Florida

Just wanted to do a quick write-up on our recent mini-vacation before it's too late. The reason that we decided to take a vacation in the second week of December is simply because I found out in the middle of November that I had a couple of vacation days that I was going to lose if I didn't use them before the end of the year. We'd already made our Christmas travel plans, so we couldn't really extend those, and I didn't want to waste the days just hanging out at home.

We spent the first night in Miami Beach at a small hotel called Circa 39 (oddly enough it's near 39th street), which was recommended by the Lonely Planet travel guide as having Miami Beach style without the attitude. With this single recommendation, the book pretty much paid for itself and then some. We spent about an hour on the beach and in the pool the next morning and then took off for Key West. On the way out of Miami, we drove through South Beach, which has the largest concentration of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne architecture in the world (one entire square mile in this part of the city is on the National Register of Historic places). I wish we'd had time to get out and walk around and take some pictures, but we wanted to be in Key West before dark, so I guess that will have to wait for another time.





After that we began the ~4 hour journey from Miami to Key West. Driving on the Keys reminds me a bit of driving on Cape Cod. The part closest to the mainland is full of tacky gift and souvenir shops, which then give way to a pretty sparse wilderness, followed by a quirky city at the very end. We stayed at a Hyatt resort hotel (because we got it for less than half price through Priceline) and got a lot of use out of the pool and sauna (moving back and forth between them probably contributed to the nasty cold that I got the day after we came back).






I didn't really take many pictures of Key West itself, because we spent most of our time there at night. We spent most of Monday at the Bahia Honda State Park, which had nice beaches and allowed us to walk around on one of the abandoned railroad bridges that used to run out on the keys.





Tuesday morning, we had to be out of the hotel by 10:00, so we still had some time to spare so we stopped by the Key Deer National Wildlife Refuge. There are supposed to be about 600 of these miniature deer living on Big Pine Key, but somehow we managed to not see a single one. There were also supposed to be a couple of alligators living in the pond at the refuge, but we couldn't find them either. After that, we drove 4 hours back through the keys and made it back to cold Boston in time to get a normal night's sleep!