Epic East Coast - Day 23

I am tired of Florida.  I'm not having any fun here because everything we want to do, there are 50,000 other people trying to do the exact same thing.  Today was supposed to be a simple day of driving out to Key West that ended up being 11 hours of travel, with almost 2 hours of that spent in a practically unmoving traffic jam.  Instead of arriving at a nice 7:00pm time, with light and time to find supper, we arrived at 9:20pm, in the pitch black of night with a rain shower making it difficult to see anything.

The day started off good, as Kristen made us breakfast and the three younger boys discovered the joy of a dog.  The drive out to Miami was fine as well, except for the American gas stations and their perverse joy in requiring a zip code in order to use your credit card for gas (and their inability to just put an $80 hold on my card so I can fill the van with gas without guessing how much fuel it will take).  Traffic was busy, but moving and we arrived at the point where the expressway stops and the small highway through the Keys begins.

This is where the first traffic jam began, and we were stuck in traffic for over 45 minutes before we finally got into Key Largo and could stop for gas.  Traffic moved OK through Key Largo, but we knew we would need to stop for supper, which we did.  After that, it was a massive traffic jam for over an hour, which at times was not even moving at all.  The reason?  When you exit the area, the highway goes from two lanes to one.  I'm not certain why they even bother with passing lanes - everywhere that the highway is one lane moved at the speed limit or higher.  Everywhere there were two lanes was a traffic jam as traffic fought to get back into one lane.

So that was our day.  We found our condo, put the kids to bed very late and I'm trying to relax.  Hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to go through the last few days of pictures.  At least the Internet is scalable enough to allow 50,000 people to do the same thing without causing problems.