December 6-8 - 2017 Miami, Florida

Wednesday, Dec. 6, we moved from Titusville to Miami. 240 miles/ca. 380 km.
We are on 184th street at a nice big and spacious campground, run by Miami-Dade County (amt).
It is hard to believe that we are, if not in the middle of Miami, then at least surrounded by it.

In the afternoon we did a trial run, going to the place where we are going to store the car and check the route to/from the airport. Time well spent, we think.

Thursday, we drove to Key West. From where you leave the mainland, around Key Largo, there is about 100 miles/160 km to Key West. That stretch is supposed to be beautiful. Well, it was not!

When we were in Minnesota in early September, we followed the news about the hurricane Irma, that hit Florida, and not least the Florida Keys. On our way down US 1, we got an idea how bad it must have been. There was debris (affald) – stuff like RVs (campingvogne), asphalt and cement (vej og murbrokker), a whole house (et helt hus), lots of refrigerators (køleskabe), palm trees… - on both sides of the road, and sometimes in the middle as well. This was, almost to the day, 3 months after Irma hit, but in a lot of places it still looked like a warzone.

We stopped at a tourist bureau, for a map, and were warned about the destruction (ødelæggelse). He said the trip wouldn’t be very pretty – but the water was still nice. He was right. The water was very pretty in the sunshine.  

We finally made it to Key West. Key West had been totally cleaned up, and we did not see many traces of the hurricane.

Key West is yet another unique (unik) town, like none other we have seen. Huge trees – mostly palm – shade the houses.

 

 
It was very warm – 88F/29C and muggy (fugtigt), so we decided to go to one of the waterfront bars for something cold to drink😊

We were surprised, that there were not many beaches. We found 2 small public beaches. (I guess if you want to go to the beach, you should go to downtown Miami).

We found two landmarks in Key West:

The marker of the southernmost point in the continental USA (USA minus Hawaii).

US Route 1. We have been running into US1 many times during our trip on the east coast. It runs almost 2400 miles / ca. 3800 km from Maine and south. In Key West we found the end of it. (We were also on it in Maine – not at the beginning, but close.)

And we found this “little” guy!

We saw lots of roosters (haner) walking freely around in the streets. We found out, that these wild birds have evolved (udviklet sig) from domestic birds (husdyr), that turned wild again at some point.

On Friday, we went back to Key Largo – the first and largest of the Keys. Off the coast of the keys, and Miami, there is a large coral reef (koralrev) (third largest in the world). We wanted to sail out to see the reef, in a glass bottomed boat. (We are too old to do snorkeling, let alone diving 😊 so we went for the glass boat).With the long drive Thursday, we didn’t have time to do that. So, we went back.

Once again, the weather was really nice for this kind of activity. We sailed about 45 minutes out to the reef. Then we floated around, looking at the coral and fish for about a half hour, through the floor of the boat. Then we sailed back. It was cool to see the fish and sea bottom. Unfortunately, it was difficult to photograph what we saw. Here are a few examples.

Some things we saw, that the pictures don’t show are: sharks (hajer), barracudas (geddelignende fisk), a turtle (skildpadde), blue and yellow fish.

We did capture the beautiful water color😊

Written by JJ and Mary