Roadtrip Series

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 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.

Iguanas are everywhere too. Invasive as citrus pests, some places have bounties on them. But traffic culls them in the Keys; we see dozens flattened. Wendy slows spotting them.

On a warm and breezy morning, we meet Mariano in Islamorada at a farmers market. A onetime New Yorker and retired school teacher, “Hey, I’m Italian!” is his catchall. All food becomes a pizza, he tells us. Seventy-five-yearold Mariano started painting a decade ago. Maybe it's his wife's idea to keep him active. Who knows. His work is thick shades of purple, yellow and pink. We buy a rooster painting from him, toss it in the SUV with a ballcap from the Coral Restoration FoundationTM. Kids from the Tavernier-based project had pitched that nonprofit. Mother Nature is big in the Keys, as she hovers over nearly everything. Coral is dying and our help is mandatory, we agree. The hat is our contribution.

People from everywhere are in the Keys, the man at the marine thrift store in Tavernier is French, for example. There are Caribbean juice shop owners, Cuban natives, of course, people of every flavor. We're in one of the world’s best fishing holes, a boating paradise. You see trucks pulling boats and RVs about every third vehicle. Monroe County, the governing agency, reported $2.4 billion in tourism spending in 2018, which in pre-Covid times meant some 26,500 jobs up and down the Keys. Entertainment and recreation were about $350 million of that. They’re in your pockets elbow deep in the Keys. But it seems like an honest trade-off, you getting yours, them getting theirs. Just expect it, accept it, and you’ll be fine.

Key West And Roadside Diners

You can’t visit the Keys without seeing Key West. Our trip south from Fiesta Key is leisurely. It is best to ride shotgun. Traffic gets goofy, so drivers should stay alert. We had earlier visited the Bass Pro Shops-Wide World