To Key Largo and Florida City.
Well, today was sort of exhausting as I’m sitting here blogging, and I’m pretty tired, and it’s only 7:30 pm. It was pretty hot today, reaching 83-84 degrees by 10:30 am and getting up to around 88-89 degrees by the early afternoon – and unlike the high temps of my long trip last year, where temperatures got as as high as 102-105, the heat here is far more humid, which makes it oppressive. Although I had my windows down and sunroof open for much of the morning, with the air conditioning on in the car, by about 12:30 I had to close the windows and just feel the A/C. Ahhh!
It was an interesting day, filled with quite a bit of stress in the afternoon, but started out well – and wound up well, also.
I started out around 9:30 and headed into Boca Raton to see what the place looked like, already having a good idea of what I’d see. This is an affluent town, a beach town, and, like Miami, a town for retirees who want the sun and don’t want any more winters (who can blame them?). At least a quarter of the population of about 103,000 are retirees. In fact, my now passed uncle and aunt (from England) retired here many years ago. The year-round average temperature is 65 degrees, and there’s about 5 miles of beach here. Like the whole of the Atlantic coast down this way, it’s a beautiful and picturesque area, with ubiquitous tall palm trees and other tropical trees, bushes, and plants lining the streets and highways.
The minute you arrive in the town there are hotels, apartments, and condos everywhere, white, tan, and bleached, with that Mediterranean look, with red-tiled roofs, stucco walls, and arched windows. As you move out of the downtown and into the residential area, homes are a mix of this traditional style and contemporary designs, but with both featuring white or tan stucco, wrought-iron, and lush gardens, along tree- and bush-lined streets. Like many towns just like Boca, the town center is sort of fabricated. There’s little natural about it, and little that’s too old. Everything seems custom built, although hotel development actually started in the mid-1920s. Still, there’s little evidence of what was here before, and no historic part of the town. with original homes, stores, and buildings. Boca Raton looks like a million beach town resorts, with little clear character of its own. It’s an affluent, clean beach town, lovely, but that’s about it.
I first headed for downtown Boca, on Plaza Real, a perfect example of a manufactured street and shopping plaza, first developed in the 1990s, filled with high-rises (of course), hotels, condos, stores, restaurants, and bars, and reminded me of a similar strip, pretty but fabricated, in Yuma, Arizona.
I drove around some of the residential streets, to check them out, and wondered (as I did in Vail, Colorado) where the normal people live, those without affluence, those who simply live and work here, and provide the services for everyone else. The streets I went down though were expensive and lovely, and clean and bleached from the sun. Some were Mediterranean style and some moderne and contemporary. All seemed to have lovely gardens on tree-lined streets.
Then I hit the beach front, which is beautiful, of course, stretched along the Atlantic shoreline. There were plenty of people around on this lovely day, but surprisingly not too many on the beach, although it was still early.
Driving around Boca, trying to stay close to the coast, the views were pretty of a town built on its beaches and slightly inland waterways.
The roads connecting the beach roads, route A1A, the coastline hugging road, and the inland roads pass over drawbridges, which open to allow boats to pass under, and these really hold up the traffic – and there was a LOT of traffic, not so much in town but as I moved south, down the coastal road.
The hotels really are everywhere, in the town center, along the beaches, and along all the major roads leading into and out of town . It’s like Myrtle Beach, but more so, or like any other beachfront resort in the U.S. or across the world, with high-rise hotel after hotel lining the roads along the beach, although a little more spread out and with a little more distance between them than in Myrtle Beach.
And, not only that, but the entire coastline from Boca Raton heading south is a continuous and steady stream of beach towns and high-rise hotels that goes on for mile and miles and miles (and miles). There must be thousands of hotels, all gigantic. As I passed out of Boca and into the other beach towns, like Pompano Beach and then Fort Lauderdale, heading toward Miami Beach, the hotels never ended.
By noon, the temperature had heated up and the beach front boulevards and beaches all along the way were hopping, filled with beachgoers and lovers of the hot weather. And with all those people came traffic, and lots of it.
Driving became arduous, as I didn’t want to take the quicker inland route (and especially not I-95) down to Key Largo and Florida City, where I’ll be spending the next two nights, and, frankly, the slightly inland scenic route 1 was not particularly scenic, and at times was very much a strip. Instead, against the will of Google Maps, I stuck to the much more scenic and coastline hugging route A1A, which took me south from one beach town to another, each town seamlessly slipping into the next, but was jammed with cars, and a million traffic lights that stayed red for a long time, and seemed to work mostly to slow traffic rather than allowing it to move freely. That really got old after an hour or more, with my GPS showing me that next 20 miles or so to Miami Beach would take 90 minutes to complete, so I finally switched to the route that Google Maps was insisting on, although that was also pretty well trafficked and filled with endless traffic signals. Still, I was heading down to Miami Beach and Miami itself, and from there down to Key Largo. However, and here’s where things got stressful…
Things were going well, intense traffic aside, and I was enjoying the ride and listening to music, until maybe 1:30 when the engine malfunction light came on, usually indicating an emissions problem, and something you don’t want to disregard.
That changed my plans quite a bit, and my first step was finding a Kia dealer who could tell me what was going on, and also whether I could safely drive the car. Oy, and here and I am in Florida, 1,500 miles from home. I switched the car on and off, checked the gas cap (a gas cap that’s loose or not in place can lead to an emission warning), but the malfunction light kept on glowing. That certainly created a stressful afternoon, for obvious reasons, but after going to three Kia dealers, in Hollywood (not the one in California), Miami, and Homestead, only about 15 minutes from where I’m staying tonight in Florida City, I set up an appointment for 7:30 Monday morning at the Homestead Kia, and figured I’d take it from there. As I’m staying here, in in Florida City, for two nights, assuming they could diagnose and repair it that day, that wouldn’t change my plans too much, other than losing the day. In the meantime, the question was could I safely drive the car without risk of damage, which could be serious.
Actually, by the time I got to Kia in Homestead around 3:45, I’d stopped at an auto parts store, where they used an OBD (on-board diagnostics) detector to see what problem code was coming up, which was a fuel problem where there was too much air and not enough gas in the mixture (a lean mix), which can cause significant problems… or it could be a loose gas cap, which it wasn’t. I refueled, although I didn’t really need it, with a higher octane gas, hoping maybe some low quality gas was causing the problem, but that damned light stayed on. At any rate, the good news was after I made the appointment for Monday and re-started my car, the light was OFF. And stayed off. My guess – not sure why it came on, but once the problem is fixed (like tightening the gas cap fully or, maybe, better quality/octane gas) it can take a while, sometimes a day or more, for a problem light to reset, which it seems to have done in this case. So, problem averted. Phew! My mind had been racing.
Okay, still time to hit Key Largo. Which was not what I was expecting. It’s an island, part of the Keys that stretch north of Key Largo, but mostly south, down to Key West, where I’m heading tomorrow. It’s a sort of nondescript town of about 13,000, and not a town with much in the way of things to see in town; in fact, there really isn’t a center to the town or downtown area, and it’s a not a walking-friendly town. It’s mostly spread out, with unassuming tree-lined residential streets and no town center. It’s a lush tropical island with natural beauty, and completely unassuming.
The main attractions involve the water: snorkeling, scuba, boating, fishing, and so on. It’s a beautiful place, but in a natural way, nested in the Atlantic, and reached by route 1 across a thin peninsular, Cross Key, that links Key Largo to the mainland. At times driving south on route 1, the road was literally bordered by water, the inland bay and lakes on one side and the Atlantic and the Straits of Florida on the other. No way to stop to take photos, but I tried my best while driving.
It was getting late in an action-packed day by this point, about 5:15, but I tried to book one of the sunset boat rides, figuring this would be a good way to end the day before heading back to my hotel in Florida City, about 30 minutes away. Too late, the last cruise went out at 4:30.
Still,there’s always tomorrow because I have to return to Key Largo to get to Key West, 100 miles south. I’d have stayed on Key Largo tonight, instead of Florida City (which is a good jumping off point for the Everglades), but there’s few hotels here, and they cost more than I want to spend, and it’s only a 30 minutes drive to Florida City. Before I head out tomorrow, after mapping things out, I’ll take a look at booking a sunset boat cruise, and maybe some other water stuff down along the Keys.
And that’s it for an action-packed day. I’m tired, and will figure tomorrow out tomorrow. Goodnight.