‘Are we nearly there yet?” We had been driving for only an hour, and there it was — one of the three phrases I was really hoping to avoid on this, our first family road trip. Rolling south from Fort Lauderdale down Florida’s wide, straight highways, it had taken some time for the sheer novelty of being in America to wear off — the vast size of vehicles, the preponderance of drive-thru restaurants, and the billboards promising speedy litigation had proved fascinating to my seven-year-old son, Dexter. However, by the time we merged from the Ronald Reagan Turnpike onto US Highway 1, boredom had kicked in.
Feeling triumphant, I countered that yes, actually, we were less than 15 minutes from our destination, and was secretly rejoicing in the total absence of my most dreaded cry — “Mum, I feel siiiiiiick . . . ” — when a second unwelcome phrase assaulted my ears. It came not from my son, but from the sat-nav. “Drive for 10.1 miles, and then make a U-turn.”
My husband, Grant, and I looked at each other, aghast. How could we have gone wrong already? One of the selling points of the Florida Keys — alongside the arrow-straight roads that might just keep car sickness at bay — had been the simplicity of the driving. There’s only one major road, the Overseas Highway, stretching all the way down this chain of coral islands from Key Largo in the north to the tip of Key West. Yet somehow we’d gone awry.
Joanna Booth with her husband, Grant, and son, Dexter
Actually, we hadn’t. A swift, panicky look at Google Maps revealed the U-turn was to navigate around the highway’s central reservation and access our lunch stop. Panic over — we were still on track.
Breathing out, I settled back to enjoy the ride. As mainland America receded, the scene through our windscreen shifted from urban sprawls to a shimmering vista where sky and sea made up 90 per cent of the view; as we crossed the first of the 42 bridges on this 113-mile journey south, it almost felt as though we were flying. Dexter’s boredom vanished as he caught his first glimpses of local birdlife; in the ten miles before lunch he had spotted turkey vultures circling above mangroves, a bald eagle perched on a pylon and a huge formation of 30 or so pelicans in flight, curving across the blue like a shallow sine wave.
Over stone crab claws and grilled mahi-mahi at the Fish House, a Key Largo institution (mains from £9; fishhouse.com), we plotted our route on their map placemats, tracing our fingers all the way down to Key West, where we’d spend two nights exploring the Lower Keys, then back halfway to a base in Islamorada for the Middle Keys. No drive would be longer than two and a half hours — a blink of an eye compared to the durations required for many iconic US road trips. This was also our family’s training wheels trip, a five-day experiment to see whether we were ready to graduate from single-centre holidays to more adventurous itineraries.
Largo Sound in the John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park
ALAMY
The driving turned out to be a cinch; the highway free of all vomit-inducing twists and dips. A constant stream of talking points materialised on the roadside, from manatee-shaped mailboxes to Bambi-ish key deer, an endangered species we would occasionally spot grazing on verges. We passed remnants of the Overseas Railroad, a short-lived and expensive train line that in 1912 made the Keys accessible by land for the first time and was dubbed the Eighth Wonder of the World for its pioneering engineering. When the line closed following the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, most of its infrastructure was converted into this highway, but stretches of rusted girders and abandoned piers remain, along with most of the original Seven Mile Bridge. Pedestrians can now walk or cyclists pedal along about a third of this, spotting turtles and rays in the water.
The Keys’ bountiful marine wildlife had been another selling point to us. While some kids’ Florida dreams are dominated by Disney, my boy’s bucket list featured manatees and dolphins. Surrounded by the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, the islands gave us access to acres of mangrove forest, expansive seagrass fields and North America’s only barrier coral reef.
● Best things to do in Florida
We started gently, with a glass-bottomed boat voyage out to the John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, spying a few parrotfish, snappers and grunts, although the highlight came when we drew back into the dock in Key Largo and a manatee swam slowly around the marina.
Our next see-through craft was more exciting — a clear kayak in which we weaved among Sugarloaf Key’s mangroves channels. Our guide Nick pointed out rays skimming over seagrass and juvenile snapper leaping clear out of the water in an attempt to elude a predatory tarpon, before gently lifting a starfish from the seabed so that Dex could see it clearly (adults £54; getupandgokayaking.com).
In Key West we headed out in the archipelago’s first electric-powered dolphin-watching boat. Without the grumble of a motor to disturb them, a matriarchal pod of resident bottlenose dolphins with one baby happily let us shadow them. Having dropped anchor, our naturalist guide Allen took us snorkelling. Dex had been practising with his mask and fins in the pool, and his first sea experience didn’t disappoint. Bright angelfish and stripy sergeant majors darted past, lobsters lurked among sponge beds, a triggerfish patrolled its territory, and we even spotted a baleful moray eel (adults £80; honesteco.org).
Key West was less of a success. Thinking we might snap a family photo at the concrete buoy that marks the southernmost point of the continental US, we walked crowded streets in the beating sun only to find a queue of nearly 100 others waiting to do the same. A quick duck into the colourful Key West Butterfly & Nature Conservancy passed half an hour, but the news that the Florida Keys Eco-Discovery Center was unexpectedly closed sent Dex and Grant back to our hotel pool, leaving me to soak up the city’s cultural sights alone.
Pines & Palms Resort in Islamorada
Within a few hours I’d ticked off the entertaining Shipwreck Museum (which Dex would have loved), Ernest Hemingway’s former home, now a museum populated by the polydactyl descendants of his original six-toed cat, and the Little White House, Harry Truman’s base when he stayed in the Keys. I was delighted to discover that the former president started every day with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and a shot of Old Grand-Dad bourbon — a morning routine infinitely more appealing than Gwyneth Paltrow’s.
While our base in Key West, the Gates Hotel, had everything practical we needed — that pool, plus bright, clean family rooms — it lacked the individual charm of other properties in less busy corners of the Keys. All of us fell hard for the idyllic Bay Harbor & Coconut Bay Resort, a family-owned haven in Key Largo. Our cute, candy-coloured cottage, one of 23 set in acres of bougainvillea-draped, hibiscus-scented gardens, sat right on the dock. We borrowed another kayak and paddled along the shore, swam in a motel-style pool and devoured home-baked breakfast scones as Peg Mullin Laron, the owner, taught Dex how to play cornhole with beanbags. If only we could have stayed longer.
It was the same story on Islamorada at the Pines & Palms Resort. Based in an appealingly retro waterfront cottage on stilts overlooking the beach, we barely had time for margaritas (and a fruit juice) around the pool on the evening of our arrival, and an early-morning stand-up paddleboard before departure.
We learnt a lot from our first Great American Adventure: we can do road trips if the roads are relatively straight; we should always stay one night longer than we first plan to; and actually, yes you can trust sat-nav.
Joanna Booth was a guest of Purely Travel, which has six nights’ room-only from £1,220pp including flights and car hire (purelytravel.co.uk), and the Florida Keys Tourism Council (fla-keys.co.uk)
Sign up for our Times Travel newsletter and follow us on Instagram and Twitter