3-28 Driving to Key West

One of our bucket list items was to drive the Overseas Highway to Key West - all 127.5 miles of it! Check. I had this vision where the majority of the highway was indeed over water.  Well, it's not.

http://www.fla-keys.com/highway.cfm

Although there are 42 bridges, 113 miles of the road travel through the small towns of the Florida Keys, and the road often narrows to one lane in each direction.  I mentioned a number of times that the landscape reminded me of Cancun - flat, ground-hugging vegetation, and lots of limestone.

So my favorite part was driving over (yes, I was driving) the 7 mile bridge as we closed in on Key West.  There are actually  two bridges here, the original bridge built in 1912, and it's newer replacement bridge completed in 1982.  Mmmm, don't remember that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Mile_Bridge

So after leaving Fort Lauderdale at 11, we reached our hotel in Key West around 4 pm. Ahh, I forgot to mention we had a little car rental issue first.  This morning, when we tried to put our luggage in the trunk, it didn't open.  Fortunately the car rental was just across the street from our hotel and the clerk was very accommodating and exchanged our car within minutes and we were on our way.

Back to Key West, after checking in we head down to the action on Duval Street - just envision Revolution in Tijuana!  Lot's of people, all shapes and ages, and many of them very drunk!  After walking around a bit, we settle on an Italian restaurant for dinner and immediately fall into a pasta coma.  Still too early for bed, we head to Mallory Square to watch the sunset and then head back to the hotel for an early night.  Tomorrow we fly over to the Dry Tortugas.

Click here to see a couple of DAY 2 pictures from our drive.