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Five things about the Florida Keys.
Mar. 15th, 2002 10:36 amOver the next few days, I'm going to be posting detailed day-by-day accounts of my trip to the Florida Keys, including (because I like writing food porn as much as ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kightp likes reading it) descriptions of my Ten Perfect Meals, as well as a grand tour of Keys birds and wildlife and a disquisition into why learning to snorkel while over a protected coral reef is more difficult than you might think. But there are a collection of odds and ends that don't belong to any particular day, and I thought I'd start out by giving them an entry of their own.
1. We stayed on Key Largo, the northernmost key, named after a Humphrey Bogart movie. By all appearances, Key Largo was developed in the 1940s and early 50s as a middle-class beach resort. Instead of rows of big, glitzy hotels (although there are a few), there are strings of tiny pastel mom-and-pop motels, cottages, and fish restaurants, crowned with concrete manatee sculptures or hand-painted statues of pirates or antique glass fishing floats or human-sized replicas of conch shells. The effect is surprisingly charming.
2. You won't hear me talk much about the weather, and this is why: every day, temperatures rose into the low-to-mid eighties in the daytime and fell to the low seventies at night. It was pleasantly cool and breezy in the shade, and pleasantly hot in the sun. Sometimes patchy clouds spotted the sky, especially in the morning or late afteroon, but every day had long stretches of bright sun and deep azure sky. The weather, I mean to say, was pretty much invariant.
3. Because the placement of the coral reefs results in shallow water and an absence of breakers, the Keys don't have much in the way of beaches. It's not like the rest of Florida, with miles and miles of talcum-fine white sand. A Keys beach is a few feet wide and pebbly, unless they've imported sand from somewhere else. Likewise, much of the water - particularly on the Florida Bay side - is extremely shallow. The up side to this is that the water is striped in the brightest shades of blue and turquoise and aqua and even almost-white, depending on depth - and also that the sea life is near to the surface and easily observed.
4. The sun sets everywhere, but in the Keys, sunsets are a social institution. Wherever we were, at sunset people would drift down to the water's edge to watch - even people who lived in the Keys year-round. There's a lot to be said for taking a break at the end of the afternoon to rest and converse as something beautiful unfolds before you. We adopted this practice instantly.
5. Spa cuisine has not come to the Florida Keys. Nouvelle cuisine has not come to the Florida Keys. At all future points at which I mention the food, assume that whatever I am describing has been served in a portion that is larger than my head. The food was excellent, almost everywhere - they're not sacrificing quality for quantity, they've apparently just embraced the power of "and."
kightp likes reading it) descriptions of my Ten Perfect Meals, as well as a grand tour of Keys birds and wildlife and a disquisition into why learning to snorkel while over a protected coral reef is more difficult than you might think. But there are a collection of odds and ends that don't belong to any particular day, and I thought I'd start out by giving them an entry of their own.1. We stayed on Key Largo, the northernmost key, named after a Humphrey Bogart movie. By all appearances, Key Largo was developed in the 1940s and early 50s as a middle-class beach resort. Instead of rows of big, glitzy hotels (although there are a few), there are strings of tiny pastel mom-and-pop motels, cottages, and fish restaurants, crowned with concrete manatee sculptures or hand-painted statues of pirates or antique glass fishing floats or human-sized replicas of conch shells. The effect is surprisingly charming.
2. You won't hear me talk much about the weather, and this is why: every day, temperatures rose into the low-to-mid eighties in the daytime and fell to the low seventies at night. It was pleasantly cool and breezy in the shade, and pleasantly hot in the sun. Sometimes patchy clouds spotted the sky, especially in the morning or late afteroon, but every day had long stretches of bright sun and deep azure sky. The weather, I mean to say, was pretty much invariant.
3. Because the placement of the coral reefs results in shallow water and an absence of breakers, the Keys don't have much in the way of beaches. It's not like the rest of Florida, with miles and miles of talcum-fine white sand. A Keys beach is a few feet wide and pebbly, unless they've imported sand from somewhere else. Likewise, much of the water - particularly on the Florida Bay side - is extremely shallow. The up side to this is that the water is striped in the brightest shades of blue and turquoise and aqua and even almost-white, depending on depth - and also that the sea life is near to the surface and easily observed.
4. The sun sets everywhere, but in the Keys, sunsets are a social institution. Wherever we were, at sunset people would drift down to the water's edge to watch - even people who lived in the Keys year-round. There's a lot to be said for taking a break at the end of the afternoon to rest and converse as something beautiful unfolds before you. We adopted this practice instantly.
5. Spa cuisine has not come to the Florida Keys. Nouvelle cuisine has not come to the Florida Keys. At all future points at which I mention the food, assume that whatever I am describing has been served in a portion that is larger than my head. The food was excellent, almost everywhere - they're not sacrificing quality for quantity, they've apparently just embraced the power of "and."
