Mot's blog

Off to the Keys!

Out early this morning for a long trip to the Keys. Brian and Greg got ahead of us quickly
[ I do not drive the van faster than 65 ] Eric was doing very well today with his manual stick shift driving
lessons. We even hit some stop and go traffic were he did not stall the car and did some nice 1st gear
Takeoffs! Learning to “goose the sweet spot” on the clutch seemed to help him a lot. However – the real test was to come! We missed a extension exit on the turnpike and promptly found ourselves dumped onto the I95 downtown Miami in rush hour. We quickly took a side route past the airport to get back on the turnpike – but Eric definitely had some trial by fire with a stop and go highway traffic by the airport. Once we got clear of that – we headed down route 1 to Key Largo from Florida city. Driving the Keys is frustrating in that once you are on Key Largo – you think the rest are not far down the road, yet an hour later.....you still only half way down. By this time, the sun was setting and we seemed to be passing a lot of neat views so we stopped to take a few pictures, I wanted to get a dramatic picture of the van on the keys.

After which we continued on past Marathon to Bahia Honda State park, which is just past the 7 mile bridge. We got to camp after the sun went down and spent 2[?] hours with brian and greg setting up camp.
Note: do not plan complicated cooking the night of arrival.
After camp was set up, we started cooking sticky rice and chicken stir fry. All good - but we finished at 11:00pm! During dinner - some neighbors stopped by - a couple from Michigan. They spotted the Vanagon pulling in and wanted to come over to say hello. Their vanagon was not running well - so they left in at home for this trip, but they really liked my van Chilipepper. They said they have used the vanagon.com website before - so i told them to keep an eye out for my write up of the trip. After raccoon-proofing the campsite and looking at a scorpion next to our van, we headed to bed.