The Key West Airport is rather grandiosely named but there is nothing international about it. They did try a couple of flights to Nassau for a while but it seems that not enough people wanted to fly direct to the Bahamas, so that died a death. As far as I know the only regular international flight was one rumored to come out of Honduras with frozen seafood to supply local demand. Plus of course we get, from time to time a plane load of Cuban refugees who hop across the waters to join us in our capitalist enterprise. Be that as it may the County Commission decided the airport was too small so they voted about $26 million dollars to upgrade the facilities.
Last week they found out the job is going to cost more than $40 million. The contract has been rife with problems and accusations and investigations and still they plow on building a new terminal on and on and on...The new ramp that collapsed killing a Guatemalan worker is now being disassembled, presumably so they can try again a second time. I'll bet they aren't doing that for free.
The thing about the addition, like so much of the new construction in Key West over the past decade, is that it's out of proportion to the needs and character of the city. There's no arguing the old terminal could use some work, it is not the most modern facility, especially in light of the security requirements since September 11, 2001, but this?
Mercifully from South Roosevelt the profile of the new terminal is reasonably proportioned, thanks to the mandated height restrictions:
Herman Wouk wrote a book a few decades ago titled Don't Stop The Carnival about expatriate trials and tribulations on a small Caribbean island, and for some reason the old Key West airport puts me in mind of that book. Is this not irresistible?
Powered two wheelers still get easy parking near the arrivals hall, and the mastodon in the middle of the scooters in actually my Bonneville:
Seen above, the new terminal is on the right connected with the abominable glass walkway to the current terminal, which is visible in the background with its shady overhang and outdoor benches, shown here: 
Key West offers very expensive connecting flights from Continental, Delta, US Air and American Eagle, but the planes are small and many are powered by propellers:
However even the commercial jets that land at Key West are on a diet. The runway is too short for them to take off fully loaded so only a portion of the seats are filled. The runway can't be extended without mangling the salt ponds at either end and the mangroves are protected. So far progress has been impeded but one wonders how long it will last. Marathon has a nice long runway but it's fifty miles away and can't seem to retain an airline no matter how much money it offers them to use their airport. The ticketing area in Key West looks much like any airport, only smaller:
The thing was, passengers went from here to the outside walkway where they went through the security check, but people grumbled that the security check itself wasn't in the air conditioning, and there are no loos in the air conditioned "secure" waiting room, all of which is either charming or irritating depending on your approach to island time. Apparently they solved one problem even before the new terminal is finished. If in doubt read the homemade sign on the door:
And a lot of travelers enjoy the offerings of the Conch Flyer bar and restaurant which is not going to survive the renovations in its current form, model planes and all:
The arrival area is like any other airport, only...smaller! And considering how few people fly on each aircraft all the kerfuffle about the staging areas and security and stuff seems overblown. This is an airport that handles a couple of dozen passengers per flight, at most. Just one baggage conveyor handles all arriving bags:
And from here one steps out to a waiting line of cabs:
Or one rents a car if one sees a need to on this small island. And from here its a few short yards to South Roosevelt and the freedom of the Conch Republic and its turquoise waters:
However the airport expansion is bringing with it a couple of other issues as well. For locals the loss of The Pines, the open space next to the East Martello Tower in front of the new terminal has been a shame. Now I grant you that it was a gathering place for our scruffy residentially challenged but I wasn't alone in enjoying the shady waterfront benches from time to time.
Now its a construction parking lot and will soon be replaced by pretty gardens to please the eye of the passing visitors.
The thing was, passengers went from here to the outside walkway where they went through the security check, but people grumbled that the security check itself wasn't in the air conditioning, and there are no loos in the air conditioned "secure" waiting room, all of which is either charming or irritating depending on your approach to island time. Apparently they solved one problem even before the new terminal is finished. If in doubt read the homemade sign on the door:And a lot of travelers enjoy the offerings of the Conch Flyer bar and restaurant which is not going to survive the renovations in its current form, model planes and all:The arrival area is like any other airport, only...smaller! And considering how few people fly on each aircraft all the kerfuffle about the staging areas and security and stuff seems overblown. This is an airport that handles a couple of dozen passengers per flight, at most. Just one baggage conveyor handles all arriving bags:And from here one steps out to a waiting line of cabs:Or one rents a car if one sees a need to on this small island. And from here its a few short yards to South Roosevelt and the freedom of the Conch Republic and its turquoise waters:However the airport expansion is bringing with it a couple of other issues as well. For locals the loss of The Pines, the open space next to the East Martello Tower in front of the new terminal has been a shame. Now I grant you that it was a gathering place for our scruffy residentially challenged but I wasn't alone in enjoying the shady waterfront benches from time to time.Now its a construction parking lot and will soon be replaced by pretty gardens to please the eye of the passing visitors. While it's true I have my doubts about the usefulness of the new expensive terminal, airport workers i have spoken with have argued in its favor complaining about how run down the current terminal is. Fair enough, but I wonder who can think that this modest little airport needs its own hotel? Indeed there are plans afoot to build an airport hotel so no visitor to the island need travel all the way (4 miles at the most) to seek accommodations. Not to mention the fact that South Roosevelt Boulevard is lined with several splendid modern hotels within a stone's throw of the airport already. The Board of County Commissioners has given staff approval to look into the first plans for the monstrosity which would be located south of the Control Tower: 
On land currently occupied by employee parking:
On land currently occupied by employee parking:
And the state driver and vehicle licensing center which hasn't harmed anyone so far as I know and deserves a better fate:
There are two things about this proposed hotel. The first is that the developers want a special exemption from the county Rate Of Growth Ordinance which is supposed to limit construction and require heavy mitigation fees. They just want to build without any of those considerations or limitations and the Commissioners didn't reject that out of hand, thus setting a precedent that will lead us God knows where. Secondly their proposal is ridiculously enormous, which is the way it goes around here. Everyone gets upset then they reduce the height to the absolute legal maximum, everyone breathes a sigh of relief and says "at least it isn't the original monstrosity" and that's the end of the opposition. We get an unnecessary hotel in an unnecessarily enlarged (expensive!) airport at a time airlines can't pay their fuel bills. Don't Stop The Carnival indeed.
We are in the middle of summer and its those pesky days of not much tourist income so the tourist people have spent a good deal of time and bed tax dollars dreaming up whacky weekends to bring people to town. With gas at four and a half dollars a gallon its more of a struggle but the show must go on and this weekend we have not only Mel Fisher days, the man who found the treasure, but coincidentally Hemingway Days when fat old white men with beards will run down Duval Street with wooden bulls in hot pursuit. Either you get it or you don't. I don't. 
I am one among the last people on the planet who reads paper books, and I alone don't like reading Hemingway. His short sentence structure, terse dialogue and lack of description leave me breathless and hyperventilating. The guide on the tour suggested this style came about from sending telegrams when he was a reporter and had to keep it short. I used to write news copy for the radio but I like a florid, run on sentence or two. He was, as they say, larger than life. He won a Nobel Prize, he made a ton of money, always the sign of an American winner, and he chased women like they were going out of fashion. Hemingway makes me feel like a pansy, he hunted big game- I felt sick the one and only time I shot a deer, he married four times I think and cheated on all of them- I'm a home body, he drank like a fish all hail fellow-well-met- I'm a sober loner, he was a successful war reporter,-I drank like a fish when I reported from the front lines and spent most of my time ready to pee my pants when people shot at me. I guess my disdain for his writing style has deeper roots. But people throng to his home and pay their respects to the man of the written word. I like his house real well and it gives us some taste of what life was like in Key West in the thirties, but I think he would have made an awful neighbor, overrunning his place with cats:
Carousing till all hours, even hauling a urinal back to his startled wife from Sloppy Joe's old bar:
Arguing with her all the time, on one spectacular occasion about the money she wasted building a saltwater pool: 
No, no Hemingway and I would never have got along. But there again, who cares? His granddaughter comes to key West and presides over a short story competition, and the city has a favored son to commemorate and we have no threat from Cuba where Hemingway's favorite home was located, Finca Vigia ("Overlook Farm") and the real Old Man and the Sea recently died so we are currently Top Hemingway Dogs. Come one, come all, just keep the economy going, please. And the tour is fun. Our guide looked like he was rode hard and put up wet, no doubt keeping up the Key West image:
The interior seems much as it was though I don't really remember much about my last visit years ago, there is still plenty of open space under the tall ceilings, in a house open to the heat and decorated with the heavy dark Spanish style furniture Hemingway reportedly liked:
Which must have made the saltwater pool quite the refuge as air conditioning wasn't then an option:
The writing studio seems changed to me, not least because the walkway from the house is gone, and the stairs are still steep:
But also they have a manual typewriter on a table with a chair and as far as I know he wrote standing up to relieve back injuries from his excessively athletic youth. I seem to recall a writing stand in the room. Oh, and boxing I think is barbaric, Hemingway loved it, so we definitely would have been at loggerheads:
Looking in through the protective bars at the studio, the tourist in front of me made some snide comment about the ease of working only a few hours each morning, and compared to the daily grind for most of us there is some truth in that. On the other hand Hemingway ate his gun rather prematurely which puts me definitely in the 100 years as a Lamb, rather than a day as a Lion as Mussolini put it facing his own unsavory end. Hemingway lived large because he was driven to, and that, not just pushing a pen was his hard work. He got a nice view out of his studio window as he struggled with the English language:
Actually he didn't. There is a print of the Asa Tifton house at the time Hemingway owned it (purchased by his father in law because writing a few hours a day wasn't making it, ironically!) and the greenery around the house was sparse, nothing like it is now. Hemingway's taste in tiles is still evident. Fish and parrots. 
The tour of the house is brief but the beauty of the Hemingway House visit is that one is free to ramble anywhere and everywhere the doors are unlocked. There are no time limits and few restrictions that I could tell. Followers of The Man are free to stand and contemplate all day long if they choose, though the public loos are a little less fancy than the master's, though entirely acceptable. I saw visitors hiding from the sun chatting in one public outhouse. 
The Hemingway House boasts a rare thing in Key West, a genuine basement which the guide assured us has never flooded. The owners of the property have fenced it off so we the curious can't get in but that black hole in the ground was tantalising I have to say:
Especially on a hot sticky day like yesterday:
The cats didn't seem to mind the thundery humidity, though the visitors were complaining all the time as though they expected glacier melt to be surrounding the Southernmost City. The cats sit up and looks supercilious as the tours go through and get kibbles for their troubles:
This one was preening himself until something startled him though what could startle a Hemingway cat in this oasis of adoration I couldn't say.
Footprints in the cement perhaps?
As an illustration of close Key West living someone who chose to live near the Hemingway House a while back reported the property to the Department of Food and Agriculture accusing them of running a breeding farm without a permit. The complaint alleged that the stock (cats not cows) were suffering in an urban environment and they should be removed. Well, the shit hit the fan, predictably enough and at vast taxpayer's expense an FDA inspector came to town to investigate the illegal cat farm and the owners howled and everything ended up getting smoothed over which is why there is an impressive cat herding fence on top of the wall around the property:
Here's a hint: don't like cats? Don't take up residence near the Hemingway House! The cats look pretty smart by comparison to the humans, even though, in the final analysis another reason Hemingway and I wouldn't have got along- I'm a dog person!
Sunny days! I remember them well! I was moved to take a few pictures of State Road 4A along it's Ramrod Key incarnation last week, before the endless summer rains seemed to set in permanently and i got by chance a few sunny outdoor pictures... It happened that I was listening to the radio (that happens a lot in my TV-less home) and I heard there was a dispute going on in Marathon, some 25 miles north of my house over ownership of a stretch of State Road 4A. That caught my attention because I knew SR4A is split between several islands in the Lower Keys, indeed I wrote an essay about the section on Little Torch Key recently, but I had no idea the road also surfaced in Marathon. In Ramrod it has pretentions to pretty leafiness:
If it seems weird that Monroe County 
Change comes slowly around here sometimes and recycling is still an art that is not fully understood. However trash comes in heaps! The Keys recycle less than seven percent of the trash stream, where even mainland Florida gets nearly a quarter recycled.
They are closed during the month of July but otherwise this is the best place to get a To Go 
There is also a surprising amount of light industry on Ramrod Key, a nursery, a vet, a car mechanic or two, construction yards and even a welding shop to my surprise:
The Keys are always 
And I use these storage lockers when hurricanes threaten, to store our powered two wheelers in, if they have any spare lockers I can rent for a quick clean week:
Usually they have 
There are billboards 
And then at the south end of Ramrod where the road ends in a red triangle there is a major construction company yard, all industrial and everything but still decorated by the 
The road runs straight and true of course one does need to 
Though most of it isn't:
Key West Diary: keeping it real on the backroads.