Today was a day we’ve been looking forward to, since we were going all the way to the bottom of the country: Key West, Florida! I don’t really vacation in tropical places, so I was looking forward to the sandy beaches and warm breezes. The drive down was very pretty, with the land getting thinner and thinner as we headed towards the Florida Keys.
As we drove, we got a notification from Google Maps saying there was a crash ahead, but we quickly found out it wasn’t in our direction, as we saw a car on the other side of the highway flipped clean on it’s side. Florida drivers, man. We dealt with our fair share of silly drivers on our side of the highway too, especially with a truck who refused to let us merge at a merge point, only to get stuck in front of us win the single-lane traffic for the next 20 miles. The same truck was also using exit ramps and merge lanes to pass traffic and then merge back in over the gore point (the painted no-driving zone between the main highway and the exit ramp lane), cutting off whoever was unfortunate enough to be near him.
We slowly made our way down the keys, filling up with gas in Key Largo to avoid the inflated gas prices further south. It’s easy to underestimate the distance from the mainland to Key West, since it all looks so small on the map, but it’s basically like driving half of the Florida mainland again. We got stuck in traffic in construction zone long enough to justify putting the car into park, and it turned out to be caused by a semi-truck waiting to turn across traffic and no one letting him cross for almost 15 minutes.
We got to Smathers Beach in Key West around 3pm and got all our beach stuff out (finally, I’ve been waiting to use my swimsuit), and headed to the beach. It wasn’t super busy, and we were able to change in the bathrooms and find a spot on the beach to put our stuff. We waded into the water, and while not as warm as the lake in St Cloud, it wasn’t super cold either. The water was really shallow for a long ways out, but wasn’t very sandy all the way out, and was dotted with patches of rocky sandstone-type rock and seaweed.
Regardless, we had fun hanging out in the water, and tried digging some holes, because, why not. Unfortunately the sand was too soft where we were digging and so it sort of just filled in our hole. We headed back to the beach and Kyle realized he forgot his towel, so he went back to the car to get it. While I waited for him, I dug a “hot tub” on the shore of the beach, basically just a hole with a wall towards the ocean so you’re blocked from the waves and can sit in a pool that gets heated by the sun. It’s a childish thing, but I like doing it. Unfortunately I soon realized the tide was going up, and that spelled disaster for my wall which quickly crumbled under the rising waves.
Kyle got back from the car saying he couldn’t find his towel, which I then discovered was inside the bag we took to the beach all along. Classic. We gathered our stuff and headed back to the bathrooms which had a shower on the outside to clean off your legs and feet and such of sand, before heading back to the car and using the back seats (which I put shades in all the windows for sleeping) to change back into our normal clothes.
We then decided to do some DoorDash, which proved to be pretty lucrative in the small but wealthy area of Key West, where tourists usually don’t have cars and want their food brought to them. Part way through our dash, we paused to go to the southern most point of the continental United States (Hawaii is actually lower than Key West). We got there just as the sun had set, so there was still enough light to get a nice photo. The line for photos can apparently get really long, but today it was quite short and only took a few minutes for us to get our photo.
We then walked through downtown and gave individually called our parents to say hi, and ended up walking about a mile into town, way past where we parked the car, so we had to walk another 20 minutes back to the car to keep going on DoorDash. We did DoorDash for a few more hours, and talked about the price of houses in Key West, which actually aren’t all that high, ranging from $400,000 to $800,000. There’s of course houses in the millions, but I don’t count those. The kicker in a place like this is the insurance though. If you can even get insurance, it’ll be so high it might make owning a home in Key West not financially viable, even if you can afford the physical property.
While walking around Key West, we also found a bunch of wild chickens, both walking around and also sitting in the trees above us! Apparently they were brought here and then eventually just released into the wild, and they’ve survived on their own ever since then. They seem smarter than deer about staying off the road though, so that may be part of why they’re still here.
We finished DoorDashing around midnight and decided we were going to drive through the night to South Carolina. It was a long way, but with enough caffeine anything is possible. As we drove back up through the keys, we were met with a ton of deer on the highway, which isn’t something you expect to see in a place like the Florida Keys. We looked it up and it turns out they moved there when there was a land bridge between the keys way back when, and have persisted ever since.
The keys also smell really, really, really bad sometimes. Not everywhere, but in some places Sargassum seaweed washes ashore and then decomposes, releasing hydrogen sulphide, which smells awful. They actually clean it off the beaches in some places, but it can also be useful to the local ecosystem so It needs to be cleaned responsibly.
We kept driving through the night and eventually found a rest area to sleep, getting in around 6am, where we promptly slept until around 10am. We’re kind of crossing the boundary of this daily post now, so I’ll end it here and pick back up tomorrow.