After all the hustle and bustle of 8 non-stop theme park days, Brian and I needed some of this:
So we headed down to the Florida Keys!
Now, I have to tell you guys, the last time I booked a hotel on Hotwire, I ended up sleeping in a conference room with a Murphy bed, but I am so glad I gave them another chance because this time, they delivered me this:
This is the Coconut Palm Inn in Tavernier, Florida, on Key Largo. We had an adorable little room with a private screened-in porch overlooking the pool and the water. It was so lovely we decided to stay three nights!
To the right of the hammocks above, there’s a little breakfast bar thing where the inn serves breakfast on the beach every morning. When we arrived, it was past office hours, so our keys and info were in a little envelope taped to the door (in a much more obvious place than when we had a similar situation in Big Bend, by the way); we didn’t talk to anyone. But there was a little juice dispenser on the breakfast bar with orange juice in it, so we helped ourselves. However, it turned out not to be orange juice, but rather a very strong cocktail!! Long story short, a couple had gotten married the weekend before right there on that very beach, and they were trying to use up their leftover liquor from their wedding reception by sharing it with other hotel guests (luckily — accidental cocktail theft would have been really embarrassing!). It turned out that the groom’s mom graduated from Delta State in 1972!! Small world, right??
Key Largo is the northernmost Key you’ll find on Highway 1, which we took down from the Everglades area, so we drove south to explore a little more.
One of the first things we did was meet Betsy, possibly the world’s largest lobster:
As you can see, Betsy is a Florida lobster or Caribbean spiny lobster… she’s native to the Keys. She lives in front of an art co-op!
Next, we went to visit some tarpon!
Tarpon are the cool-looking fishies you see above. They congregate at this one particular pier in Islamorada, and you can buy a bucket of fish to throw to them. Legend has it that the owner of the pier rescued and rehabilitated an injured tarpon there, then set him back in the water when he was all healed up; the tarpon kept returning back to the pier to get food, and I guess he told all his tarpon friends and now here we are!!
The water is very clear, and the tarpon are pretty aggressively interested in getting fish, so it’s a really unique experience. The tarpon will actually jump up out of the water to grab a fish out of the air or someone’s hand (and you have to be careful — they bite!!). We kept our hands a safe distance from the water, but others are more daring:
Thanks, tarpon!
Of course, tarpon aren’t the only wildlife in the Keys. There is a whole deer sanctuary for the special breed of Key deer:
The Key deer are endangered, but they are protected. They’re small — around the size of a German shepherd. Cute!
Key West (the southernmost Key) boasts a flock of wild gypsy chickens.
The southernmost point in the United States is in Key West.
Okay, so, technically this monument is not located exactly on the southernmost point, which is actually on a military base inaccessible to civilians, but it’s still pretty crazy to be closer to Cuba than to Miami.
I should mention that in our time in the Keys, we had a lot of really great food. We particularly enjoyed the Old Tavernier Restaurant in Tavernier and Island Fish Company in Marathon. Also, we got key lime pie at almost every opportunity (which added up to a lot of key lime pie!!). I really liked the pie at both Kermit’s Key West Key Lime Shoppe and at the Blond Giraffe Key Lime Pie Factory, but since the woman manning the Blond Giraffe was the rudest, meanest, most horrible customer service person I’ve ever met in my entire life (!), I have to give the edge to Kermit.
Thanks, the Keys!!
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