Bike touring the southern tip of Florida

Country house in the Red Lands, Florida - Photo: Still Gravity.
View from the bike trail by the Red Lands - License our images here.

50 miles trip on the bicycles around the southern tip of Florida. The route was the paved bike trail the follows Krome Avenue. Many farms and plant nurseries around. Urban civilization returns with the cities of Homestead and Florida City. 

These places are the doors to the Florida Keys, Biscayne, and Everglades National Park. Now the cities mix up, we couldn't see where one ends and the other begins. Hurricane Andrew brought destruction to both in the early 90s. Now there is a vibrant community of Hispanic immigrants here. Most work in the surrounding farms. 

Downtown of the city of Homestead, Florida - Photo: Still Gravity.
Riding through the downtown of Homestead. 

The original name of Homestead was "Homestead Country". The town grew from the Homestead Act, a law signed by Lincoln in the 1860s that made easy to get free land. The city of Homestead was officially born in 1913. 

Entrance to Biscayne and Everglades National Park by Homestead, Florida - Photo: Still Gravity.
Directions to the national parks. 

Florida City was known as Detroit in 1910 and got the actual name four years later. Here we found "the oldest southernmost tavern in the mainland USA" - Sam's Hideaway Tavern - and the end of the Florida Turnpike.

Sam's Hideaway Tavern at the end of the road after Homestead, Florida - Photo: Still Gravity.
The old tavern at the end of the road. 

We completed the tour at the last gas station in the continental US. The painful return began - but we had a nice intermezzo for ice cream on the way back.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chekika: Forgotten spot of Everglades National Park close to Miami

Image
During our last visit to Chekika ( map ), we found closed roads and dilapidated buildings. This was our fourth time here. Little by little, nature is coming back. Wilderness taking over what was always its property.            The closed entrance to the Grossman Hammock -  License our images here .   Everglades National Park closed indefinitely the Chekika Day Use Area in 2013. They claimed budget constraints. One year later, Chekika was on the news when a juvenile Nile crocodile was removed from the area - the animal was captured in a canal north from the Grossman Hammock. Two others were caught in 2009 and 2012 further to the east. You know the script with invasive species: they escaped, or someone released them.  The Everglades already have the mighty Pythons running wild. I don’t want to imagine the River of Grass ruled by “man-eaters” crocodiles that can reach up to 17 feet. That would be madness. 
More »

Google search and the little blog

Image
Many small websites are going dark like the sands of the desert at nightfall -  License our images here .   Little blogs are dying. They are jailed in a dark and remote dungeon of Google organic search, the non-index dungeon. The mighty gatekeeper, like Saturn , is devouring its children. Betrayed for money, the good old-fashioned blogs are the collateral damage of their "helpful" content update. Long gone is that 2004 when Loren Baker wrote: Google likes Blogs. Blogs do well in Search Results Listings on Google. This is because Blogs contain fresh content and are richly interlinked, despite their relatively small audiences. Some would go so far as to say that Google over-represents Blogs. (Source:  What if Google didn't like blogs? ") That's ancient history. A jump to 2022 shows a different picture. According to Sandy Maguire: The Internet is dominated by a few big websites. Out of social, the amateur opinion is vanished. (Source: " Why Is the Web So Monoto
More »

Ernest Hemingway's "Oklahoma": "All of the Indians are dead (a good Indian is a dead Indian)"

Image
Page of an edition of "Three Stories & Ten Poems" from Ernest Hemingway.  Here we go with Hemingway poetry. Harsh. But we know what to expect from his sharp journalistic prose and  iceberg theory .  "Oklahoma" was published in 1923 in Three Stories & Ten Poems   - affiliate link to Amazon . The name says it all: the "Oklahoma" of the Choctaw language - means "red people" -, and Oklahoma the state seen through its genesis, the Indian Territory .  American Indians or Native American - whatever suits you, but many of them prefer the first name - in their new way of life.   Now to the poem.  All of the Indians are dead (a good Indian is a dead Indian) Or riding in motor cars— (the oil lands, you know, they’re all rich) Smoke smarts my eyes, Cottonwood twigs and buffalo dung Smoke grey in the teepee— (or is it myopic trachoma) The prairies are long, The moon rises, Ponies Drag at their pickets. The grass has gone brown in the summer— (or is it
More »