In less than an hour’s drive south of the rental car desk at Miami airport, the Florida Turnpike ends and U.S. 1 heads for the ocean, then winds through the Florida Keys and a series of bridges toward Key West.

Looking toward the Atlantic at Pines & Palms Resort, Islamorada

Overseas Highway is a drive like no other in America, on a path that began as a plan for a railroad, linking islands washed on one side by the Atlantic, on the other by the Gulf of Mexico. Each mile southwest brings you closer to Cuba, and at the highway’s end you are 104 miles of water from Havana, which is more than 50 miles shorter than the drive back to Miami.

If you haven’t been to the Florida Keys, I highly recommend even a short visit, perhaps a couple of days on either side of a cruise out of Miami or Fort Lauderdale. Florida of the Keys is a world away from the high-rises of the Sunshine State’s East Coast and the sodden beats of South Beach.

Feeding the tarpon in Islamorada, Fl

You can get a pretty good feel for the laidback seaside island life of song lyrics (think “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys and “Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffett), do some fishing, casual or serious, and eat from today’s catch from local fishermen — even if your drive is limited to, say, half the 160 miles from Miami to Key West.

In two hours of highway from the Miami airport, my partner Fran Golden and I were in Islamorada, at Mile Marker 80, the halfway point on the road to Key West.

In Islamorada, we ate well (fresh bakery breakfast at tiny Midway Café; my first mac and cheese with lobster at Green Turtle Inn, yellowtail snapper and a tasty conch concoction at Lazy Days). We stopped beside the road to feed hungry tarpon from the docks at Robbie’s Marina ($5 for a bucket of bait fish), but mostly we just hung out with the pelicans on the beach and the Atlantic Ocean docks of the Pines & Palms resort (www.pinesandpalms.com), a respite of comfort and peace on the beach.

The beach at Pines & Palms resort in Islamorada, Fl (Photos by David G. Molyneaux, TheTravelMavens,com)

Eighty miles farther southwest is the southern-most point of U.S. 1, at Key West, the United States’ touch of Caribbean-style living, in architecture, atmosphere and attitude. Next Blog: December on a sandbar lighted for the holidays – where nothing succeeds like excess (thank you Oscar Wilde).

David Molyneaux is editor of TheTravelMavens.com