Key Largo and a Giant Guitar

Fort Lauderdale – 3 kilometres walked, 50 metres snorkelled, 320 kilometres driven

The plan was to be in the car and heading to Key Largo by 9am. At 8:45 a full coffee was accidentally dumped on the cabin table, which splashed both Ana and Stella, ran all over the floor and into the bilge compartments, and soaked a cushion.

 

I was in the v-berth when I heard the screaming. “What happened?”

 

“We just got ourselves a 30 minute delay, that’s what happened,” said Ana as she looked at the coffee splatters on her lovely dress then grabbed a rag.

 

It took two hours to arrive in Key Largo, and the last 30 minutes was jammed with traffic. The approaching scenery was exactly like what I had been expecting to see in the Everglades – thick mangroves on both sides of the road, swampy channels, lizards and iguanas in the ditches and hanging off the trees, and no signs of development.

 

We decided to have a quick lunch before heading to the beach and found Dani and Mike’s Smash Burger – a small food stand beside the John’s General Store. The $10 burgers were probably the best value in Key Largo and we enjoyed them around a wooden picnic table shaded from the hot sun with a canopy.

Initial impressions of Key Largo were not what I expected. A two lane highway plugged with traffic ran through a commercial district with everything from dive shops to restaurants to hotels to industrial sites. You couldn’t see the ocean and, in fact, most of the areas we saw were not even that close to the ocean. The kids had done a bit of research along the way and we decided to go to the John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park as it was listed as the site with two beaches and the best snorkeling. Well, the man-made beach had little sand and was mostly rock and hard packed gravel, yet full of people. The water was murky brown instead of the Caribbean blue we were expecting and covered with layer of floating foliage – tree needles, marine plants, seed pods. It was not very nice. I did discover they do have an impressive snorkelling reef, but the boat ride there costs fifty bucks per person then you get stuck snorkelling with a hundred other touristos like a bunch of harbour seals waiting to get snacked on by a Great White.

 

Stella and I went out snorkeling and saw a few reef fish, some sunken cannons, and she came across four very large fish that surprised her. We were going to give Anna a snorkeling lesson as she hadn’t done it before, but this really wasn’t the place to do it – we will wait for the magical waters of Bahamas.

 

We stayed at the beach for a while then walked to the Visitor Centre to see the aquariums full of fish, which was pretty cool. We looked at a map to try and find an oceanside restaurant to stop for a drink, but there didn’t appear to be any. But we did find Snook’s Bayside Restaurant & Grand Tiki Bar which faced Florida Bay to the north and it was a lovely spot. We sat at the waterside bar table, enjoyed Coronas, and watched the little fish swimming in the water below, the small motorized tiki bars inching around in the bay and at the docks, the nearby lizards sunbathing on the rocks, and the moored sailboats and catamarans. The restaurant, of course, was packed full of people and crazy expensive, but we had to keep reminding ourselves we were visiting in peak season and the Florida Keys are an exceptionally popular tourist destination, evidenced by the diversity of vehicle license plates in the parking lots, from seemingly every state in the US north of Florida.

Conveniently located beside the restaurant was yet another Salvation Army thrift store so my gang got busy thrifting while I briefly browsed the selection of books, but none veered from the subject matter of Fad Diets, Children's Stories, Jesus, and Crochet. I found greater pleasure standing outside and watching the traffic whizzing by.

 

By 4:30 we were ready to call it a day so plugged “Merle Fogg Park, Fort Lauderdale” into the GPS and took the return trip, which took us along a different, more scenic, and less busy route – the 905A. The two hours still felt like twice that and the only thing of interest we saw after leaving the Keys and hitting the congested freeways was a building shaped like a giant Gibson guitar, brilliantly illuminated, with a white spotlight mimicking a guitar neck, shining straight up in the sky as a beacon for rock and rollers. Google told us it was the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood. We may need to drive in for a close look when we visit Miami.

 

Back at the boat we had happy hour drinks and Ana made us a spectacular pasta and meatball dish. After dinner, all five of us sat in the cockpit for a lively two-hour discussion after Stella asked, “How was everybody’s 2024. What would you rate it?”

It is so nice having the kids here.