My wife and I have coincidentally had the opportunity to visit the same city for different conferences, a year apart, several times.

This happened in Denver, Miami, and New Orleans.

One year I had a conference at a Hilton hotel in Miami, and the next year she happened to have one at that very same hotel.

One thing that surprised me about that section of Miami was, almost all of the homes we saw on the drive from the airport had burglar bars on the windows. Same as what we had seen in Puerto Rico. I do not think I would want to live in a place like that.

That second trip, it worked out that we were able to take a few more days afterwards and drive down to Key West, which we did not have time to do on our first trip – just like Denver and Pike’s Peak, a few years earlier. That was a trip I will never forget, for several reasons.

Our flight was supposed to have landed in Miami around 5 pm. Our plan was to rent a car and drive the four hours to Key West, having enough sunlight to enjoy the view for most of the way down. As so often happens, it didn’t happen that way.

Our flight was delayed three hours leaving the Atlanta airport, due to engine problems, so we didn’t arrive in Miami until 8 PM. Then the car rental place “upgraded” our rental to a convertible. We didn’t realize until we got on the road how noisy a car it was! We would have turned around and gone back for our original reservation, but it was already late. So we drove on.

That car whistled and groaned all the way down to Key West! And of course by then it was too dark to see anything. We got to our B& B around 1 AM, and promptly crashed.

My wife had lined up a snorkeling excursion the next morning, but that didn’t work out as planned, either. She had done that once before, on a trip to Puerto Rico, and enjoyed it, so wanted to try it again.

Problem #1 was, the weather didn’t exactly cooperate. Problem #2 was, one of those huge 4,000-passenger cruise ships had docked the night before, and all those people came ashore the next day; so the snorkeling cruise wound up with 100 people instead of 20. The boat captain took them out about an hour’s ride, where the water wasn’t quite as rough, then just said, “OK, go for your swim, we leave in an hour.”

Needless to say, that was not what my wife had in mind for that experience.

We did get to look around the rest of that afternoon and the next day, visited the Pirate’s Museum, saw the Ernest Hemingway home (but not the famous six-toed cats that lived there), got some good seafood in a couple of picturesque places, and then had to head back to Miami for our return flight.

At least we got to see the road on the way back.

It was four lanes in some places, but only two lanes in others. Occasionally we got stuck behind a truck or slow driver and couldn’t get around them. So it took a little longer than expected.

But the return flight was at least uneventful.

One other thing surprised us. Key West has no fresh water source other than rain water, so has to pipe in their water all the way from Miami. That’s a long pipe!

Key West has another distinguishing feature we did not know about until we got there: it was long known as “shipwreck alley,” back in the day when ships were made of wood. The waters around it abound in reefs, and unaware sailors would crash on the reefs and get stuck. So quite an industry sprung up there, salvaging goods that came off those shipwrecked vessels.

I quite understand the frustration Key West locals have with the cruise lines who come in for a couple of days, briefly drop hordes of passengers in that small downtown, and then leave.

It overwhelms the place, and causes other problems with the fishing and charter boat industries. Bar Harbor, Maine, and Venice, Italy, have similar problems, among other places.

At least Key West has managed to escape hurricanes, for the most part.

And we finally got to see it.

Rafe Semmes is a local writer and traveler.