Nice to Visit, But....

There is nothing like travel to learn about geography.  This time we how learned much we had totally underestimated the size of Florida and its driving distances.  Since New Orleans, we have logged over 1800 miles. It was a full day from New Orleans to Mobile, then three more full driving days to Key Largo, 100 miles north of Key West.  Most of those miles were pretty flat, boring (except for the heavy traffic), lined by trees and punctuated now and then by strip malls and casinos.  But at least the weather was a very welcome change!

We can highly recommend Hotel Hollander in St. Petersburg

Salvador Dali Museum, 2nd largest
Dali collection in the world

Tallahassee was forgettable, but St. Petersburg and Tampa were nice, as were a few parts of the Keys and Coral Gables in the Miami area.  Lodging in Tampa was very expensive, so we opted to spend three nights in St. Petersbug, at a nice historic hotel, popular with long-dead movie stars.  It was close to everything downtown, including the Salvador Dali museum and the Sunken Gardens.

Fun day of biking and frequently getting lost in Tampa

Tampa

A mini cigar factory in Ibor

Cuban lunch

We drove the crazy causeway traffic to Tampa and enjoyed a nice day of bicycling to Ybor (Little Cuba), having a memorable lunch at the historic Columbia Restaurant.

The lavish Henry Plant Resort
opened in 1891

Bar at Columbia, the oldest surviving restaurant in FL

We later toured the historic Henry Plant Resort, now mostly part of the University of Tampa campus. We concluded that we would rather be low income  today than super rich at the turn of the century, with its rigid class structures, formalities, diseases, and high child mortality rates.

Wine & cheese on the dock.
Ahh, now this is what we were expecting!

Ten days after landing in New Orleans, we made it to Key Largo, the northern end of the long Florida Keys, where we finally felt like we had arrived into a warm tropical climate.  It was good to just do nothing for a whole day and evening.

Idyllic view from
our room

Not-so idyllic view 36 hours later

But 36 hours later a big storm blew in with 50 mph winds that toppled trees and made our idyllic evening dinner of wine and cheese on the dock the night before seem inconceivable.  Our Air B&B room had no table or chairs, except for those outside, but they kept getting blown over.

When in doubt take a road trip!  We drove 100 miles southwest to Key West. The Florida Keys are long.  Sometimes on the two-lane highway we are surrounded only by the Gulf of Mexico on one side, and the Atlantic Ocean on the other.  But traffic made it difficult to enjoy the view. The bridges are impressive, as is the abandoned railroad infrastructure from long ago.  Not impressive are the strip malls in the towns along the way.

The Florida Keys (some of them)

Key West is quite the tourist town, but walkable and bicycle friendly.  We toured the Hemingway home, saw Harry Truman's winter white house (used by every president from Taft to Clinton).  We rented bikes for two hours, and it was delightful when the wind was at our back.  Coming back, we nearly got blown over.

One of 53 six-toed cats on the 
Hemingway estate, sleeping on his bed

The highlight of our visit to the Keys was a private boat tour to a very small part of the salt water portion of Everglades National Park. The mangroves were a calm and beautiful oasis from the windy open water.  Many of the trees are as old or older than the redwoods and sequoias.  They protect the coastline and are protected everywhere in the world except for Indonesia, which is destroying them to make room for shrimp farms.  (Don't buy shrimp from Indonesia!).

Drifting through the Everglades

The old and slow-growing mangrove trees

We wrapped up our 17-day trip in the Miami area, staying in a delightful R B&B close to the Coral Gables country club.  It was a refuge from the insane traffic and bustle of Miami.

Our Air B&B suite was a former single car garage

We rented CitiBikes and cruised the lengthy bike/walkways along Miami beach--quite the scene of young-old, resident-tourist, gay- straight, fit-fat, tanned-pale people and art deco-modern architecture.

Most of this is a parking garage!

We ate lunch at a hole-in-the wall Cuban restaurant frequented by construction workers, then toured the over-the-top Vizcaya estate, completed in 1922.  James Deering, the founder of International Harvester, imported entire rooms and ceilings from Europe and built the home around them.

The Vizcaya estate

We spent our final full day in Shark Valley, a grassland portion of Everglades National Park.  We rented bikes and rode 15 miles along canals and grasslands and saw countless alligators and spectacular birds.  A nice ending to a mostly urbanized trip.

Photo bombed by a gator!

One of many herons we spotted

The only gator we saw moving
the whole day

Most of the Everglades are vast grasslands.
It was soooo nice to be in an official US wilderness area!

We visited with a lot of interesting people, saw nice (flat) scenery, learned a lot of history, and enjoyed warm weather in January. We ate everything from cochon to gaitor to conch fritters, all with plenty of oil and breading. We're glad we had an opportunity see this part of our country--everybody should experience it at least once--but we're Oregonians at heart.