June 3, 2010 - Day Twenty-seven

We elected not to drive I-75 on our way to Key West this morning. Although the road is commonly referred to as “Alligator Alley”, we elected to take the older Highway 41 directly through the Everglades. The Interstate runs directly west to east from Naples to Miami and then one goes south to Key West, but 41 follows the hypotenuse of that triangle from Naples to Homestead.

We didn’t see any alligators lumbering across the road or anywhere else, but we did see a deer and many different kinds of birds. And we elected not to ride in an airboat to see more wildlife; we’ll have to do that on some other odyssey.

We stopped on one Key at a practically deserted park to have lunch and let the dogs out. Since it was toasty warm I fired up the generator so that we would have air conditioning while we ate. For the first time we were just yards from the Atlantic Ocean!

Heading out through the Keys, we had to make a stop on Marathon Key to visit a customer of our good friend, Dennis Andrews, who supplies the (legal) drugs to the nation’s only authorized turtle rescue center.

Dennis’ customer, Ryan, was a great guy who gave us an impromptu behind-the-scenes, tour of the facility, which was used to be a motel. When it was open, the motel provided the income to run the hospital. Today, the hospital takes up the front half of the motel, and some of the rooms are used by the staff as housing. But best of all, the former large seawater swimming pool is now a pool for a number of recovering sea turtles.

We were lucky to catch Ryan when we did, since he had about fifteen minutes to give us the tour before he had to get ready an give another tour to a group of school kids arriving by bus, and after that, he’d be off for two days. We also bought a few souvenirs in their gift shop.

Onward over some of the longest bridges in the world we finally made it to Key West, and checked in to Boyd’s Key West Campground, the southerly most campground in the continental U.S. Our campsite was once again just inches the beach, but this ended up being the most we have ever paid, by far, for a campground, an astronomical $125 per night, and we were staying two nights. All of the other campgrounds were too far from Key West on more easterly Keys and almost expensive. Heck the KOA was about 20 miles away and was $90 per night. We justified the expense because we were in Key West and this was an once-in-a-lifetime experience.

That evening we took the truck in the heart of Key West, Duval Street, to catch the sunset at Mallory Square. First off parking is almost impossible to find just before sunset and secondly my truck is way too big to fit into the available parking spots. After driving around a bit we were lured into a private parking lot and ended up paying $10 for two hours.

We walked about six blocks and got to Mallory Square where hundreds of tourists were lined up shooting photos of the last vestiges of the sun’s glow in the West. The buskers were entertaining the multitudes with their acrobats, singing and guitar playing, silver-painted statutes, and pantomimes. There were also more street vendors selling more trinkets.

The area around Duval Street reminds me of Bourbon Street in New Orleans, but on a much smaller scale. It has almost the same flavor, but not quite as tawdry.

We walked around a bit, at one point a shop owner stopped us and wanted us to look over our shoulder at the sky. I’m always leery of complete strangers asking you to do a form of Pilates, but since we were still on a busy street I reluctantly agreed. And there it was, a towering thundercloud still lit by the setting sun, almost continually glowing with non-stop flashes of lightening. “Only in Key West,” proclaimed the shopkeeper; I guess he doesn’t get away from here too much.

Along the way we kept ducking into the oodles of curio shops just to cool off, because like in Naples, it’s hot here even at night. I went into an “Everything is $5” shop and found a T-shirt I thought was apropos for this trip; it heralded, “Mess with me and you mess with the entire trailer park” complete with a drawing of a travel trailer. But it wasn’t $5, it was $7.50, I guess my T-shirt was just too special. In another shop Marianne picked up a cute painted metal frog for our “critter” fence at home, ten post cards to let her friends keep up on our progress.

As we were heading back to the trailer, we got drenched by another thunderstorm, our Florida record remains intact.