Day 5 – Keys to Paradise

It was nice waking up on a farm!  Bedner’s knows how to do it right.  As we had breakfast, we watched the kids and families go out to the fields and pick strawberries, tomatoes, cukes and peppers.  The birds were chirping their hearts out too… probably trying to keep those kids away from the bird’s breakfast of fresh produce.  When we went into Bedner’s market, the manager on duty let us know about the wild life preserve directly adjacent to the farm.  We decided to take a bike ride to Arthur R Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge (that’s a mouthful).  We biked about 3 miles through part of the park and saw a parrot in the wild, storks, herons, brown pelican, red shouldered hawk and a couple varieties of ducks.  It was a difficult trail on the bike, flat in elevation but sand (sometimes felt like quicksand) and bumpy…. A good workout right after breakfast.

On the way to the keys we drove through Pompano Beach and stopped to see our friend Jay, then stopped in Ft. Lauderdale to see Sara at work.  She showed us around her job site where they outfit yachts and other large water craft with everything from food to linens to play toys for the big boys.  It was a last minute decision to visit but we were driving right by their home.  It was nice to see them, it has been a while and we have known Sara since she was an infant.  Nice to have hugs from our extended family!  On the road again … A slow freight train, traffic and boneheads on the road made the trip past Ft. Lauderdale and Miami a bit tedious.  We did make it to Key Largo to pick up a rental car on our way down to Sugarloaf Key where we are staying till Wednesday.  We got the car about 5 minutes before the place closed but the sales person was quite pleasant and made me feel less stressed about the timing of everything today.

Once set up, about 15 minutes, dinner and wine was on the table in another 15…

We walked around the camping resort to see what it had to offer in the dark.  There are several beautiful sites right on the peninsula for RVers as well as tenters.  We will let you know what we see in the daylight tomorrow.  Listening to Kaleo radio as I type this, chilling and loving that we are finally in the Keys and able to set up for a few days.

Total trip miles 1566.2 (211 today)