Miami to Key West

Thursday, 2/14







Back out to South Beach this morning via MacArthur causeway to see what we missed driving through Miami Beach in the dark last night. A few blocks north of Joe's Stone Crab on Collins Avenue we spotted The Big Pink. We stopped in for breakfast and both the food and service were excellent.

After I finished a big cup of coffee, we took a quick walk over to the beach followed by a tour North along Collins past some of the well-preserved art deco buildings. Then we headed back to Miami over the Venetian Causeway to finish our quick tour through the area. It was great to see the vitality of the South Beach area compared to my memories of it in the 1970s and 80s.



We headed next for the Florida Keys. After paying a few $1.00 tolls along Highway 1, we reached Key Largo and the 120 mile-long highway to Key West. This is a brutal drive. Plan on about three hours to cover the route. It is mostly two-lane road, the traffic is heavy in both directions and the speed limit is mostly 45 m.p.h. And, don't forget school buses, cars turning and a few stoplights.

The scenery is great but repetitive. If I ever do this again I will bring some fishing gear and take the time to take advantage of some of the finest fishing piers you'll ever find consisting of abandoned stretches of highway bridges.









We arrived in time to check in at the Garden Hotel, take a quick walk down infamous Duval street and enjoy the Sunset from Mallory square before heading to dinner.

Where have we been?

Blogging has been light! I have had trouble getting a good internet connection so will have multiple posts later.

Headed out to Key West where we had a great time including a beautiful sunset.

After that it was back to Ft. Myers to visit friends, then up to central Florida where we toured The Villages Yes the people really do drive their golf carts from the course to the restaurant and then on to the community center for a dance.

Heading up to Tallahassee now and found a good Internet connection at McDonalds.

Short Shots

Here is a traffic sign that you are not going to find on a Minnesota road.

A Rainy Day in Florida

Wednesday 2/13

By noon today, the rain had returned to central Florida. That cut short most of our sightseeing.

The rain varied from mostly moderate to damned downpour as we pressed on South from Titusville.

We mostly followed state Highway A1A which hugs the coastline but periodically disappears entirely. You get to see a lot of the "old Florida" along the East coast with this route. The old cottages painted pastel shades of pink, lime and yellow are reminders of the time before condominiums.

The sheer number of homes and their variety is stunning. A patch of double-wides, some old bungalows and then a dozen high-rise buildings followed by beach front mansions. Stops in Melbourne, Vero Beach and Jupiter gave us a good feel for the variety.

We took the two-and-a-half mile ride along the ocean in Palm Beach to check out the serious wealth. Some of these places are visible from ground level but most are well-concealed behind lush shrubbery ten to twenty feet tall. Someone is making a mint selling garden services in this area because they are all trimmed to perfection.

While it almost seems like a single long city extending the length of Florida's East coast, there are quite a few state and county parks scattered throughout the area. With the weather what it was, we didn't expect to see anyone out on the beach but were pleasantly surprised by the number of hardy souls who were out:



Route A1A is a slow road so we ran out of daylight before we ran out of coastline. We headed inland to I-95 for the final sixty miles down to Miami. At 7:00 p.m. there were three to five lanes of heavy traffic headed South into Miami for the entire drive. We couldn't imagine where they were all going except to replace the three to five lanes of cars headed North out of Miami.

There is a boat show in Miami Beach starting on Thursday. Boats were lined up by the dozens along Bayshore Drive. These are not pontoon boats or runabouts - Probably nothing much under forty feet in length. Think the U.S. economy is hurting? Not this sector! All the rooms in town were booked except for one at the airport Mariott and that is where we are tonight.

Dinner was at Joes Stone Crab at the Southern tip of Miami Beach. After ninety-six years serving up stone crabs to the famous, infamous and just plain folks, Joes still had a ninety minute wait for dinner when we arrived at 8:30. It was well worth the wait. This was Linda's first trip to Joes and she liked the crabs too. We both pronounced the key-lime pie as World Class.

Backtracking in Northern Florida

Tuesday, 2/12

The more we thought about it, the more we realized that we had missed something yesterday as we crossed over the Suwannee River and hadn't taken at least a quick look at the nearby Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center back at White Springs.

So we began the morning by backtracking to the North and visited the State Park back at White Springs.

Now it turns out that Stephen Foster never visited Florida and has no connection to this area. Well, no connection except that once upon a time he was writing a song and needed a two syllable name for a river in the South. A little adjustment and "Suwanee" became "Swanee" and he was home free!

In fact, in spite of the setting of most of his most famous compositions, Stephen Foster only visited the deep South once and that was on a month-long riverboat cruise along the Mississippi to New Orleans.

This did not stop the state of Florida from creating a 250 acre park in his memory complete with the world's largest carillon, a 97-bell unit that plays Foster melodies throughout the day.

The main museum building in the park preserves a number of items from Foster's past and includes a number of interesting antique pianos. It also houses eight action dioramas that depict some of Foster's most memorable tunes. Your first reaction at seeing the depiction of "old Black Joe" and some of the others is almost certain to be shock. We live in a society that has quietly and with embarrassment purged Foster's tunes from our schools over the course of the past forty years. This exhibit preserves not just the memory of Stephen Foster and of the slaves of 1850 but also of the Southern culture of 1950 when this exhibit was constructed.

Well, with that out of the way, have a look at this bed and breakfast in White Springs:





I think that our next trip through the area will have to include a stop here or at the nearby old hotel. They are both on the banks of the Suwannee river.






And maybe we will find ourselves in the area with time for a canoe trip along the river. The Cyprus trees and and Spanish Moss would make a great setting even though we did notice that the gift shop was heavily stocked with mosquito repellent.


















We wrapped our morning and headed back through Lake City and across toward St. Augustine. Traveling the back roads we passed through Starke where we again had barbecue for lunch. This time it was at Sonny's Real Pit Bar-B-Q. Sonny's is a regional chain with 138 sites in 9 Southern states. While good, and you can't complain about the price at $5.95 for meat and two sides plus garlic toast, it was no JL's. In fact, Famous Dave's puts this chain to shame.

The Weather Channel had predicted rain at about 3:00 p.m. We found it held off until almost 3:45. At that point, the rain got pretty heavy and put an end to our sightseeing as we passed through St. Augustine and along the coast.

The Daytona 500 is being run next Sunday so this is Speed Week in the area. The Harley-Davidson dealership near Daytona had thousands of bikes in their spacious lot and we didn't even try to find a hotel until we reached Titusville near the Kennedy Space Center.

But SpeedWeek isn't what it once was. Up until 1959, the race events were run on the beach in the wet sand. The highlight was the "flying mile" and the cars were truly stock.

We settled in at a Day's Inn and are ready for a leisurely jaunt down to the Miami area tomorrow.

Off to the South, again!

Monday 2/11

It 's been a busy travel start to 2008 for us. After our January trip to the deserts of Utah, Nevada and Death Valley, we rested up at home for two weeks. Now we are off to the southland heading into Atlanta for a tour that should take us South to Key West and then back up as far North as Virginia.

Up early on Monday morning we were greeted by a temperature of minus 2 as we headed out to the airport at 5:30 for our flight into Atlanta, GA. After a bit less than two hours in the air we landed to find the temperature near 60 degrees with bright sunshine. We picked up a brand new Chevy Impala with only ten miles on it and headed South on I-75.

Our first chance to stop for tourist information was at Macon. Macon bills itself as the second oldest city in Georgia. (Savannah is the oldest) A very helpful transplanted Ohioan, Greg Webb, gave us a number of suggestions for seeing the sites in Macon. With a metropolitan area of almost a half-million, and unscathed by Civil War battles, Macon has an interesting history and boasts numerous ante-bellum homes. An historic trolley tour is available downtown. Macon also boasts a strong music history being the home town of Lena Horne, Little Richard and Otis Redding among others. Macon is home to the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.

Unfortunately, we didn't have time to explore Macon on this trip. We have set Key West as our goal and reaching that point and returning North to points in North Carolina and Virgina is going to cut back on our usual flexibility. We headed back to the freeway.

Some things can't be passed up, however. Everyone has to eat and I had spotted billboards advertising JL's Open Pit Bar B Q as "The Best Barbecue in Georgia." Located at exit 3 on I-475 as you bypass downtown Macon, JL's proved to be in the running for best at the very least. For $5.50 you get a meat and two sides plus a great garlic toast. Highly recommended!

And we weren't far beyond Macon before we'd already passed up several Pecan stores. Another fixture of the South, these stores usually go well beyond the sacks of pecans and peanuts that I remember at Pecan stands in the 1950s and 60s.

We pulled in at Adcock Pecans in Tifton, Ga. The selection of Syrups, Sauces, Jellies and Marmalades alone made this worth the stop. We picked up some Pecan brittle and Wild Cherry Hard Candy and were quickly back on the road.

As we passed Valdosta and neared the Florida border, I was badly tempted by the $3 book sale billboard advertising "over 200,000" books. Linda talked me into leaving that for another trip too.



As soon we crossed the border, the scenery changed noticeably and the soft Georgia pines began to give way to more tropical palms and magnolias. Was it my imagination or a serious planting project by the Florida Chamber of Commerce? I can't say for sure.

We pulled in at the Tourist Information Center and there my dawdling pace would come back to haunt us. It was ten minutes past five p.m. and the Information Center was closed. We picked up a current state map but nothing more and headed on.

Soon we approached a river and noticed a series of musical notes underneath the name "Historic Suwannee River." Another mile or so and we noted an exit sign for White Springs and the Stephen Foster Culture Center State Park.

We continued on another ten miles and spent the night in Lake City, Florida.