Florida dies in Florida City and Homestead. As a sentence that would leave galloping imagination, it ends with an ellipsis: the Keys. Nearly a thousand islands and islets, sometimes only a few square meters, a road linking the mainland to the island's most southerly course and number of bridges, including the famous 7 Miles Bridge.
We spend the night at the motel "Gilbert's Resort in Key Largo. A room with 2 queen beds, but neat summary, a small wood deck faded a trifle shaky overlooking the dock, a table of the same wood and 2 plastic chairs that have seen better days. 
This could be a setting to give you the blues, but it has the endearing charm of those old ladies who tell of their former glory with a naughty look even ... few steps along the dock, here's the Tiki bar: a few huts under palm trees, a friendly waitress vulgar, a band playing tunes of the 70s, a few middle-aged Americans to sip their protruding belly that Budweiser leaning on the bar, a couple a little drunk trying to dance, c 'America is popular and friendly ... The place is not in the guides and it is difficult to find, since the road was destroyed by the last hurricane and must make a detour to get there. We are the only tourists. On the menu, nothing sophisticated: shrimp or fish on the corner, "Rack of BBQ Ribs and / or fried. A delight.
The next day, after another 2 hours away, a sign announces "Key West". And the road runs into a wall bristling with flags. Which way to turn? No matter you are at the end of the world. Afterwards, there is more than the sea .. and Cuba, 90 km away. For right or left, you arrive at Key West tourists, pierced by Duval Street with its restaurants and shops kitsch neck and neck, his air of perpetual holiday, the little train on wheels that serves the bus, his bike rent. The music comes from all windows,
all windows.
Clothes ... it's for dogs!
But take a side street and you change your world: you follow pampered colonial houses with lush gardens,
then at once you arrive on the wings: a small square, the homeless snore while another, sitting on a kayak, braid bowls and hats from palm leaves.
200 years ago, Key West is a mosquito-infested island on which live a few fishermen. But some get the salt trade, a commodity essential to the time for food preservation. And harbor waters, relatively deep, are also an ideal stopover Key West and almost mandatory on the road of "West Indies (Caribbean). However, the reefs surrounding the island would generate a far more lucrative trade that the port duties: a gust of wind, maneuvering a trifle vague, and cargo ships were shipwrecked virtually at your doorstep. Just sit and wait, then go get the goods still usable for sale. Technology helps, vessels become stronger and more sophisticated navigation instruments: the wrecks are not enough to feed their rights. Key West starts the business of the sponge, then with the arrival of Cuban immigrants fleeing the Revolutionary War (which lasted 10 years), in the manufacture of cigars. But the industry collapses with the arrival on the cigarette market. The boom of the 20s used to develop tourism, but not for long. That's Great Depression 30 years, and Key West for bankruptcy, its factories closed, leaving its people, its houses are empty. New twist 15 years later with "pink gold" - a new variety of very tasty shrimp. Then in the late '60s, many artists a bit hippie, a bit idealistic and very misty by hashish and LSD settle. They are still there. Maybe they still indulge in a little smoke makes occasional, and their ideals have not changed ... 
Ernest Hemingway, whom his friend in Dos Passos spoke at length, stops in Key West with his young wife on his return to Paris and falls in love Island: "It's like living at the other end of the world while on the last toe of America." He buys a house, takes a lot of fish and cooked the ancient evoke nostalgia vaguely guilty. That Hemingway became the flagship of the city, and refined gentlemen who make you visit his house that evoke his genius, erasing its follies. Bar Hemingway's favorite, became a tourist trap ...
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