Something on my bucket list was the Florida Keys and in all of our time in Cayman and visiting Miami we never got there – but today was the day.
We headed off fairly early as it is a good 3.5 hour straight drive to Key West so it would be a long day, especially for Mark. We drove down through the various keys, over the 7 mile bridge (which unlike 7 Mile Beach in Cayman, is actually 7 miles long) and very impressive, until we got to Key West, where we parked and found somewhere to eat.
We ended up at the Seaside Cafe at the Southernmost Mansion which turned out to be a great choice. The food was really good, especially the tuna poke bowls, and the frozen margaritas weren’t bad either! The toilets were down this tiny alley (they called it Diagon Alley) and we did wonder how some American’s would actually fit down there.
After filling our stomachs we walked the hundred meters or so to the queue to have our photo taken at the Southernmost Bouy – the southernmost point of the Continental USA (although technically the beach area of Fort Zachary Taylor Historic State Park is approximately 150 m farther south than the marker). We took our photos and then proceeded to walk to Kermit’s Key West Key Lime Shoppe, which has arguably, the best Key Lime Pie. It would be wrong to come here and not at least try it.
It meant walking almost from one side of the Key to the other in the midday sun, much to the annoyance of the kids. We walked past Ernest Hemingway’s residence in the 1930’s (we didn’t go in – just got a picture), past the end/beginning of US1 and the 0 mile marker and continued on to Kermit’s.
We got a slice of pie and a chocolate dipped slice of pie on a stick. Both were really good, although the kids didn’t have the same appreciation for it as I did. We found an ice-cream shop for them and then walked back to the car via a surf shop.
On our way back to Miami we worked out the blimp we could see was part of a group of helium-filled blimps formally called the Tethered Aerostat Radar System, or TARS. Cudjoe Key is home to the first TARS set up by the Air Force in 1978. The program was launched to monitor the southern border of the U.S. by detecting low-flying small planes used by drug smugglers. In 2013, U.S. Customs and Border Protection took over the program. In response to the blimps, Customs says most drug smugglers started to land ahead of the border and head for the U.S. by land.
We stopped at Sombrero Beach in Marathon where TJ and Sophia buried Greer in sand to turn her into a mermaid and stayed to watch the sunset before heading back to our apartment.
