Florida Keys Getaway

It had rained a drizzly rain just about all of the way there from South Carolina. By the time we got to Miami, I was beginning to have doubts as to whether or not we were going to have a bright vacation. Once we did get there, you can see that the rain had gone. Woohoo!

If I remember right, the average temperature is 84 degrees. While we were there in October, the direct sun caused our sweat glands to go into overdrive. Better than rain or snow, though!

A benefit from our mid-Autumn trip was that the traffic was light on the one and only road that leads visitors though the islands — the famous US Highway 1. You begin in Key Largo at Mile Marker 108 for your trip through one of the most beautiful places on earth to get to the end at Mile Marker 0 in Key West.

Once you're in the world of The Keys, your directions to places to go are given by "mile marker." For instance, Seven Mile Bridge is at Mile Marker 47.

In the Florida Keys, you can stand on a bridge, look down into the water, and see this! Spectacular!

Key Deer are an endangered species now native to the islands — they swim back and forth between some of them.

They are pretty tame. As you can see, with the aid of some Zoom on the camera, you can get rather close to them.

They're still skittish, but at the welcome center, the man who recommended the Key Deer sight-seeing trip said that some of them will eat out of your hands. He prefaced it by saying that it is totally illegal to feed them. "Some deer," he said, "will come running if they hear a potato chip bag being opened." Personally, I would never advocate feeding chips to deer. When they become dependent upon junk food, it erodes their health.

We spent about four hours on this little journey looking for the deer. This is one of many photos of Key Deer — some of them show the deer grazing in peoples' back yards!

I wondered how they got to the islands, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. "It is believed that the Key Deer is a subspecies of White-tailed deer which migrated to the Florida Keys from the mainland over a land bridge during the Wisconsin glaciation."

We stopped in at the World Wide Sportsman in Islamorada.

There, in the center of the store was the sister ship to Hemingway's Pilar. Inside the boat, it was set up with Hemingway memorabilia. This boat is said to be the one that Hemingway fished from and liked so much that he had one custom ordered. The real Pilar still belongs to Cuba, I believe.

During the tour of the boat, I spied a fellow tourist who just happened to favor Hemingway himself. He was very nice to let me take his picture.

Waking up to this view every morning and seeing the anchored sailboat was never any less breathtaking.

When we left home, we hadn't planned anything except to get there. And I don't know about you, but we don't like the hotel chains. They are too predictable, and usually not in a good way. We were lucky to find a great little resort that was well taken care of. I so loved that the floors were tile and not carpet!