Day 152 West Palm Beach - Key West
Trip Start
May 07, 2008
1
161
205
Trip End
Nov 22, 2008
Key West,
Florida,
United States
Monday, October 6, 2008
Well with our KOA next to a lion safari park it was interesting to be woken in the middle of the night with the roar and growl of lions.
The rain and surface water had reduced in the morning, we had breakfast accompanied with the roar of the nearby lions (quite cool really.)
We packed up and headed towards the Palm Beach, certainly not an easy exercise with the Castle. The beach's are not as open to the public as ours or are sheltered from the high rise fronting the beach.
We managed to find our way to a beach access, (not easy for the Castle) and a car park that was limited, so Karon & Earnie went for a look see, while Rick guarded the Castle.
They returned to The Castle to Report, the beach was closed and the sand was nonexistent, we guess it suffered from the heavy weather recently experienced in this area.
We attempted to take a route down along the seaway but the high rise and development makes it slow going and no visions of the beach.
We headed back up onto route 95 to head into Miami, a wonderful network of highways looping in and out of each other and certainly a lot of focus to enable us to keep on track.
We headed to Miami beach, and again encountered the same challenge that we have faced with all the beach visits on our journey, no real beach access and no parking easy accessible, Especially for a Small Castle!
We managed to find a couple of parking meters one street back and walked up to this famous beach.
A wooden walkway runs along the edge of the sand area but again the high rise is right up to the beach area only guarded by the wooden walkway. The sand was present at least, but a lot coarser than our Aussie Sand, grittier and a lot of broken shells.
We walked along the water's edge, paddle a bit in the warm water, the sea was choppy so didn't entice us to take a plunge.
The life guards have look out cubicles but they fly flags from these to explain the conditions. Different coloured flags depending on the conditions.
They do not have "sections to swim between the flags" as we do, just every 200 -300 yards a new lookout spot for lifeguards.
We walked along the board walk a reasonable distance, we have found that the beaches are not serviced as ours are with Restrooms or facilities.
We head back to the Castle and set our sights for a shopping centre, to find the parking was not there to service Little Castle type vehicles, oh well back to our great fall back, a Wal Mart or Target.
We eventually found a K Mart and had a look around as well as had our lunch.
Then set sail for Key West, the road was easy enough to follow and eventually we were on the one way in and one way out path.
A lot of traffic with no overtaking lanes, single lanes both ways; with bridges connecting the different keys, a lot of different names, beginning with Key Largo: with one bridge being 7 miles in length.
It takes around 2 - 3 hours to travel the distance down all the connecting bridges and keys to reach the KOA RV park at Sugarloaf the nearest KOA to Key West.
The water has the Caribbean colours attached to it, lovely blues and light greens, with no waves just gentle views of water as we crossed the bridges linking the keys.
We arrived in at around 4:45pm (just in time before the office closed).
We check in and have an escort to our site, the site had an overhanging branch, so we convinced the escort to change sites for us, to the next door site without the tree.
We had found out at the office of no WIFI (IE: not free you have to pay for it, as opposed to what is advertised)
The "beach area" had no sand, the site we were given had no TV so were moved to a third site, this gave us TV.
We paid top dollar for this park yet it was near enough to empty and not as advertised. Mmmmm
Never mind we are in or should I say NEAR Key West. Key West is 20 miles South, we plan that final step tomorrow.
