A beautiful road leads to Key West, laid across the islands. Near the city of Marathon, you can walk along the picturesque abandoned bridge Old Seven Mile Bridge. In total, we spent four days in Key West, one of which was dedicated to a trip to the Dry Tortugas National Park.
From Miami airport to Key West is 260 kilometers or 3 hours drive. But you can't just get to Dry Tortugas, you need to buy an excursion either by boat or by plane. I will tell you about this national park in the next post.
On the map of Key West I have marked the points that are mentioned in this post.
Panorama of Miami from the plane before landing. Before takeoff, the pilot announced that this was a flight to Honolulu. Somehow, I automatically started packing my things and moving to another plane. But then the pilot admitted that he was joking 🙂 Delta pilots are generally very talkative, for example, they love to tell why a flight is delayed and what problems they found in the plane. On the previous segment of this flight, for example, the pilot announced that the light responsible for heating some tube in the tail of the plane did not light up. And since he could not check it himself, a mechanic would come and touch the tube with his hand. The mechanic came, touched it, and the plane was replaced. They also often announce that the plane is ready for takeoff, but they cannot find the crew.
At the Miami airport we took a car and went to spend the night in Miami Beach, and in the morning we headed towards Key West. Approximately in the middle of the road there is a particularly picturesque section where you can see the remains of the old road running parallel to the new one. The old bridge was built at the beginning of the century, but already in 1935 it was partially destroyed during a strong storm. The road looks very abandoned - rusty, with holes, with bushes and trees. slowly taking over the roadway. It turned out that part of this road is open to tourists.
To get to the old bridge, you need to make sure you don't miss the parking lot right at the exit from Marathon. If you miss it, you'll have to drive across the new bridge there and back, which is 14 miles.
Of course, we didn't cross the entire bridge, but only the part that connects the city of Marathon with the island of Pigeon Key, where the road builders once lived. You can't get to the island from the bridge; you have to get there by ferry.
Pigeon Key is 2.2 miles one way (7 kilometers there and back) - a hundred miles is not a detour for a mad dog. Even during a beach trip I managed to squeeze in a hike.
After Pigeon Key, there are several dips in the old bridge and there is no way to get there. I noticed that there is pedestrian access on the other side of the bridge, but we did not stop.
In every hike there comes a point after which it is still too far to go forward, and it is already stupid to go back. Everything would be fine, but the hike was somewhat unplanned. We did not take water with us, and my wife did not have suitable shoes. At a temperature of 30+, such jokes end badly. I managed fine, but my wife threw murderous glances at me. Stirlitz had never been so close to failure.
Pelican aerobatic team.
I had to urgently save my wife (and save myself from my wife), so I had to photograph the iguana that was waiting for us at the exit from the bridge practically on the run, like the pelicans above. There was a tourist center nearby, where I filled up with bottles of water and we rolled on. On the way to the city, we stopped at the Bahia Honda Park and swam for the first time. This beach is actively advertised in guidebooks, but in reality it was not impressive.
Since this was our second time in Key West, we mostly walked along the beaches rather than the sights. The first was Smathers Beach. The water is clean and clear, but quite shallow. You can rent an umbrella and lounge chairs on each beach.
But alcohol is not sold on the beach. You can go to a nearby hotel and ask for drinks to go. However, you still can't drink on the beach.
Why not the Maldives?
The next beach is Higg's, located near the long pier on White Street. Some seaweed:
View from the pier. The depth is almost knee-deep everywhere:
Most of the coast is rocky. Some beaches belong to hotels and outsiders are driven away from there.
It wasn't until I was writing this post that I realized I didn't have any photos of Key West's best beach, located in Fort Zachary Taylor State Historic Park. The beach is rocky and hard to get into, but it does have some depth. The cover photo of this post is a view of the beach from an airplane. There is an entrance fee to the park.
Source: travel.ru
