Our trip to Key West for a wedding and a family reunion began on a sour note but ended in great happiness at spending time with people we hadn’t seen in years.
Our flight out of Houston was delayed for two hours by an irreparable mechanical difficulty, which eventually necessitated a switch in airplanes.
We thus arrived in Fort Lauderdale at the peak of the evening traffic hour. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t matter, but on this trip our late arrival and gridlocked traffic meant that we had to drive the entire distance from Fort Lauderdale to Key West at night, 168 miles according to Susan, our GPS narrator.
The night was pitch dark and the only sign of life we saw on the entire trip was an occasional group lined up at a solitary unisex rest room in a convenience store. Beyond that, the edge of the earth may have loomed. As far as we could tell, the famous Seven Mile Bridge was just another couple of lanes of blacktop separated by an endless dark line. Key Largo was merely a Bogie and Bacall movie or a song by Bertie Higgins.
When we finally reached Key West around midnight, Susan ably directed us through the almost deserted streets of Key West’s Olde Town to our hotel on the other side of the island. I say “almost deserted” because we unexpectedly almost ran down a host of bicycle riders. They were all over the place, visible only by their small, pale headlights. My distinct impression as we followed Susan’s directions was of a rather tacky town in the tropics much like many I had seen in my travels.
Olde Town
After a refreshing night’s sleep, we learned that our initial impressions were completely wrong. Key West is a clean, neat town of mostly white homes and buildings with pastel trimmings. According to some sources, such as Wikipedia, most of the structures date from the early 1800s to around 1900. The homes certainly had a decidedly colonial Spanish and French look to them.
Olde Town, as its name suggests, is the oldest settled part of the island and as well as the center of tourist life. The town is split by Duval Street, the hub of night life. The street is lined with drinking establishments galore with cafes and restaurants thrown in for the hungry tourist. Seafood is the backbone of the restaurant business much like Tex-Mex is the backbone of the Texas dining scene.
Duval Street is packed with tourists day and night despite city ordinances that require all booze establishments to close at 11 p.m. and remain closed until 11 a.m. the following morning.
Olde Town is also the location of numerous hotels and motels, most of which offer coupons for thrilling activities such as a six-mile cruise on a glass bottomed boat to the world’s third largest reef (according to the tour’s narrator) where the tourists who aren’t seasick can spend some time taking pictures of reef fish through the green tinted glass at the bottom of each side of the catamaran. I snapped a bunch of pictures but haven’t’ seen a fish in any of them.
Truthfully, I thought the highlight of the reef trip was our location. We cruised slowly above the reef a mere 84 miles from Cuba, and I fully expected a Cuban gunboat to appear on the horizon at any minute.
New Town
In contrast to Olde Town, New Town is a modern area of malls and shopping centers, mansions along the Gulf drive, and assorted business like the ones you might find in any similarly-sized town in the heartland.
And, of course, fast food outlets. You name the outlet and it will probably be located along Key West’s main around-the-island highway. As usual, however, they’ll all be located on the other side of the road. New Town and the Heartland aren’t too different after all.
The People
Based on nothing more than my observations without reference to other sources, most of the people we came into contact with were from somewhere else. We would expect that of the tourists, but others, such as hotel front desk people, sales clerks, waiters and waitresses, tour guides, police officers, taxi drivers, and a plethora (love that word) of others were the people we might once have referred to as expatriates, much on the order of the flotsam and jetsam and Sadie Thompson’s of Somerset Maugham’s stories of the Pacific Islands.
Our hotel desk clerk was a guy from Napa who was in Key West because he had lost his job in California. The tour guide and driver of our train ride around town was an escapee from the cold in Minnesota. And several others were people with European accents, mostly German and Scandinavian with a smattering of French and Spanish.
The worker bees, such as maids, bus boys, and other manual laborers appeared to me to be Hispanic from Mexico and parts of South America, although they could have been born and raised on Key West. I wouldn’t have known the difference.
The island is home to a fair sized U.S. Naval air station with a thousand or so military people stationed on it. As far as looks go, I wouldn’t have known the difference between the service men and women and the rest of the island’s population.
The Weather
Mostly hot and humid with frequent rain-bearing thunderstorms. I found the rain refreshing and I had no problem walking around in it to cool down. When the rain stopped and the sun came out, there was also a moment’s pleasant feeling of renewed warmth.
If there was a downside to the heat and humidity, it may have been a local custom of cranking up air conditioners to da max. In that respect, Key West is similar to Texas where it’s a hundred degrees outside and 67 inside.
Activities
Think Hawaii. Everything you would expect in an ocean-oriented community: beaches, water tours, parasailing, snorkeling, historic military installations, dinner cruises, air tours, you name it. Because of our limited time on the island and a full-round of family activities, including a wedding, we were able to take advantage of a mere three or four before we had to leave for home.
Interesting Things I Learned
I’m sure you’ve heard of a conch shell. How would you pronounce the word “conch?” I’ve always said it like the ch at the beginning of choo choo. But that isn’t the way it is in Key West. In the Keys, it’s pronounced like conk, as in “I’ll conk you on your noggin.” In other words, the word is spelled conch but pronounced conk.
There’s only one road in and one road out of Key West. That’s U.S. Highway 1, which runs from Key West to the U.S. border with Canada in Maine. The part of the highway running between Key West and Fort Lauderdale is about 165 miles. That’s the distance we drove on our first night in Florida.
The Return Trip
And it’s the distance we traveled on our return drive in the daylight. Quite a contrast. The weather was beautiful. We left our hotel early, missing most of the traffic along the way, and although the sky and the clouds were beautiful, the landscape was remarkably unremarkable. The road took us from one Key to the next with no grand views, just the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other.
Tropical foliage lined both sides of the road, but for most of the distance, the strips of land on which the highway had been constructed wasn’t much wider than the road. A drunk driver or a sober driver whose tire blew out could easily have hit the water at a high rate of speed.
On Balance
Speaking only for myself, Key West is a nice place to visit once but it isn’t a spot I would choose for regular trips. Just my personal preference. Maybe a part of it is the difficulty in reaching the Keys. We could have flown directly in because Key West has a nice airport, but our travel costs would have been much higher. Who knows these things?
Besides, how many times can you ride a glass bottomed boat or take a miniature train ride through Olde Town over roads so bumpy I had the impression they may have been made of cobbles laid by French colonial convict labor.
Would I recommend a trip to Key West? Absolutely. You will probably love it. I am merely reporting my own impressions.
Sidelight
We were in the Fort Lauderdale airport when news of Casey Anthony’s acquittal was announced. Coincidentally, I was in the Jefferson County, Texas, airport when news of the acquittal of O.J. Simpson came over the cable waves or whatever.
All I’ve seen of Florida is the panhandle, so Key West seems like a dream to me. Just the ability to stare at the ocean for hours on end seems idyllic. Don’t even get me started on the ability to find fresh seafood. There’s also a museum there that I’ve been wanting to see.
I hope you found it peaceful and enjoyable. Thank yo for writing about this trip.
Rachel, I think you would love Key West. You have a fantastically inquisitive mind and there are enough sights, sounds, tastes, and historical nuances to hold your interests for goodness knows how long. I didn’t mention things like Ernest Hemingway’s House, or the bar he hung out in and supposedly paid for drinks with one of his first checks. I also didn’t talk about the only railroad between Key West and the Florida mainland. It has long since been abandoned and parts of it have collapsed into the water. But even so, it is still usable for tourists who which to stroll along the parts still standing. A person like you, with your interests and abilities would, I believe, easily fit into Key West’s workforce and social groups. Maybe you should try it.
Thank you for commenting on my essay. rs
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I would love to be a travel writer and explore these places.
Rachel, I’ll be your agent.
(Smile). Thanks, dear.