Leonida Keys Is the Florida Keys: The Seven Mile Bridge

The official description calls the region "the dress code is casual, the bars are loaded", a "tropical archipelago" on the doorstep of "some of the most beautiful and dangerous waters in all of America". There is one archipelago in Florida that fits that sentence exactly, and it is about a hundred miles south of Miami on a single road.

The official copy, in full

Heading: "Gateway to Paradise." Standfirst: "Life is a beach, but not quite." "The dress code is casual, the bars are loaded. Life in this tropical archipelago isn't flashy but it's easy. Get your buzz on and pull up a deck chair but look out, you are right on the doorstep of some of the most beautiful and dangerous waters in all of America."

Every element of that paragraph has a real referent. The casual dress code is the Keys in winter, when the locals wear flip-flops to dinner. The loaded bars are the dockside places on Key Largo and Islamorada. And the "beautiful and dangerous waters" are not decoration: the Florida Reef runs 120 miles offshore and carries genuine Florida reef, with its own currents and its own weather.

The real chain

The Florida Keys are 1,700 islands, of which about 30 are inhabited, strung along the edge of the Gulf and the Atlantic. They begin at Cape Sable on the mainland and end 90 miles later at Key West. Almost all of them are reached by one road, the Overseas Highway, also called US 1.

One detail worth holding on to: the distances are long and the road is slow. The Overseas Highway crosses 42 bridges, and mile for mile it is a two-lane road with a bridge every few minutes through the middle of the chain. A drive that looks like 100 miles on a map takes four hours.

The Seven Mile Bridge

The single most photographed object in the Keys, and the one the game places exactly where it belongs. The old Seven Mile Bridge runs from Marathon to Key West, running due south across open water with nothing on either side but the Gulf on one side and the Atlantic on the other. There is a newer bridge carrying four lanes of traffic right next to it; the old one is for pedestrians and bikes now.

It is genuinely remote. In the middle of the span, the nearest land in any direction is more than a mile away. That is what makes the stretch of water around it, and its reputation, unusually serious.

The Rusty Anchor and the boat yard

Trailer 2 opens on Brian Heder pushing a boat out of his yard on the Keys, and the community has matched his yard to the Marina at Key Largo, on the water at the north end of the chain, where the local docks are, where the boats are kept, and where a boat business would actually be.

The dock bars on that stretch are the real thing. The Rusty Anchor is the community's match for the Caribbean Club on Key Largo, and it is a genuinely famous stop: a low-slung dive bar on the water with a reputation for cheap food, loud music and a dock that is the only place in the Keys where the sun sets in your face rather than behind you.

Wonder Whale and Betsy the Lobster

The whale figure in the game has been matched to the enormous life-size lobster sculpture at Betsy the Lobster in Rain Barrel Village, Islamorada, where a 30-foot concrete lobster has stood over the road since the 1950s. Betsy is the most photographed roadside attraction in the Keys and is genuinely worth the stop.

Rain Barrel Village itself is a good place to eat. It is a strip of small restaurants and shops built around an actual 1886 rain barrel, and it is the standard first stop on the drive south because it is the last place with a supermarket before Marathon.

Planning the drive

If you are doing this in a day, it is tight but doable, and it is better early. The practical advice is to leave Miami before 7am, because the traffic on the Overseas Highway backs up from about 11am to 4pm on weekends, and a jam there costs you two hours of sitting in a car with a view.

• Leave early. 7am from Miami puts you in Islamorada before 9, and on the bridge before 11.
• Fill the tank in the Keys. Stations are expensive and sparse, and there are long stretches without one.
• Do not try the drive and a full day on the water. Pick the drive, or pick the boat, and not both in one day.
• Watch for the toll. There is a toll on the Overseas Highway at the start of the bridge, roughly $2 each way, and you can pay it with SunPass or a card at the booth.
• Go in winter. From December to March the Keys are at their best: low humidity, calm water, and the winter sun on the water at sunset.

The boat instead of the drive

There is another way to do the Keys, and it is the better one if you only have a few hours: come by water. A boat leaves Miami Marina, runs south through Biscayne Bay and out past Government Cut into the Atlantic, and delivers you to Key Largo and Islamorada in about 90 minutes with no traffic at all. You see the reef and the marine wildlife on the way, and you arrive where the boats are kept.

Our Key Largo boat trip runs exactly that route, with an hour on the water in Islamorada, lunch, and a stop at a working marina. It is the version of the Keys that fits into a single day without turning into a four-hour drive each way.