Keys

We spent a lot of time trying to make Dry Tortugas National Park work. To go to Dry Tortugas without our own boat, we needed to drive to Key West and take a boat early in the morning. Our RV would not fit in the garage of the place that ran the tours, nor could we figure out where to park it in Key West otherwise. No RV parks were close enough to the dock to solve the parking problem. We tried to look at hotels and AirBnBs, but very few are pet friendly, and the ones that do tended to have restrictions such as: one dog, under 30 lbs. So we decided against going to Dry Tortugas and made a long day trip out of the Florida Keys!

We started out early in the morning, hoping to catch sunrise on Key Largo. Turns out there are very few places we could see eastward on the key, but we found a park that wasn't open, but we parked beside it and watched.

On the way down we just drove, enjoying the narrow stretch of keys that were initially connected for railroad use. When we got to Key West we decided to go to Fort Zachary Taylor State Park because we knew we could park the RV there. Unfortunately, they don't let you walk out of the park and re-enter, so we didn't get to see much of the town of Key West.

The end of HW-1 in Key West.

In the state park, we took a free guided tour of the fort. The fort was built with French help as a mid 19th century effort to secure the Atlantic coastline. There are several other identical forts (including Fort Jefferson in Dry Tortugas) that together guard the few channels that exists into the Gulf of Mexico.

The french design worked well in a lot of ways, because it was a structurally sound fort. However, there were also several ways in which southern Florida differs greatly from France that were not taken into account. For example the toilets in the fort relied on the 7-8 foot french tides in order to "flush." Southern Florida has tides closer to one foot and those toilets simply didn't work.

Fort Taylor held a significant strategic position in the civil war as well. It was always controlled by the Union and stopped many blockade runners from getting supplies from Pensacola to confederate forces further north by water.

As the weapons of war changed, so did the fort. When artillery became strong enough to shoot over the horizon and radar could be relied on to target boats, the top layer of the fort was taken off to make a lower profile. They also needed to the walls from bricks to concrete. There are records of outdated artillery being sold to different cities for display purposes. However, when the parks service hired someone to track them down, they could not be found. It turned out, that they were used as filler for concrete and somebody either forged the sale documents or walked away with the money. Modern scans of the concrete have found all the old cannons buried in the concrete. 

Before leaving Key West, we took a short stop at the Eco-Discovery Center, where they had some informative exhibits about coral reefs, the Florida national parks and deep sea exploration. The highlight for us was a 3-D video of snorkeling in Dry Tortugas, which made up for us not being able to go this time around.

On our way back, we got hungry and decided to stop at a Cuban place we had seen on the way down. It was a cute little hole in the wall place that offered authentic Cuban sandwiches. They were amazing!

   

We caught the sunset on the way up too and made it back to the Homestead to catch the Pac-12 championship game!

 

The Keys are a beautiful place to visit, but not easy to plan with an RV. We would love to go back to Key West and spend some time there in a B&B and just walk the streets. You don't need a vehicle to get around.