweries to Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA) and brings in cool musicians and bands from all over the place.

Hanging out at the Parrot, which does not offer a bar menu but does provide unlimited popcorn to its patrons (hint: don't stand or sit near the popcorn machine unless you feel like doing an awkward dance every few seconds, which I personally deem the Popcorn Shuffle), it's easy to feel like a local.  While some Key West locals don't like tourists, the locals at the Parrot are friendly, perhaps because they assume anyone who's stopped by has consciously elected to avoid the tourist trap bustle on Duval Street.  And according to my wife, who doesn't drink beer, the bartenders pour a stiff (and damn good) margarita.  Watching the band play, sipping a drink and having an amazing time, I caught myself wondering how difficult it would be for us to move down here - my wife could open a used book shop, I would drive a bicycle taxi.  (Then, of course, reality hit - our lives in New Jersey are damn good, and it's hard to make a living in a tourist destination.)

I had always thought of Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville," the official anthem of the Conch Republic, as a sad song - after all, it's a song about loss, and about making obviously awful decisions in response to loss.  It always struck me as weird to consider the song as a sing-along, karaoke standard.  But thinking about the lyrics while in the Keys - living on sponge cake; watching the sun bake all of those tourists covered in oil - made me think differently.  Maybe it was meant to be a fun song, but in the same slightly twisted, tongue-in-cheek way that folks down the Keys think about stuff.  After all, we're all just moving through, following the currents as best we can, aren't we?  Might as well lay out in the sun and have another drink.  It's pretty much the way of life down there.