Ehmann Family: Last FL visit?

Nana and Grampa are selling their house and moving to South Carolina next summer. We traveled down to Naples for one last visit before their big move.

The girls took their remote schooling in FL. Tessie's piano recital was prerecorded and we watched her performance on the big screen.

These Florida soft-shell turtles were all over the neighborhood pond

We'll miss swimming and shelling in the Gulf at Wiggins Pass State Park

As much as I respect the wonder of the heavens, this Saturn-Jupiter conjunction was underwhelming

Where we were looking from, you needed decent eyesight to even see the smaller Saturn

On our "way home" I decided that this was the time to tackle visiting the Dry Tortugas. So the afternoon before our flight home, we drove across US40 through the Everglades and down to Key West. We spotted this guy at the Big Cypress VC in the Everglades.

In the summer we were in the northwest corner of the country where I-90 and US-101 end. Here in Key West we're at the far other end of the US, where US-1 ends.

There's a lot of southernmosts in Key West. At 8 in the morning while picking up pastries for breakfast we encountered the southernmost drunk guy that I've ever seen. Here's the southernmost conchblower statue, the southernmost menorah, and the southernmost lost hat.

and here's the famous concrete buoy marker. Now just because they built the causeways to make it drivable, I don't understand how an island can become part of a continent. The southernmost point of the contiguous US is actually Cape Sable at the end of the Everglades. With so many gators, skeeters, and pythons out there, there's no one to object to Key West claiming the tourist trap.

See Google agrees with me. While driving out to Key West and on one of the causeways, it said that we were in the Atlantic Ocean.

To get to Dry Tortugas NP the options are by boat or plane.

I got to ride next to the pilot of the DeHavilland Otter, technically making me the copilot

Straight ahead is the southernmost point, which we are now south of. We took off from Key West in a passenger vehicle, so now are we at the southernmost point?

There are a string of keys beyond Key West out to the Dry Tortugas, including the Marquesas of Survivor fame and Ballast Key, the true southernmost island in the US

The Tortugas get their name from all the sea turtles in the water and from our viewpoint a few hundred feet above the waves we could see many loggerheads surfacing for breaths of air. The Dry bit was added later to remind seafarers that there is no water on the islands. Technically an atoll of 7 islands, Garden Key is the biggest and almost entirely occupied by the massive Fort Jefferson. The last island is Loggerhead Key with the lighthouse. Speaking of lighthouses, you may think we're crazy for visiting so many US National Park sites, but consider the plight of stamp chasers for the the US Lighthouse Society. There are >660 stamps to collect!

The morning seaplane arrived 2 hours before the daily ferry, meaning that we shared the island with the NPS staff and a handful of campers

and that's why you wear flipflops to deplane from a seaplane

At 16 acres and containing 16 million bricks, the fort is the largest masonry structure in the Americas. And it was never finished. Construction began during the Civil War as part of the Union blockade of the Gulf. Like so many brick forts of the era, it quickly became obsolete due to the power of rifled artillery. Rather than finish the fort, the military developed the island as a strategic refueling location for ships patrolling the Gulf and Caribbean Islands. The Park Service acquired the island in 1935 and the fort has been crumbling away ever since.

And I mean crumbling. Over half of it is off limits and the rest is open for wandering at your own risk

Precipice path on top of the fort

I'd always wondered how it was possible for cannons to hit ships when fired from forts. This wayside reminded me that the the cannonballs would skip along the water surface, and in this case after they were superheated, the red-hot cannonballs could ignite a fire on the target ship.

Southernmost Junior Ranger swearing in in the continental US (couldn't resist)

The seaplane company supplied us with snorkel gear. The surf ended up being a bit too rough for decent snorkeling. And the "sand" was actually entirely crushed bits of shells that scratched your feet when they stuck in the flippers.