Over the holidays, my family and I spent about five days in southern Florida, visiting Miami, Key West, and some of the national parks in the area. We flew in quite early on Christmas Day—I think our flight departed from Newark at around seven in the morning—and got back in the evening on the twenty-ninth. It was good to spend time with family, especially before my sister goes off to college next year; I often say that I should go home more often (New Jersey is right there), but I somehow always find excuses not to. Anyway, here’s a brief summary of the trip, organized more by location than by chronology.
I’m not sure that I would characterize us as a “granola” family, but I suppose empirically, we spent most of our time in the Everglades area, visiting Biscayne National Park, Everglades City, Big Cypress National Preserve, and Everglades National Park. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I had previously given that much thought to the Everglades; my conception of a national park was mostly anchored to Yosemite, with its huge but desolate mountains. The Everglades are the opposite of that: they’re mostly very flat wetland teeming with life, remarkable more for its biodiversity than the magnificence of its landscape (unless you’re into swamps and marshes, I guess). I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed looking for all the diverse wildlife in the park, though I’ll spare you the florid prose I was cooking up about “life in its variegated splendor.”
We did two guided tours through the swamp: the first an airboat ride near Everglades City, and the second kayaking through Big Cypress. The airboat ride was fun, and the guide was pretty friendly, but we didn’t really see that many animals, except for a shark. The kayaking trip was much more interesting: we saw several alligators, a turtle, lots of fish, some birds, and wild orchids. Plus, it was actually a lot of fun getting to kayak through a narrow mangrove tunnel; it’s a kind of wilderness that I had never previously explored. I did unfortunately sustain several mosquito bites throughout the process. (Foolishly, I did not put on bug spray—in my defense, I was coming from New York in January.)
Besides these tours, we also took a few short strolls through some trails near various visitor centers. In one, at Big Cypress, we were lucky enough to see two friendly manatees! I thought these things only existed in nature documentaries or something, but apparently they swim inland sometimes, and they happened to come to our little pond! We also walked the Anhinga Trail in Everglades National Park, which was home to a huge number of alligators as well as lots of birds. The namesake anhingas were plentiful, but they were apparently all mocking me. You see, all I wanted was to get a picture of one eating a fish, but none of them was cooperative. The first one I observed feeding was standing in really poor lighting, so I couldn’t get a good picture. The second was eating in perfect lighting, but as soon as I got the camera out, it had the audacity to swallow the fish!
We didn’t spend that much time in Miami itself, but Annabel and I did head into the city for a bit to walk around Little Havana and briefly visit Miami Beach, which I will admit was a bit nicer than what we have in New Jersey. The rest of my family had previously been to Miami, so I guess they felt they didn’t have to see it again, although this was my first time.
The streets were surprisingly lively at night, with many restaurants staying open quite late. It made for a nice nighttime stroll along Miami Beach. Something else that surprised me was the preponderance of Art Deco architecture; apparently, the movement is a big part of the city’s heritage. As a snobby New Yorker who lives a few blocks from the Empire State Building, I had always mentally associated Art Deco with New York, so it was interesting to see these familiar-yet-different motifs in another setting.
On Sunday, after attending service at Kendall Baptist Church, we drove down to Key West; the drive was a bit more congested than expected but was fairly scenic, especially the seven-mile bridge across the pale, blue Florida waters. When we got to Key West, we first stopped by Hemingway’s House and the Key West Lighthouse, the latter of which had an interesting physics display demonstrating how a Fresnel lens works to concentrate light into a beam without the bulk of a traditional convex lens. Pretty cool!
We then visited the southernmost point in the continental United States, which is home to a famous marker that lots of people like to take pictures next to.1 The line to do so was ridiculously long, so we decided to skip this and instead just walk down the ever-busy Duval Street, ending up at Mallory Square just in time to join the crowd watching the sunset. I will admit that the sunset was actually pretty good.
We spent the night on a small boat(!), which was actually quite fun; I feel like I rediscover how pleasant boats are every time I go on one. It was surprisingly cozy despite being ridiculously cramped, and the shower was actually quite pleasant. (We were docked in a marina, so we had running water.) The next morning, we paid a brief visit to Fort Zachary Taylor State Park—which was infested with colorful but invasive iguanas—before finally heading over to the airport to return to New York.
Technically, the marker is not typically at the actual southernmost point on the island, and in fact when we went it had been moved up over to the next street due to construction.↩︎
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