Showing posts with label ocean. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ocean. Show all posts
mallory square sunset
Every evening in Key West, crowds gather in Mallory Square and sailboats gather on the water to watch the sun go down. There's usually a whole lot of chaos and a ton of vendors and performers all vying for your attention. We paused to watch a crazy frenchman and his cats jump through flaming hoops and I was called up to assist at one point. He kept calling me "Mary," and it took me awhile to realize that he was talking to me. Awkward.
road to nowhere: seven mile bridge
The Florida Keys are a series of
islands connected by the Overseas Highway and a number of bridges, the most famous of
which is the Old Seven Mile Bridge. It
spanned the gap between Knight's Key and Little Duck Key and only half is safe for pedestrians.
Pigeon Key, a little island resting near the center of the bridge, served as a home base for the workers who built the bridge
and is now a museum, but we didn’t much feel like walking the 3.5 miles in the humidity to get
there or pay for a ferry to get out there. The Old Seven-Mile Bridge has now replaced by
a wider, more modern version, impossible for pedestrians to traverse due to the
zooming traffic.
long key state park: golden orb trail
Our
next stop as we were driving down to Key West was to walk a short trail in Long
Key State Park (short only because we were hot, tired, and bored; not
necessarily the trail itself). Though
allegedly named for the spiders that live in the area, the only creatures we
saw were small crabs that carpeted the trail and would scurry ahead of our
footsteps, in search of their hidey-holes.
Mangroves
had also completely taken over the area with their stilt-like roots and small
spattering of yellow leaves spangled amongst the green. Because mangroves typically get their water
from the ocean, they have to desalinize their water before they can use
it. On their own they can remove about
90% of the salt in their water source; the last ten percent is sent to a
“sacrificial” leaf on each branch, which begins to turn yellow and eventually
die. This process allows them to survive
without a freshwater source, which would kill any other vegetation.
Their
interlocking root systems also allow them to survive extreme weather systems,
like hurricanes and small inlets in the mangroves forests, known as “hurricane
holes,” are some of the safest places to seek refuge if you ever find yourself
outside, near a mangrove forest, during a hurricane.
chum: robbie's marina
On our way down to Key West, we stopped at Robbie's Marina on Islamorada. For $3 you can buy a bucket of fish to feed to the tarpons, 50lbs scavenger fish that hang out around the marina waiting for any food that may fall into their reach. They're mostly harmless, but huge; most of them were at least the length of one of my legs.
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