With the Spring Break Road Trip on our agenda, I suggested to Ted that for this “special” birthday of mine, we make it a destination birthday and celebrate it on Key West. I didn’t even have to twist his arm to get him to say “yes.”
Of course, we traveled on the Overseas Highway (U.S. 1) because it’s the only road connecting the Florida Keys to each other and to the Florida mainland. The highway is 113 miles long with 42 bridges, and it’s scenic all the way. It’s also slow all the way–think mostly less than 45 mph with moderate to heavy traffic on a two-lane highway and essentially no opportunities to pass a slower vehicle. You have to switch to “island time” and just enjoy the ride and the scenery. Add a major accident with a 45-minute delay, and we arrived hungry for dinner in Key West. It was warm, and the tourists–including us–were out in full force. There was lots of music and lots of action on Duval Street–the main drag. The street is 1.25 miles long and extends across Key West from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean.
We picked a restaurant called the Gas Monkey–whatever that means. The food was good and it was warm enough to eat outside. What more could we wish for?
It’s Key West. Key lime pie is mandated, isn’t it? I don’t usually like Key lime pie very much, but the real thing was delicious.
This is the second-most photographed spot in Key West. The line to take a picture was a block long in the afternoon so we came back after dark. Then we were third in line.
We took a conch (cahnk) train tour of the city and learned a lot of interesting things about the history and architecture of Key West.
Some of the high points regarding Key West’s architecture include: houses are built with higher ceilings on the first floor than on the second to allow the warm air to rise higher; since the 1923 fire leveled the city, all buildings are required to have tin roofs; porch ceilings are painted blue to keep the wasps from landing on them–the wasps think the blue is the sky; “zigzag roofs” are designed to create channels to drain rainwater for collection. There is no fresh water in the Keys; it is piped in from Miami. Our hotel had a 50,000 gallon cistern to store rainwater.
A few highlights of Key West’s history include: (1) The Overseas Railroad was completed in 1912 and destroyed by the Category 5 Labor Day hurricane of 1935. The rail bed was later used as the foundation for the Overseas Highway; (2) A fire leveled the city in 1923 and burned so hot that people had to go into the water to survive the heat; (3) The Depression hit Key West so hard that 90 percent of the population was unemployed and people were put to work under some of FDR’s programs to rebuild the city. The city was then destroyed in the 1935 hurricane and rebuilt again (no government funding this time), after which it became a tourist destination; (4) In 1982, Key West, aka the Conch Republic, declared a faux war on the United States. This is an interesting and amusing story.
And that’s enough history. Let’s get back to being a tourist. It was my birthday, so we went to the starting point. This is the most photographed spot on the island and the “Mile 0” sign is the most stolen sign in the city. The mayor got tired of replacing it, so he added a video camera and promised that, if you steal the sign, you can “arrive for vacation and leave on probation.”
I’m going to start over counting birthdays. This one can be “zero” and then I’ll take the advice on the sign: “Begin 1.” (We did not steal the sign.)
Walking around the city, we saw Rick’s Bar (Casablanca), Sloppy Joe’s Bar (Hemingway’s hangout), Hemingway’s home, and Margaritaville (Jimmy Buffet). We also saw an interesting sign on a driveway gate.
I think the message is clear, don’t you?
In Key West, they “celebrate the sunset” and it’s a big deal. People start to gather an hour or more before sunset, so we joined them on Sunset Pier.
As sunset got closer, there were hundreds of people sitting, standing, eating, and/or drinking from one end of the pier to the other.
Key West = margaritas on Sunset Pier.
Live music kept us entertained while we watched the sun drop lower and lower in the sky.
Lots of boats gathered on the water to watch the sunset.
And then the sun went below the horizon.
After sunset, Ted and I had a delicious dinner followed by even better Key lime pie than last night’s. It was a beautiful day and evening for a birthday celebration. This one will be unforgettable and hard to beat.