Florida Keys - Where Heartaches Are Healed By The Sea

Many say driving on US -1 is a unique experience itself. The long road stretches all the way from the American- Canadian border in Maine down south to Key West, Florida - the southern most island in the contiguous United States. When the car passed through Miami, what you would see was the endless wilderness of the Everglades. Before the developers came to Southern Florida in the 1920s, much of what known as Miami today was just like the rest of the Everglades - it was a giant swamp where flamingos and alligators call heaven.

US-1 in the Florida Keys have tranquil scenries like this one everywhere

Once the car climbed up a little bridge on the Southern part of the Everglades, the landscape dramatically changed: Boats and yachts came in and went out in the complex waterways somewhere down the bridge. Bunch of moorages and marinas suddenly popped up along the way with advertisement boards trying to sell visitors cold beer and fresh seafood. If you look further, you would see many islands scattering in the sea with a color as blue as the tropical sky. You know where you are? Welcome come to the Florida Keys baby.

Crossing one of countless bridges in the Florida Keys

The first island on the way to Key West is Key Largo. For many of visitors who are exhausted by the city life in Miami and want a place that's not far away to escape (or in my case, visitors who run out of water supplies in the middle of nowhere), Key Largo is just perfect. The Florida Keys is famous for its beautiful coral reefs and ship wrecks caused by its beautiful coral reefs. Many of those ship wrecks just happen to be around Key Largo, which gave local businesses and government the perfect reason to refer Key Largo as "The Scuba Diving Capital of the World" in order to attract tourists. The government even deliberately sunk one of U.S Navy's decommissioned dock land ships near Key Largo in 2002 so scuba lovers across the globe could find themselves an excuse to fly straight to the Keys overnight and dive into the water first thing the next morning. 

A Rest Area on US-1

At the reception desk of the Key Largo tourist information center there sat a lady, who was at least in her 80s or even possibly in her 90s. While most other tourist information front desk people were trying the very best to be automated computers and gave you so called tourist information they found somewhere on the internet, this lady just said to me: "you can try, but I don't know what a Google is". She told me about her own experience in Key West many years ago. She once encountered William Randolf Hearst at an intersection and was told by Hearst himself that "Don't ever let everyone else know I am here!". She then shared all these stories about Ernest Hemingway while he lived in Key West. Hemingway often visited a local bar called "Sloppy Joe's" and enjoyed rum, which he referred to as "afternoon tea". I told her that Hemingway must learned that tradition during his visit in Canada. Being someone who was born not far (both in terms of distance and culture) from Canada in a place called Upper State New York, she couldn't agree more.

An abandoned old bridge seen from its new replacement

I have always loved the name of Islamorada. It means "purple island" in Spanish. When our car was passing through the countless bridges in Islamorada, I was thinking: the next one gotta be the Seven Miles bridge, we are almost in Key West!" However it turned out that none of the bridges was the Seven Miles Bridge and I couldn't spot any island in my sight that even resembled Key West. However along the way, I saw many people standing on those bridges hoping to catch a fish. The problem was, I didn't see anyone with a bucket that contained any fish at all. But everyone seemed to enjoy what they were doing, including a random pass-by/drive through who saw all these and tried to make his way to Key West. I guess Islamorada is just like its name: everybody dreams of a purple island, and the real thing isn't even close. Every fisherman dreams of catching a big fat fish just off the bridge, and it didn't happen at that time. Everyone (or just me) dreams of reaching Key West after the next bridge, but the fact is once you cross one, you see another one. Yet everyone is enjoying the dream - Hey, if we are all happy, who cares if it's a dream or not.

Islamorada, many call it the "Sports Fishing Capital of the World"

When I saw the actual Seven Miles Bridge, Islamorada was some distant memory from at least an hour ago. I first saw the bridge in Arnold Schwarzenegger's movie True Lies, where he chased the terrorists all the way to the Seven Miles Bridge and even detonated an atomic bomb while the hero was kissing his wife (now come to think of it, the atomic bomb might ended up blowing up Cuba considering the size of the bomb cloud and the direction of explosion). Now there are two Seven Miles Bridges: the new one we were driving on, and the broken, old one which is mostly for tourists and newly weds as the government thought it was too expensive to do the demolition work. 

People fishing on the Seven Miles Bridge

One hour later I found myself standing in Mallory Square, the town center of Key West. When I stood and watched the scenery at the Sunset Pier, it seemed that all of my bitterness about the bad weather in the past few days just went away. My heartaches were healed by just looking at the tranquil sea soaked with turquoise colored water, without even sailing with Captain Morgan (That was a good song, Mr. Garth Brooks).

Seen from Sunset Pier in Key West

As our car was running away from the sun at 60 miles per hour later that evening, I could see that giant orange colored thing sinking quickly on the horizon in the back mirror. When my father and I made a stop in the middle of nowhere and tried to capture the last bit of the Floridan sunset, it was too late. However, after experiencing the crowd in Key West for most of the day, there was nothing more rewarding than spending some quiet time alone in the wilderness. A couple of hours later, when old country songs and Elvis classics slowly faded away in the radio and upbeat Latin Music blasted out in the middle of darkness, I knew the Florida Keys were already behind me and I would see Miami very soon. 

Missed the sunset, got this instead