Words by London Baker
Here’s some unsolicited travel advice for you: don’t waste your appetite on airport food.
Truly good food is supposed to be eaten in the coming days. You don’t want to squander your appetite on the airport steakhouse. Following this advice my Dad and I found ourselves eating at Miami International’s Subway sometime around midnight (luckily we had the foresight to not bring our subs into the hotel room…the onions would’ve stunk the place up).
We were Key West bound. Two unserious Michiganders hoping to soak up some February Florida sun. The almost-two-week-trip involved a flight down to Miami International, a bustling airport right up there with JFK or Atlanta. Why Miami? We had a stop to make in the Everglades prior to our stay on the beaches of the Keys and Miami was the closest spot we could fly into.
Those subs would serve as splendid fuel for the coming adventure—a python hunt deep in the swamp. Mind you, pythons are highly invasive. They’ve killed off a large portion of mammals in the Everglades and pose a massive threat to local biodiversity. This piece, however, is not about my experience battling pythons (which I wrote about extensively for an article in American Clubman Magazine).
After a day in the swamps and an afternoon fishing trenches in Miami we found ourselves up with the sun, making our way towards the famous Overseas Highway, the legendary final-stretch of U.S. Route 1.
Our pace on the drive down was leisurely. We made plenty of stops along the way—a Bass Pro Shop here, a roadside antique store there. With the windows down, a gentle breeze lifting arm hair on pale, winter-tortured skin, we finally felt free.
There’s something hypocritical about rushing somewhere to unwind. Trips like these are meant for relaxing. To stress getting to the destination is to waste the point of going there in the first place. If you really want to stress about schedules and activities and money then just stay home and do so from the comfort of your living room. A heartless opinion? Maybe. But still.
Needless to say our drive down was slow. The highway’s view was incredible. There’s something surreal about winding down a narrow road suspended over the teal blue waters of the Gulf. There’s something about rolling the window down and hearing the waves crash beneath you. At any moment this bridge could break. The cement could crumble and my Dad and I would be lost to the briny depths.
Luckily, as it has for decades, the bridge held.
As we wound our way lazily to Key West our stomachs began to rumble. Food would be a priority before getting there and loading into the boat that would take us to the small off-shoot island we’d be staying on.
“I’ve got an idea,” my Dad said. A half-hour before this we’d left behind the ocean view. Now pine trees filled our line of sight.
He jammed something into his phone’s GPS and cranked the wheel, turning us down some dusty dirt road. The houses around us were run-down, but not in a way that made them unattractive or dangerous. They were quaint, almost picturesque, in comparison to the Orlando houses of Florida that I was used to. This was Old Florida. Florida the way Florida always had been (and quite honestly the way it should’ve stayed).
We kept making turns, one dirt road leading to another. All around us was nature. No condominiums, no ugly developments. Just trees. And Key Deer (small, endangered deer native to the Keys).
Our rental car’s tires crunched on the gravel as we turned into a parking lot, a squat teal and yellow building right behind us. For the sake of keeping a gem hidden, I’m leaving out the name. But suffice to say this particular restaurant/bar has a colorful heritage (the building once housed a brothel), and the food is even better than its lore.
Inside I took the words of Jimmy Buffet to heart and indulged in a delicious cheeseburger (It was eaten in paradise, as the lyrics go). The patty was thick and perfectly cooked, topped with a juicy slab of roasted pineapple. My eyes mist over just thinking about it.
The structure of this restaurant was covered in dollar bills, all stapled or taped to the ceiling and walls. A “million dollar roof” they called it. Somewhere in there is a bill with a doodled-over Washington signed by “Bill and London Baker.” By now, all these months later, it’s probably covered over.
After slamming burgs and watching a half-dozen Key Deer meander across the road my Dad and I loaded up in the car and began the final stretch of our drive. If we’d been in a good mood before, the heavy lunch in our stomachs sent us to a different plane entirely. We laughed and joked, cranking the music up to full blast as Route 1 slowly came to an end.
And then Key West rose up in front of us, a colorful slap across the face. Houses of various light pinks, greens, and yellows were packed tightly together, people laughed from bars, chickens strutted across the streets. The roads were vaguely European with their tight turns and the pedestrians absolute lack of spatial awareness.
Our destination was some hotel that I can’t recall the name of. While we were in the Keys, that hotel was going to store our rental car for us. The plan was to take a small boat that runs twice-hourly to the small Key we would call home for the next few days.
With a half-hour to kill before the boat arrived we grabbed some frozen treats and perused through a gear store. Not much beats ice water and ice cream while looking at fishing gear, I’ll tell you that much.
The sun was high in the sky, as were our spirits. Thus far the only complaint we could muster was that the port’s single-person restroom was hot and cramped (when I say it was hot and cramped, it was hot and cramped).
The boat arrived right on time and my Dad and I loaded our suitcases onto it. Ten minutes later we’d arrived, hair tousled from the salt breeze. My grandparents stood on the dock, waving at us as our boat arrived. Over the next few days they would be our breakfast and dinner companions, our rental houses right down the row from each other.
After getting our bags unloaded in the quaint, two-bedroom house we were staying in, my Dad and I took a walk. Despite having already been in Florida for a few days, we marveled at how beautiful the weather was, marveled at how grateful we were to be there.
That’s another little tidbit I’ve picked up. Once you’re somewhere, pause for a moment to realize that you are there. Don’t just sprint off into the distance towards whatever else you’ve signed up for. Sit for a moment, appreciate the fact that you woke up somewhere different than you’re standing now.
Beneath our chatter about dinner and the weather, something else loomed. There was a proverbial elephant in the room. Tonight was going to be special, the sort of special that comes around once in a lifetime. But before I could get to that, I had to eat.
A little while later, stuffed to the gills (pun intended) with seafood and filled with delicious coffee, my Dad and I made our way down to the docks. Like clockwork the boat was there and we boarded, making our way back towards Key West.
The streets were illuminated, vibrant. People milled about laughing and drinking, enjoying the simpler, yet somehow finer pleasures of life. The sun was just starting to set, and I was silently grateful we’d come to Key West when we did. In only a few weeks everything would be packed with spring breakers.
And I mean everything.
Now, in my opinion, books are an essential part of travel. The books you bring with and read while on trips are some of the most memorable you’ll ever indulge in. Even now I think back and can remember reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast in Paris, Towles’s Rules of Civility in Oxford, Myers’s The Offing in a small beach town somewhere else in Florida. These books stick with me far more than most.
And books are important in general. The quality of education is the quality of society, and self-education is included in that. I also think everyone should have literary heroes. I think everyone should find authors whose style and voice they adore. Hemingway is one of those for me. Some of you may already be guessing where I am going with this, especially those with background knowledge about Key West.
Looking up, I found myself standing in front of Ernest Hemingway’s Key West Home.
The privacy wall towered above me, the front gate made of wrought iron. Exotic trees and flowers were in bloom all around. The lot was entirely cast in shadow with the fading twilight sun.
Hemingway had many homes across all parts of the world, but some of his most productive years were spent in Key West, writing about 70% of his stories there. And things just get better from here. As a Christmas gift my family had booked me a private writing session in Hemingway’s office, a writing session that was to occur after the museum had closed its doors to all other visitors.
That meant that the only people who would be there would be myself, my Dad, one staff member who’d be closing up other parts of the house, and the dozens of cats that call Hemingway’s Key West house their home.
I was elated.
The worker led me up to Hemingway’s old office, a carriage house that was unattached to the main building. A set of thin metal stairs led up, and with each step my heart began to hammer more. The woman opened the door and walked me towards the large desk in the middle of the room.
“If you need anything please come find me,” she said, heading back down the stairs.
My Dad hadn’t come up yet, instead he was walking the grounds. He would come up after I’d done some writing. I remember the feeling in my chest as I pulled out my legal pad and pen. I was working on a little story called “God is Bleeding” and had spent the last few days scribbling away at it. The plan was to finish tonight.
But as I held my pen above the paper I couldn’t help but pause. Decades earlier one of America’s greatest literary figures had once done the same thing, in the same room, on a night probably similar to this. How many times had he seen the same moon outside that window? How many times had he stood, walking over to gaze out of it? How many words did he let flow from his pen and from his typewriter? How many times had his writing been interrupted by cats crawling over his notepad as they were for me right now?
I sat back down, the words needed to finish my yarn flowing like water from an open dam, splashing out across the page. Twenty minutes ticked by. Thirty minutes. Forty-five. Fifty. I glanced up one more time, smiling as I scratched the last few words on the page, “God is crying because of what I’ve done. So much cruelty. So much pain. The water laps at the boat as I lean back on my hands and watch God bleed.”
Satisfied, I thought for a moment and added something else to the bottom of the page, “Completed on February 17th, 2025 at the desk of Ernest Hemingway in his home in Key West, Florida.”
I sat back, setting my pen down on the table and sliding the pages of the story away. A few months later “God is Bleeding” would find a home with a publication called The Yard, but for now it existed as simply scribbles and ink smears.
Standing up from the table I walked over to an easy chair and sank in. One of the cats jumped up on my lap and I scratched gently behind his ears. Twenty minutes later, my Dad came up and we sat in Hemingway’s office exchanging hunting stories and other tales that I dare not immortalize in print.
As we left, stepping back into the busy streets, I was already trying to drum up what I’d write next. For me, it’s never been about the publication or recognition. I wrote seriously for more than half a decade before I even had a piece published.
Getting paid, holding a book or magazine that contains a story you wrote, podcast interviews, having people tell you your story was amazing…all of that is nice, but it’s not the point. For me, it’s the love of the craft. For me it’s putting words to paper.
A few days later my Dad and I would take a guided fishing trip out into the Gulf. We’d catch so many fish that neither of us could keep count. We talked of trips we wanted to take to Cuba, my future, our presents. And that day as the afternoon sun began to sink I saw a boat wrecked, broken mast jutting up into the horizon. It would inspire a story that eventually became a novella now published as Pull of the Tide.
Just like the sun, our adventure began to fade. Three days left. Two. One. Home.
That’s the worst part of traveling, the coming home. You’ve experienced all of these things, had adventures and learned lessons, spent half an hour battling toothy salt water fish with a fly rod, yet no one else knows. No one else feels the way you do.
But that’s also sort of the point. Part of the reason we travel is so we can bring back lessons with us. That’s why we go to other countries. Heck, that’s why we go to other states. We go and experience something that is vastly different from our own reality.
That’s why we travel. To understand that the world is far bigger than our house or neighborhood or city or state or country.
So get out there.
Travel doesn’t have to be grand. It doesn’t have to be expensive. I could write a book about my time in the Keys with my Dad. I could write about the dozens of conversations, the delicious food, the swamps and beaches.
Nature is free. Conversation is free.
So just get out there.
Stop making excuses and just go see this beautiful world we live in.
Because in the end there are few blessings as big as the ability to travel.
END
