bahia honda ~ #flkeys

Let’s visit Bahia Honda State Park in the Florida Keys 🙂 .

I’ve sorted literally thousands of digital photos over the past few days from our Florida Keys road trip last week, and could NOT decide where to continue with my blog series about the trip. We had so many fun adventures, just looking through the photos was a little overwhelming. I finally decided that since I began the series last week with the Card Sound Bridge entry into the Keys, I would continue with another historic bridge ~ and we’ll just see where things go after that ~~~

Bahia Honda means “deep bay” in Spanish and is in the lower Keys ~ the State Park entrance is at MM 37 Oceanside. Founded in 1961 the park is over 500 acres and occupies most of the island.

There’s camping, boating and trail hiking on the island, with plenty of park facilities to take care of basic needs. There are beaches on both the ocean and bay sides, and you will definitely want chairs and an umbrella for shade if you plan to stay very long. Water quality varies, but it’s shallow and makes for easy snorkeling.

Along with beautiful beaches, the main attraction is the scenic and historic Bahia Honda Rail Bridge. Originally part of Henry Flagler’s Overseas Railway (constructed from 1905-1912), the state of Florida purchased the bridge and converted it to automotive use as part of the original Overseas Highway project, after the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 severely damage the railway. A portion of the bridge span was removed to ease boating, as the new bridge is taller than the old scenic bridge. The new four-lane bridge was built in 1980 just north of the old bridge, replacing the old US 1 route. I love this photo where you can see the bridges almost come together!

We spent the afternoon snorkeling and enjoying the beach on our way traveling down from Islamorada to Key West. Bluwaterguy used his camera housing to take photos in the water, including our obligatory “floating feet” shot 🙂 . Can’t get a more scenic backdrop than this for happy floating feet!

This was one afternoon on our 10 day road trip, so you can imagine how many things I plan to write about for the series here on the blog! I’m going to post a bit of the journey and our adventures each week in no particular order, along with other post topics. (Gotta have some cocktails, snacks and style too!) I’ll use the #flkeys tag in the post titles for easy searching, and include links to series posts along the way.

This is one of the nicest things about the blog ~ I get to capture the moments for my  “life enjoyed” bucket, and then go back and visit them when the mood strikes me ~ and share them with you! I hope you’ll enjoy the journey as I post it here in the series. There are more pictures on my Instagram page, and I’ll be adding a photo album to the Facebook page too.

This was a really special road trip for my 20 years of traveling to the Keys ~ and oh yeah, my 5 years of blogging here on bluwaterlife! You could say this was my anniversary gift to myself ~ and you would be right ~ but I’ll share it here with you! Let’s go ~~~