A few days before leaving New York, Henri and I had decided that our first route would be New York – Key West. A town at the end of “Road One”, floating in the ocean : it sounded like a perfect goal.
After eight weeks on the road along the U.S. Atlantic Coast and a week in the Lower and Middle Keys, we closed the first chapter of our trip in Key West, Florida.
The Keys can sound like a beach bum paradise. We found it to be more of a fisherman’s or diver’s paradise. There are not many sandy beaches. Actually, the highlight of our journey along the one hundred mile road between Key Largo and Key West turned out to be a refuge for the Key deer, on Big Pine Key.
There are sone very nice campgrounds in the Keys. We tried every single State Park on the archipelago. Our favorite was Long Key State Park. Each site is facing the sea. I’ll never forget waking up with this view.
And then we reached Key West. Catastrophe, the end of my 3000 miles journey was actually the trashiest place I had seen in my life. In Duval St, Key West, probably lies the biggest concentrate of poor taste in Western white culture… We did not feel very much like queuing for a selfie, buying an homophobic t-shirt and getting drunk thanks to a coconut at 4 p.m. The silver lining: it’s much easier to be a very bad photographer and find subjects in a street full of drunk tourists.
However, you can get a great, cheap, unforgettable Key Lime pie at Key Lime Pie Company. You can follow some roosters wandering around the streets, which is real fun. You can visit Hemingway’s House for $14 (we passed). You can say hi to the ladies who are really nice. And then, you can just get the hell out of here and go back to your fabulous campsite, or see the deer again.
