G.A.S.P.

I got to Key West about 3:00 which gave me time to set up camp, then ride around town for awhile doing all of the “tourist” things.  First, I located the home of Ernest Hemingway who lived in Key West from 1928 to 1940.  Supposedly, it was only by accident that he stayed here in the first place.  As the story goes, he was returning from Europe and was supposed to pick up a car in Key West, but the car was delayed for a few weeks, and in the meantime Hemingway fell in love with the town and decided to stay.  Many say that the years he spent in Key West were the most important and influential in his life.  Since I visited Monterey and then read some Steinbeck, I think I’ll now have to read some Hemingway.  Maybe I’ll start with The Old Man in the Sea or For Whom the Bell Tolls. 

Next I went to the southernmost point in the United States which is just 90 miles north of Cuba, and then on to historic Fort Zachary Taylor.  Construction of Fort Taylor started in 1845, shortly after Florida became a state.  It was to be one in a long string of coastal defense forts stretching from New England to the Gulf of Mexico.  In 1861, the still unfinished fort was captured by Union forces who held it throughout the Civil War as one of the (effective) blockades of commerce to and from the South.  It was finally finished in 1866 and served during the Spanish-American War.  It was modernized several times, but by the end of WWII was obsolete.  Beginning in 1968, volunteers began to excavate the old fort and found among other things the largest collection of Civil War cannons in the U.S.  The site is now a National Historic Landmark.