Florida Vacation 2008, Part I
We arrived in the Keys on Saturday without too much incident. The trip was long as always but spread over 2 days, it seemed like more than forever. I think we’d just rather have drove through the night and gotten it over with. And why couldn’t Georgia have something worthwhile to look at along the highway? We didn’t get into Florida on schedule due to road construction and the kids needing to pee at inopportune times. We had also planned to eat picnic-style for lunch but the weather would threaten with rain and thunder.
We got into Gainesville late in the evening and stopped for the night at a Days Inn. After a [good] night’s sleep (it was as good as it was going to get, frankly), we headed back on the road onto the turnpike. There was some traffic congestion when we first got onto US-1 but we did get to Steve’s before sunset. We even had time to relax in the pool before bed.
On Sunday, we went out to Veteran’s Memorial Park on Little Duck Key for a swim. The beach there is a really nice one. The shallow ridge goes on to what seems like forever. Steve took the boys out pretty far, I could hardly see them from the shore. They also enjoyed searching for shells and coral pieces near the shore. It wasn’t too hard as the “sand” there is pretty much made of broken coral and shells. The water was also very warm and was much to my liking. Weird as it sounds, I really do prefer warmer water to wade in than the more frigid water that public pools like to use. It’s a good beach and we’ll probably head back tomorrow.
Yesterday, the rain kind of ruined any plans to go out anywhere as most things down here require the great outdoors and sunny weather. After lunch, we came back to the house and relaxed a bit; the kids played some games and tried their best to practice different ways to get themselves upside down and so forth with handstands and cartwheels.
Today we did make it out of the house for most of the day. We went down to Key West and parked the van in at private garage so we could walk on Duval Street for a few hours. We stopped at the Hard Rock Cafe for some ice cream and water. Both were very nice to have on this hot day as it got to 94 degrees while we were out. I took a few pictures of the memorabilia and it was pretty awesome to be in the same room as the instruments and garments of these familiar rock legends. After the Hard Rock, we continued up Duval and checked out some souvenir shops. After a couple of hours, we walked back to the garage to find the passenger side door was open! Luckily nothing was missing. I’m guessing that one of the kids forgot to close it. Yeah, lucky there. We went along Whitehead Street to see the Southern-most Point and back onto US-1 heading north back to Big Pine Key.
We did get held up in a traffic jam on US-1 though at about mile marker 20. When there’s an accident on this road, it’s just a catastrophe as US-1 is the only road in and out of the Keys to the mainland. It is, for the most part, two lanes and bridges. The accident apparently started at 1:30pm and involved a dump truck spilling its entire load on a bridge. We had left Key West at 4:20pm and didn’t get back to Big Pine until about 6:45pm. Yeaaaah, that was fun. All part of the great adventure, I suppose. ^_^
Well, time for bed. More details on our exploits later this week.
