Nikki

My daughter Lauren and I spent five days in the Florida Keys in December. Lauren lives in California and I live in Massachusetts, where the weather was becoming increasingly wintry. The week before our trip, it was cold in Florida, but it warmed up just in time for our visit.

The plan was to fly to Miami December 20, rent a car, drive to Islamorada and spend two nights there, then drive to Key West for two nights, and spend the final night on Key Largo before heading back to the Miami airport for our flight back to Boston on Christmas day. Our flight to Miami was uneventful, just the way we like it. There were lines of people at the airport in Boston who were hoping to get to Europe, where airports were closed due to snow. This made me very happy I hadn’t followed my first urge and booked us a quick trip to Europe. Florida turned out to be a much better choice.

We wasted a bit of time at the Miami airport looking for the rental car counters. Turns out we should have followed the signs for rental cars that pointed to the shuttles outside the terminal. All rental car desks are now in a large rental car center that is only accessible by shuttle bus. Once we figured this out (and I admit it, Lauren figured it out way before I did), we had no trouble getting our car and driving out of the airport.

I looked at a map and figured out the way I thought I wanted to go. The GPS had other ideas. I am just learning to live with GPS. It is something of a struggle for me to relinquish the role of navigator, put the maps away, and follow the directions of the GPS unquestioningly. I have found that it works best when I give up the notion of understanding the big picture, cultivate a Zen attitude and just go with the flow, do what it tells me to do. I have been wondering whether this will carry over into other areas of my life. I suppose if it had, I would have followed the signs to the rental car shuttle instead of stubbornly insisting there were desks inside the terminal.

At first I ignored the GPS, followed the map, and was pretty sure I knew which way I wanted to go. The GPS kept insisting otherwise. And when I ended up unintentionally in a right turn lane while the GPS was urging me to turn right, I gave up and figured it was time to relinquish control, turn right, and do what I was told. This worked out well, as almost immediately we saw a likely looking lunch stop and turned in to a strip mall for tapas at Diego’s Andalucia Tapas & Delicatessen, 4825 SW 8th Street, Miami. http://diegosandaluciatapas.com/ There were very inexpensive lunch specials but we went with a selection of tapas that were delicious and still pretty reasonable. This is a great lunch or dinner choice near the Miami airport.

We were the only people speaking English in the restaurant. People seemed surprised that we were speaking English. After lunch we went into the supermarket in the strip mall to buy drinks for the car, and the announcements over the loudspeaker were in Spanish, the tabloids at the checkout counter were Spanish, and I felt like we had been transported to a foreign country. Without the hassle of a long flight and a time change, and without the airport closings and delays of Europe.

This taught me the value of listening to my GPS, so I followed it the rest of the way to Islamorada.

I had reserved a room for two nights at the Ocean View Inn and Sports Pub, known locally as the OV. http://www.theocean-view.com/index.html
I chose this place because of its reasonable room rate of $89 per weeknight off-season and its reviews on Tripadvisor. It was clear from reading the reviews that the owner has a lot of friends and fans who have made it the number one out of eleven hotels on Tripadvisor for Islamorada. It is essentially a roadside bar with some motel rooms out back. The bar is a local hangout and a crowd gathered that first night to watch Monday night football. The rooms are very attractively decorated in a Florida style and have private patios with footpaths to a nicely done pool area. There is a path to the water, where a small dock provides access for boats and has benches for watching the sun set and the moon rise over the bay.

When we arrived at the bar to check in at around 4 PM, there were some folks sitting at the bar who asked whether we had been there last year. I said we had not, and the woman and her husband told us we looked just like a mother and daughter they had met there last December. They were very insistent about it, and we were chuckling at the thought that there was another pair of us out there somewhere, but we put it down to the possibility that this couple may have had a few drinks that enhanced our resemblance to that other mother and daughter.

We chose a restaurant to try for dinner but when we got there we found there was only outdoor seating and it was too cool to sit comfortably outside and eat. This was a common pattern in the Keys. Many restaurants had tables outdoors, frequently on the water, and little or no seating indoors. As we were leaving, we met a guy in the parking lot who was also leaving because of the cold, and we asked him if he knew any nearby restaurants with indoor seating. He recommended Lazy Days Restaurant, and that is where we headed. http://www.lazydaysrestaurant.com/

We ate on the outdoor terrace overlooking the ocean, but it was enclosed with plastic sheeting and when we sat next to a gas heater it was warm enough. We tried conch fritters. Turns out they are similar to clam cakes in Rhode Island, essentially batter with chunks of conch inside. Then I had a platter of broiled seafood, including half a Florida lobster and a few other fresh fish items. Very pleasant.

We had a quiet evening back at the motel and went to bed relatively early. The sounds of people watching football at the bar were evident outside, but it was quiet inside the room. I toyed with the idea of watching the game in the bar, and it sounded pretty lively, but Lauren didn’t want to join me, so I enjoyed the private terrace for a while. The next day we had scheduled a boat ride and the sky was perfectly clear, lighted by a full moon. Seemed like a good omen.

Nikki

Tuesday morning we did a little shopping at The Rain Barrel, a complex of craft and gift shops. Very nice things in a pleasant atmosphere. We chatted with (and purchased from) a basketmaker and a glassmaker.

The next stop was Robbie’s Marina. I had read that the thing to do here was to go out on their dock and feed the tarpon that congregate there. Ordinarily there is a large school of tarpon waiting for the bait fish that visitors pay to dangle in front of them, and people pay a dollar just to go out on the dock and watch. Today there were about a dozen tarpon, and the guy at the desk told us we could walk out on the dock for free because there weren’t many fish. We learned later that the tarpon decreased dramatically after a cold weather spell last January. Only one person was attempting to feed the tarpon, and the ones that were there just didn’t seem interested. The pelicans, on the other hand, were very interested in the bucket of bait fish.

We ate at Lorelei Restaurant and Cabana Bar, the restaurant we had left the night before because it was too cold to sit outside. This was out in the Islamorada yacht basin, and it was bright and sunny at noon. We enjoyed our lunch there. I believe I had cracked conch and key lime pie, and Lauren had a beautiful fresh fried fish sandwich.

I had arranged for a chartered boat through Easy Adventures Boat Tours in the afternoon. http://www.easyadventures.net/ The captain was a loquacious fellow who described a lot of local wildlife and sights, as well as directing us to the locations of the best parties in the area and the best deals in restaurants and happy hours throughout the Keys. We had wonderful weather and explored the bay, the ocean, a sand bar, Indian Key state archeological site, and mangrove islands.

We got explanations for many things we saw en route. The rows of pipes sticking up out of the water in some shallow spots marked places where the sea grass had been stripped by boats scraping against the shallow bottom. The pipes serve as perches for birds whose droppings fertilize the ground under the water and encourage the sea grass to grow over the bare spots. The large groups of birds of prey we had noticed since arriving on the Keys were turkey buzzards, which have only started appearing in the area recently. A quick google at home shows me that this is a locally used term for the same bird known elsewhere as the turkey vulture, which I encountered with some bird-savvy friends last year in the Pyrenees. The water on the ocean side was marked by rows of lobster pots.

As we headed back to the dock in the late afternoon, we passed a bird rookery with an amazing quantity of large birds roosting in the mangroves. This was the highlight of the trip for me, and I took a lot of photos. Looking at them now, some of these birds do not look real, more like some image created of a prehistoric flying creature pasted onto a backdrop of water and mangrove island.

yk

Lovely report, Nikki! I'm looking forward to the rest. Trying to warm myself up here in Boston by imagining the sunshine and sea in the Keys.

Nikki

Once we were off the boat, we decided to skip the first party of the evening (a Chamber of Commerce Christmas party at Robbie’s) and have dinner out before going to the second party the captain had told us about, a full moon party with fireworks.

We dined at Marker 88, a spot on the water where we were seated outside, although there did appear to be indoor seating here. I had a terrific key lime seafood penne for which I would gladly return. http://www.marker88.info/ Then we headed to Morada Bay, a beachfront restaurant where the monthly full moon party was getting underway. We paid fifteen dollars apiece for admission and walked out onto the beach. http://www.moradabay-restaurant.com/index.php?id=79

There was a guy playing guitar and singing near the tables for the restaurant, where one could have dinner (if one had not already eaten elsewhere- not that I regretted that key lime seafood penne for an instant). There was also a beach barbecue and a bar to buy food and drink. It was another cool evening, so we found seats around a warming bonfire on the beach to listen to the music and wait for the fireworks. A livelier band started playing on a bandstand near the bay, and two circus entertainers came out juggling fire and walking on stilts.

When the band took a break, the fireworks began. Really good ones, too. After they ended, a Bahamian junkanoo parade band in costume (at least that’s what I think they were, based on the website description) marched around the beach to a catchy beat and gathered a crowd behind them, finishing up in the bar. We finished up too, although it appeared that for some folks, the party was just beginning.

I woke up early Wednesday morning and went outside to read by the pool. As the sun hit me, I closed my eyes and was startled by a chihuahua in a Santa suit peering over the foot of my chaise lounge. Time to go pack.

Nikki

Before heading down to Key West, we visited Theater of the Sea, across the street from our hotel. There are shows featuring dolphins, sea lions and parrots, and informative talks about sea turtles and other wildlife. The demonstrations emphasized environmental concerns, and many of the animals are injured and unable to survive in the wild. The turtle lagoon featured a number of injured sea turtles wearing various adaptive devices and was essentially a disabled turtle residence. There are programs for swimming with the dolphins, sea lions and stingrays, but we did not participate. It takes about two and a half hours to go through the whole facility. There is always one demonstration going on, and we followed the group from one show to the next until we had finished the cycle. We skipped the last activity, a short ride in a glass bottomed boat, because there was a wait and we wanted to get going.

Driving south, we stopped for lunch in Marathon at Keys Fisheries Market and Marina, where there is a window for counter service and tables on the docks. We sat in the sun eating crab cakes and lobster bisque.

Our next stop was at Big Pine Key to see the Key deer. These are relatives of the Virginia white-tailed deer found on the mainland that were isolated when the ice receded and left them stranded to evolve into a smaller subspecies, growing up to three feet tall at the shoulder. They are found only on a few of the Lower Keys where there are sustainable sources of fresh water, and they swim between the closer islands. A portion of the land here has been set aside as a wildlife refuge for them. http://www.fws.gov/nationalkeydeer/

We had been told that we were likely to spot the Key deer as we drove along the road on Big Pine Key and the smaller No Name Key, but we did not see any. We had been looking for the refuge’s visitor center and thought we were following signs for it but did not find it in the shopping center to which the signs directed us. After driving around fruitlessly for a while, we called the visitor center and found they were indeed located in that shopping center, so we went back, found it, and had an informative talk with a ranger there. She gave us a map of the refuge, told us where to go and advised us to slow down or stop the car to see if any deer would approach us hoping for food. Feeding the deer is strictly prohibited but people do it anyway, and the deer have lost their fear of automobiles, with the predictable sad results.

We drove to Blue Hole, an abandoned limestone quarry that has filled with fresh water and is home to alligators and other wildlife. A ranger was answering questions and we talked to him for a while. As he gesticulated enthusiastically, glasses in hand, he dropped his glasses into the water from the viewing platform and climbed down to the water, hunting in the muck for his glasses with a stick. There was an alligator sunning itself nearby on the edge of the pond, but the ranger knew it by name and did not appear to be bothered.

We drove on to an area with walking trails and followed one to a wooden viewing platform overlooking a wetland. We sat quietly for a while but saw no deer. Then we drove to the end of the road and finally spotted two small deer. We stopped the car and one of them approached us curiously. We stared at each other for a while and then drove on, satisfied with our encounter.

We headed off toward Key West, where our curious encounters would be limited to two-legged creatures.

Nikki

Dutifully following my GPS, we had no trouble locating the Almond Tree Inn in Key West. www.almondtreeinn.com. This is a well located small hotel in the Old Town. Our large room on the second floor had a sitting area and a walk-in shower, with the sink located outside the bathroom, and outside our door was a nice outdoor lounge area with furniture. We arrived just in time for the daily happy hour. Free beer, wine and soft drinks are available from 5-7 PM with cheese and crackers and other munchies served outside near the pool. A free continental breakfast is served in the same area.

While the hotel does have free wi-fi, it is not available in the rooms. In order to use it, you must be just outside the office in the area where the happy hour and breakfast are served. This turned out to be convenient enough, as I caught up with my e-mail during these times. The hotel plans to change to a system which will provide wi-fi in the rooms some time soon.

We walked to El Siboney, a Cuban restaurant in a residential neighborhood, for dinner. There was a line of people waiting to get in, but this is a large restaurant and the line moved quickly. We had fresh avocado salad, followed by roast pork and a whole fried yellowtail snapper, with yellow rice and beans and fried plantains. All very good and a great value.

After dinner we weren’t sure whether we wanted to go out, so I was hanging around by the pool when Lauren came down to tell me she had found two bars with live music for us to check out. We were using the guidebook Hidden Florida Keys and Everglades, which was extremely helpful. So we went to the lively end of town and first hit Captain Tony’s Saloon, at 428 Greene Street. We heard some blues guitar playing from the street and walked inside. www.capttonyssaloon.com

People at the bar started giving me high fives as we passed between the musician and the bar stools. We found seats on the other side of the room. There were plenty of empty tables but there were lots of people around the bar. Next to our table a tree was growing through the roof. According to the website, seventeen pirates were hanged from this tree by vigilantes in the nineteenth century. Attached to the wall there were business cards that looked like they dated from approximately the same era. There was a large collection of bras hanging from the rafters, reminding me of that little restaurant in Paris where the chef told a good story about how he had accumulated them.

According to the website, this is the location of the bar where Ernest Hemingway used to do his drinking until the barkeeper moved across the street during a dispute with the landlord. Previous businesses at this address evidently included a wireless telegraph station, a cigar factory and a bordello. But as the guitar player started doing more talking and less guitar playing and singing, the crowd strayed out of the bar, and it started to resemble its earliest incarnation as ice house and makeshift morgue.

We followed in Hemingway’s footsteps and walked across Duval Street to Sloppy Joe’s Bar. www.sloppyjoes.com. There was a lively band playing here and a standing room only crowd. We found a table when some people left and enjoyed the music and some drinks until we decided the day had been long enough.

TDudette

Super TR, Nikki!

cw

Just found the report and read it through with great enjoyment. Sounds like a great trip. I've always wanted to visit the Keys. Was this your first trip?

I had not known about the deer population. Fascinating. Thanks Nikki!

emalloy

Very interesting TR, Nikki, thanks for posting.

Nikki

Thanks for the nice comments. I was on the Keys for a daytrip once about 25 years ago, and we only made it about half way down.

Nikki

Thursday morning we walked to Ernest Hemingway’s house and toured it. The guide told stories about Hemingway’s life and loves, and we got to see the urinal from the original Sloppy Joe’s Bar (the one that is now Captain Tony’s, if you are following carefully), which Hemingway installed near the pool to get back at his wife for spending so much money on building the pool while Hemingway was out of town. The wife decided to take those lemons and make lemonade, so she constructed a fountain around the urinal. Or so our guide told us. Meanwhile, the descendants of Hemingway’s six-toed cats are still prowling the premises, and the urinal didn’t seem so out of keeping with the ambience in the garden.

Our next stop was the Florida Keys Eco-Discovery Center. http://floridakeys.noaa.gov/eco_discovery.html We had been directed here by the ranger at the Key deer sanctuary. It is a relatively new facility built along the waterfront on the old US Navy base that takes up a large amount of space on Key West. There is free admission and parking. Inside there are exhibits about the nature of the Florida Keys, aquarium exhibits, and a good movie about a young woman who grows up exploring the coral reef. Outside we could see a huge cruise ship, an old military vessel and a carnival that had been set up.

It was a beautiful day, and we drove on from there to Fort Zachary Taylor State Park. The fort was originally 1200 feet out at sea, but in the 1960s the Navy filled in the land as part of a dredging project, surrounding the fort and making it landlocked. During the Civil War the fort was controlled by the Union and was used in a blockade to keep supplies from the Confederacy. In 1968, people excavating the site found the largest collection of Civil War cannons in the US. The moat surrounding the fort is a recent addition built to keep people from entering the fort when it is closed and to give the impression of the fort surrounded by water, as it was when it was in use.

We walked around and took photos for a while, then drove to the beach. Sitting in the shade of a gazebo with a beautiful view of the ocean, we looked through our guidebook for a spot to have lunch. We decided on Santiago’s Bodega at 207 Petronia Street in Bahama Village, a neighborhood between the fort and our hotel. We loved this place, which had delicious salads and tapas. www.santiagosbodega.com

After lunch it was the warmest day we had experienced in Florida, and I spent a couple of hours reading near the pool while Lauren walked down Duval Street to explore and shop. It still wasn’t really warm enough to go in the water, but it felt wonderful to be out in the sun, especially knowing that my husband had been shoveling snow back at home off and on since we left.

Nikki

Our next stop was the sunset celebration at Mallory Square. I particularly enjoyed the juggler who got everybody’s attention with a whip that he snapped at people who stood within the circle he had drawn around his performance space. Unlike the llama lady at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris last year, he managed to hold on to the whip and I did not find it flying past my left ear. This was a good thing. The climax of this old hippie’s act was a walk along a high wire he had strung above the sea wall. It was very windy, and this took a lot of guts. Easily worth the couple of bucks we put into the hat.

There were lots of tourists strolling about, but there were also some oddities to give the event the Key West flavor one has heard about. The guy in the UMass jacket with the parrot on his shoulder was listening appreciatively to a drunk guy singing and playing Silent Night on a guitar. On the other hand, Lauren said the sunset just looked like a sunset anywhere else. I’m not sure what she expected.

We had dinner at Kelly’s Caribbean Bar, Grill and Brewery at 301 Whitehead Street. www.kellyskeywest.com The restaurant is in a lovely, historic building that was the original home of Pan American Airlines (it doesn’t look anything like the Pan Am Building in New York). Dining was outdoors in a beautifully landscaped and lighted garden with heaters, which were welcome on this cool evening. We shared an appetizer of macadamia nut encrusted baked brie with pineapple salsa, which I followed with Calypso pork, marinated in dark rum and brown sugar, all very good.

And then we went to the drag show. Lauren had seen an ad for this show posted in the ladies’ room at Santiago’s Bodega and had walked past the venue in the afternoon. Neither of us had ever been to a drag show before, and I was hoping we would not stand out in the crowd. We needn’t have worried.

As we entered the Aqua Nightclub on Duval Street, we stopped to pay our admission of $15 apiece. The cashier said, “You’re locals, right?” Lauren and I looked at each other. There really was another mother and daughter pair of us walking around somewhere. The cashier said he thought he had seen us around town. This guy seemed pretty sober and normal to us, so we couldn’t write off his comments the way we had those of the folks back in Islamorada. “What if we were?” I asked. Apparently we would have gotten in for free. Oh well.

We found seats, ordered drinks and waited for the show to begin. I had just finished playing the flute in five holiday concerts and thought I wouldn’t want to see any more Christmas shows this year. It seems I had one more in me. But this one would be a bit different from the others.

There were three performers who took turns lip-synching a variety of songs, many of which were Christmas songs, some of them quite obscene, and many of them hilarious. These performers were dressed significantly better than the drag queens I have encountered on Commercial Street in Provincetown on Cape Cod in the summer, drumming up business for their shows.

The three performers took turns, each one coming out in a new costume and doing two or three songs, strutting and sashaying around the room while customers placed dollar bills in their (increasingly sweaty) cleavages. At one point, some money fell out of the dress of one of the performers and I pointed it out to her. She looked at Lauren and pointed for Lauren to pick it up for her. I realized that this particularly curvaceous lady was so corseted that she could not bend down.

So this is my travel tip for the day: if you are going to a drag show, be sure to bring dollar bills or you will feel like a cheapskate.

TDudette

Gotta get to Key West!

cw

"if you are going to a drag show, be sure to bring dollar bills or you will feel like a cheapskate"

Ain't travel educating?

SAnParis2

I'm ready to go, when's the next flight out ??

Nikki

Friday morning we went on a glass bottom boat to see the coral reef seven miles off shore. The boat leaves from the foot of Duval Street and is easy to spot because of a huge sign right across the end of the street. We had called the day before for reservations. http://www.furycat.com/key-west/glass-bottom-boats.htm

The reef looked remarkably like the ones in the Eco-Discovery Center, and we were glad we got the opportunity to see the model upon which they were based. The water was not really warm enough for snorkeling while we were in the Keys. Lauren had dipped a toe in at the sandbar when we were out on the boat in Islamorada and did not make it any farther in.

It took forty minutes for the boat to get to the reef, and then we spent about thirty or forty minutes viewing the coral and the fish underneath the catamaran. During the viewing time both Lauren and I became slightly queasy. Many on the boat were significantly seasick, especially on the windy ride back to the dock.

Back on dry land, we headed for the car and left Key West. We managed to avoid running over any chickens in the road. (Insert obvious joke.) We also managed to avoid hitting any people, who seemed to pattern their road-crossing behavior on that of the indigenous free roaming chickens. I figured it’s Florida, the rules are different here.

We stopped for lunch at Mangrove Mama’s on Sugarloaf Key, at mile marker 20. www.mangrovemamasrestaurant.com This former rail stop for Henry Flagler’s railroad has indoor and outdoor seating. We shared some conch fritters which I thought were the best exemplars we had on this trip. I really enjoyed my salad with blackened mahi mahi and key lime pie.

After lunch, Lauren said she felt like she was still on the boat, the restaurant was rocking. So I took the wheel and we headed toward Key Largo. We found the Marriott Key Largo with no difficulty and checked in. We were staying here on points that I had accumulated when Lauren got married at a Marriott last summer. Our room with no view had been upgraded to a room with obstructed view and a private balcony. The obstruction turned out to be the hotel’s restaurant, but there was plenty of water to be seen, and I enjoyed sitting out on the balcony reading, catching up with my e-mail, calling home, and watching and photographing the sunset. Oddly, I started to feel the balcony was rocking. This was my delayed reaction to the morning boat trip. By now Lauren was back to normal. The feeling passed after a little while.

For dinner we went to the happy hour at Num Thai Restaurant and Sushi Bar. On the Keys it seems to be fashionable to call the reduced price menu in the early evening the happy hour rather than the early bird special with its connotation of senior citizen hour. The captain on our charter boat in Islamorada had pointed us to this place for a great bargain for sushi. The happy hour specials were all $11.95. We each got a bento box with a good amount of sushi, sashimi, and one other dish, as well as miso soup. It was all good and fresh, and it was good to have a relatively light dinner after our big lunch.

Back at the hotel we watched Miracle on 34th Street. It was Christmas Eve, and I had never successfully made it through this movie before without falling asleep. So I guess I can check that off my bucket list. We had read that the hotel bar had live music, but it seemed very quiet from outside. After printing out our boarding passes in the lobby, I went back to the room and we called it a night.

Nikki

Saturday morning I spent a couple of hours sitting along the beach outside the Marriott. It was getting to be the warmest day of the week. Very few people were out early on this Christmas morning. If we had been able to stay later, I would probably have made it into the water for the first time. Instead we packed our things, checked out of the hotel and went in search of lunch in Key Largo. This was no easy task. We had gotten the names of two restaurants that were open for lunch on Christmas day from the hotel desk. One was a pizza place. We set out for the other one, which was off Route 1 in a marina. We tried to follow the directions given us by the hotel and got lost. We called back for further directions and got lost again when the stop sign at which we were supposed to turn did not materialize. We called the restaurant and got directions to turn at the same nonexistent stop sign, but it was all moot because when the person on the phone realized we were on our way, she told us the restaurant did not open for another two hours.

So we ended up at the pizza place. The pizza was pretty good. The drive back to the Miami Airport took a bit over an hour and it was easy to find the rental car return center. The flight to Boston was uneventful, just the way we like it. Christmas is a good day to fly; our plane was less than half full. And the blizzard in Boston held off until the next day, allowing us to get back home easily. Driving to New York two days later was less problematic, but that is another story.

sassy_cat

Nikki,
Lovely to hear about the deer, the hanging bras, the urinal and the drag show. What a trip!

I've duly taken note of your travel tip. It will come in useful one day I'm sure and in return here's one you've probably heard before

'Never go on trips with anyone you do not love' Hemingway

I'll add 'but it's OK to leave someone you love behind to shovel snow once in a while'

Nikki

Fortunately for Hemingway's travel agenda, he seemed to love lots of people.

retired04

Just finished reading thru this and can't wait to get on the road to the Keys! Going to spend a whole month in Islamorada! Driving from Michigan.