Florida (part 2)

So, after the Everglades, we headed down the Overseas Highway (US 1) from Key Largo to Key West. It is 110 miles, and actually had much less driving over ocean than we thought. We thought there was going to be a lot of this -

… when in fact, there was a lot of this -

We were really surprised by how much land is present on individual keys, and there is an amazing number of them.

Most of the time driving we were enclosed on both sides of the road in scrub and some palms. We stopped about halfway down the road at Marathon Key to walk along the Seven Mile Bridge. I took pictures of the sign and thought I’d just post those, so you can read the information for yourselves. I found it interesting.

And this was on the back…

We only walked about 1/2 mile on the bridge, so that I could get a different perspective than what we had been seeing by car…

… but of course I had to get a zoom shot -

This next one doesn’t look very appetizing, does it? I liked that you could see some far off keys at the horizon -

As we got closer to Key West, the land we saw seemed much more arid, and there were new clusters of mangroves everywhere (probably going to become their own keys in a few hundred (or thousand) years) -

Key West was beautiful. Between interesting homes with manicured plantings…

… to those where you could barely make out a house…

… we loved wandering the streets and ogling enormous banyan trees…

… and admiring all the orchids that were blooming profusely from pots just tied to tree trunks…

THE big thing to do on Key West is to watch the sunset (with several hundred of your closest friends) from Mallory Square -

… so of course we did.

And I must include a picture of some of the more colorful denizens of the island (they are everywhere!) -

After bidding adieu to this bright and hot island, we headed back north on the Atlantic side to Palm Beach. There is a unique diving opportunity at Blue Heron Bridge where you can see many weird and wonderful fish and creatures. This was a really big Hermit Crab that ambled by - (usual reminder: open this email in your browser by clicking the link at the bottom of the email, to view the videos)

This dive was on a really boring sand flat in no more than 20 feet of water. However, the unique creatures we saw just blew us away! This is a 1 minute long video that Steve shot, following a cool fish called a Flying Gurnard, that we had never seen before (in over 500 dives!) -

The next is a Molly Miller Blenny playing peek-a-boo. (you’ll probably need to enlarge the center of the screen to fully appreciate it) :)

Ok. Enough diving pictures. Just know that we were underwater for nearly 2 hours, and that’s a record for us. We could last that long on one tank of air because we were so shallow.

We then continued north to St. Augustine, because Steve was interested in seeing the area, after having read a lot of the history of the “oldest city in the US”. It was established by the Spanish in 1565, 55 yrs before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. It was a cloudy, windy day when we were wandering around, so forgive the drab appearing pictures.

The sharply angled walls of the Castillo de San Marcos were quite striking -

Its walls were made of coquina, which is rock made up of millions of compressed coquina clam shells. This is found in very few places in the world, and no other building used this material before the fort was made in 1672. They didn’t know how it would hold up (it’s done very well for 350 years so far!), and were happily surprised when cannonballs either bounced off or stuck in the stone only a few inches, due to the stone’s compressibility in absorbing the shock of the hit.

There were some gorgeous buildings (built in the 1880’s)…

… that we admired from the outside as we wandered, because we didn’t have enough time to check out any museums during our short stay.

I’ll close with a sunset shot from Key Largo. I forgot to mention that we stayed there on our way north out of the Keys, but we didn’t sightsee there - just spent the late afternoon at the beach and relaxed.