Celebrating 40 in Florida

Cindy and I celebrated our 40^th wedding anniversary (which was actually on December 17 of last year) by spending the first two-and-a-half weeks of 2024 in Florida. We started out in Key West and worked our way north, finishing in Orlando. It was a lot of fun and a very memorable trip!

Since this is my blog and therefore I can do whatever I want, I’m going to post a few pictures and share vacation stories with you. So if you aren’t interested, you don’t have to continue reading. It’s your loss, though! 😊

Key Largo

On our way to Key West, we stopped in Key Largo to meet a movie star: the original African Queen from the movie of the same name. Yes, this is the actual boat on which Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn had their adventures back in 1951. Bogart won his only Oscar for playing the irascible Charlie Allnut in the film.

I was really excited to get to see her and even got to step on board when one of her captains showed up.

If you want to read a harrowing and frequently hilarious account of the making of the movie (much of which was filmed in Uganda and the Congo), get a copy of Hepburn’s The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind. It’s a very entertaining read.

You can take a 1.5-hour tour of the Key Largo canals on the Queen—if you have sixty bucks!

Key West

Key West had been on my bucket list for a number of years. I wanted to be able to go to the southernmost point in the continental US! (Maybe someday I’ll go to the northernmost point—Angle Inlet, Minnesota. But I doubt it.)

I love touring historical homes, and Key West has a couple that are really interesting and historically significant: specifically, Harry Truman’s Little White House and Ernest Hemingway’s former home.

Harry S. Truman’s Little White House

Getting a good shot of the exterior was difficult because of all the foliage.

Truman spent nearly two hundred days of his presidency (1945–53) living at the “Little White House” in Key West between 1946 and 1952. It is a museum today, but it’s still available to any sitting US President who wants to use it at any time. You can learn more about it here.

Truman’s Stetson and cane. As I recall, this was in a corner of his bedroom.

The décor is just as it was in the 1950s. I really loved it!

Truman conducted presidential business from this small desk while in Key West.

Truman’s gleaming presidential limo. Wow!

The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum

The great American writer Ernest Hemingway lived in Key West from 1931 to 1939. It was during those years that he wrote To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls as well as Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa.

On their first visit to Key West in 1928, Hemingway and his wife lived here on the second floor. The first floor was a car dealership back then.

As with the Little White House, it was difficult to get a decent shot of the front of Hemingway’s home because of heavy foliage, so I took this shot of one end of the home instead. I wanted to be sure to include the cat in the photo. There are cats roaming all over the home today. Why? Keep reading.

A nice, quiet spot in a corner of Hemingway’s writing room. Sleeping on the chair is another of the approximately 60 cats that freely roam the grounds and buildings. They are all descendants of a six-toed cat Hemingway owned—and almost all of them have extra toes!

Captain Tony’s Saloon: an establishment frequented by Hemingway during his Key West years.

Sloppy Joe’s Bar: Another establishment frequented by Hemingway during his Key West years.

The Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservatory

This was a place Cindy really wanted to visit, and I’m so glad we did! When you step into the conservatory (a large, high-ceilinged greenhouse), it’s like going through a portal into a lush rainforest where beautiful music plays and amazingly diverse and colorful birds and butterflies flutter everywhere. I would put this on my Not-to-Be-Missed-in-Key-West List. For more information, click here.

An extremely rare and beautiful butterfly—truly one of a kind!

Cindy made a new friend!

And so did this little girl!

Dry Tortugas National Park and Fort Jefferson

This was truly a great adventure for us, and the visit allowed me to check this remote, seldom-visited National Park off my bucket list!

Dry Tortugas is located about 70 miles west of Key West at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico, midway between Florida and Cuba; it became a National Park in 1992. The first European to visit and document the existence of the Dry Tortugas was Ponce de Leon in 1513. He wrote the Spanish word “tortugas” on a map to indicate that there were many sea turtles there; later the word “dry” was added to indicate that there was no fresh water on the island. The National Park retains that primitive ambience—there are no concessions, no gift shops, and no safety features anywhere!

Dry Tortugas is dominated by the impressive Fort Jefferson, a massive but unfinished coastal fortress and the largest brick masonry structure in the Western Hemisphere, composed of more than 16 million bricks. And every single brick had to be brought to the island via sailing ship between 1846 and 1875. The amount of time and work it took to build the structure are mind boggling—as is the precision with which it was constructed.

Visitors usually access the park in two ways: by chartering a seaplane and landing near the island’s beach, or by taking the official Dry Tortugas National Park Ferry, the Yankee Freedom III. We took the ferry—a two-and-a-half hour boat ride through some very choppy seas! Dramamine saved us from any embarrassing regurgitation incidents. By the way, the ferry costs $220 per person for the round trip—another reason this park is rarely visited. Plan ahead if you want to get a seat! As I write this on February 21, the ferry schedule is booked full, except for one day in April, until May 1.

The fort is a gigantic hexagon in shape, surrounded by a moat. This is just one corner.

Part of the interior of the fort.

We followed the path around the top of the fort, 45 feet above the moat . . . with no safety rails! When we got close to the edge, Cindy walked right along without a quiver. Me, not so much! When I got near the edge, I walked as fast as I could and looked the other way! It made me dizzy!

More than 2000 arches can be found in the fort, and the precision and symmetry with which they were constructed is very impressive!

On the horizon to the right is Loggerhead Lighthouse, which is farther west than Dry Tortugas.

A view from the top of the fort.

Coral Castle

Coral Castle, in Homestead, Florida, is truly a unique place to visit and a real-life mystery. Between 1923 and 1951 one man, Edward Leedskalnin, single-handedly carved and set up over 1100 tons of coral rock, and he did it at night when no one observed him. How did he remove these giant stones from the ground by himself? How did he carve them all alone? And how did he set them up without anyone else’s help? Nobody knows—and that’s the truth!

Everglades National Park

Here’s another National Park that Cindy and I had never visited! The Everglades were awesome—if you’re ever in the Miami area, check them out!

By the way, never call the Everglades a “swamp.” They are actually a very slow-moving river (only ½ a mile a day; for comparison, the Mississippi flows about 1.5 miles an hour) that starts at Lake Okeechobee and flows to the southern end of Florida—a river 60 miles wide and 100 miles long. 

Up close and personal with a gator on our tram ride through the park. We saw over thirty gators . . . and one crocodile!

Observation tower in the Everglades. Looks like something out of a fifties sci-fi film to me!

On an airboat ride through the ’Glades! Fun!

The End!