Florida
Roadtrip Series
YOU FEEL LIKE A KID, THE HINT OF SOMETHING MYSTERIOUS AROUND THE CORNER. You feel like a kid, the hint of something mysterious around the corner. Some 20 or so miles ahead we make a sudden veer off the Overseas Highway for a night in Key Largo at Gilbert's Resort, like a Holiday Inn, a '60s-looking place dated
Robbie's Marina in Islamorada
to the early 1900s as a fishing camp. Because we arrive after 9 p.m., there's some mix-up on room passkeys. But a night clerk couldn't be more professional, more polite in using our first names. We trudge up a stairway to the room, which in April runs just north of $200 for the night, and it's … beautiful, retrofitted in grays and yellows and whites, a balcony overlooking a waterway two or three football fields across. The Atlantic Ocean is east, the Gulf of Mexico west. Anchored houseboats line a far-off mangrove; there's the wreck of something like a sailing frigate from the 1860s. A story to that boat but no one to tell it. A public-pool-sized American flag across the water channel snaps in the warm breeze. Gilbert's in the morning has a good breakfast and hot coffee. You hand the woman a chit. Someone has driven around the tiki bar and the small beach pulling a tractor rake. Overseas Highway traffic arches overhead, already bunching for Friday's ride south. And we're gone to join the exodus.
ROOSTERS AND PEOPLE FROM EVERYWHERE We track ourselves with Mile Markers in the Keys. Mile Marker 0 in Key West, for example, is iconic. But the fowl don’t know that … roosters and chickens are everywhere, wild ones, under cars and in the bushes. Things still crow in this world? Like us, the birds nudge their chicks along, as if “c'mon, c'mon!” Then you’re like the locals, shooing or side-stepping them. We shake our heads. And smile.
38
Florida Keys—
F L O R I DAC O U N T RY J u n e | J uGRAB-AND-GO ly 2022
VISIT TO PARADISE
TOP PHOTO COURTESY OF FIESTA KEY RV RESORT & MARINA; BOTTOM PHOTO BY STEVE BEAUDET/COURTESY OF VISIT FLORIDA
A 28-acre resort located on its own island. Surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico, leave all your troubles behind and relax. Breathtaking ocean views with plenty to do at the Fiesta Key RV Resort & Marina.
