Key Largo
is the northernmost Florida Key. It’s the first one you hit as you
drive down US 1 and emerge out of the Everglades’ river of grass and
into this string of islands that hook between Florida Bay
and the Atlantic Ocean. Depending on traffic, you can get there in an
hour from Miami. This is both good and bad: Key Largo is the most
accessible key, but it’s also the one where you’re most likely to run
into urban problems, like crime.

At the Pelican,
for instance – our favorite place to stay in the Keys and a jewel of a
find I’m sharing with you now because I love you, oh MOLI reader –
someone once stole my flip-flops from the shore as I was out kayaking. The
resort figured it was the same young couple they caught trying to load
one of the Pelican’s paintings into their car – and kindly reimbursed
me for my footwear, which I had just bought down the road at one of my
other favorite Key Largo establishments, Divers Direct.

Whatever:
Having wandered up and down this Caribbean appendix to the U.S. many
times in 20 years, I think that Key Largo has become my favorite key.
Key West has the gingerbread houses and the gay-friendly nightlife –
but it also has the roving drunkfest of Duval Street. Islamorada has Kaiyo Asian restaurant and the amazing Casa Morada
– but both are budget breakers in these tight economic times. At $200 a
night, the Pelican ain’t cheap – but for that price, you can get one of
the waterfront rooms with your own private porch and watch the sun set
over the water as you grill your fresh fish. It’s a quick, easy getaway
from the city – and even after only one night, you’ll feel like you
like you were in Jamaica, or the Bahamas, or Puerto Rico, or somewhere
foreign and exotic and tropical. But you didn’t have to fly, and your
dollar isn’t deflated here, and you can stop at Alabama Jack’s to see some old-fashioned clogging (yes, clogging) and eat a bowl of chili on the drive home.

Key
Largo is a city. US 1 is lined with businesses; you’re not in the
wilderness. That’s part of what’s so amazing about the Pelican
(formerly known as the Hungry Pelican): At one end of its driveway, you
can walk to a CVS, or get a milkshake from the funky diner Mac’s, or
order custom deck furniture shaped like a lobster or fish or dolphin
from the store across the street. But walk west down that driveway,
past each of the modest cottages with its own little grill area, and
you wind up at a Florida Bay oasis, with a hammock strung between palm
trees over (imported) white sand and two docks leading out into the
water, from which you can watch a mother horseshoe crab carting her
baby around the bay’s bottom.

I’ve had some truly magical
moments in Key Largo. Once, in a Pelican kayak, we found ourselves in a
pod of feeding manatees. One of the great, lumbering beasts came so
close to us, my husband scratched its head. On Mother’s Day last year,
the water literally came to sparkling life: Some sort of tiny
bioluminescent creatures do it every year in May under the full moon,
and their coitus was leaving little squiggly marks in the water. This
Mother’s Day, we kayaked to a mangrove island where cormorants and
herons were nesting, and we saw a little white baby heron head sticking
out of one nest in a tree.

Key Largo’s chief asset is John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park,
an oceanic preserve that is world renowned for its snorkeling and
diving. The variety of life here in shallow waters is astounding –
although if you’re at one of the reefs where the glass-bottom boats
dump tourists, the quantity of human life can get annoying. Still,
there’s so much reef, that unless you’re snapping pictures of the Christ statue,
you can usually get away on your own and find the nurse shark nesting
under a ledge, or have a little damselfish attach itself to you like
you’re some lost mother figure.

Every time we go to the Keys (which is a couple times a year – lucky us), we make sure to stop at the Key Largo Conch House,
an old Victorian with tables on the deck, a golden lab named Chief, a
parrot named Romeo, and great breakfasts, sandwiches, salads, and
smoothies. They also serve dinners there now, but we haven’t made it
there yet for that, as we’re usually grilling at the Pelican.

This
past weekend, once the steak was done, we found out that all the forks
were gone from our room. The woman at the desk told my husband she had
just stocked all the cabins with flatware – again – and only gave us
two forks, one of which was plastic. Okay, so that wouldn’t happen at
Casa Morada. Then again, we couldn’t bring our son to that child-free
institution. And Cole loves Key Largo so much, he begged us to stay
another night.