Key West. Visit it and enjoy. We drove from Miami to Key West in just over 5 hours. You actually drive from Island to Island for most of that time. The largest span over the water is on a 7 mile bridge surrounded by pale green water. Absolutely spectacular. Key West itself is an anomaly. Beauty and wealth in a still functioning fishing village. You can walk the back streets and find yourself transported into another era. One that was illustrated by Norman Rockwell so graphically in the 1940’s/50s. Vintage is the era I enjoy and Key West is all of that. We sampled the local fish dishes, and of course Key Lime pie….. We left the garish T’shirts and the tourist junk to the bus tours and just enjoyed the ambience. On the way home we visited an opulently designed restaurant celebrating the life of adventurer and writer Zane Grey (1872-1939) - original name Pearl Grey. He was a Prolific American writer and pioneer of Western as a new literary genre. Grey produced over sixty books, and almost as many have been published posthumously. In his works Grey presented the West as a moral battle ground, in which his characters are destroyed because of their unable ness to change or redeemed through a final confrontation with their past.
The walls of the building were 1940’s fabric, the carpet a small grey and white log cabin design and the lift and shop fronts had been purchased in France and shipped to the area. Focal feature in the building was a 50 ft wooden boat owned by Tennessee Williams. Fantastic.
I’m disappointed that I’ve not seen crocodiles wandering the streets… then again the Americans are always looking for the kangaroos in the main St of Adelaide.
