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The drive itself is half of it. The Overseas Highway runs 113 miles from the mainland to Key West across forty-two bridges, including the Seven Mile Bridge, with water on both sides most of the way.
Scenic Highway 30A through Walton County runs behind the dunes past the coastal dune lakes, which exist in only a few places on earth. A1A along the Atlantic gives you St Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the country. Inland, the Tamiami Trail crosses the Everglades and Big Cypress. For a single view, the tower at Bok Tower Gardens in Polk County stands on one of the highest points in peninsular Florida, and Vizcaya in Miami-Dade is a 1916 villa on Biscayne Bay.
Monroe County. Sandspur, Loggerhead and Calusa are the three beaches, and the sand here is real sand rather than the thin cover most of the Keys have, because of the way the current works through Bahia Honda Channel.
Open the guide →Walton County. Nearly 2,000 acres of white quartz sand, dune and coastal forest, and the beach is regularly named one of the best in the United States. Western Lake, 100 acres of it, is one of three coastal dune lakes inside the park, a kind of lake found in only two states and four countries.
Open the guide →St. Johns County. The tower went up in 1874 and the keepers' house followed in 1876, and both stand at 100 Red Cox Drive on Anastasia Island. Climbing it means 219 steps up a spiral staircase to a gallery with a view over the whole of St. Augustine, the inlet and the Atlantic.
Open the guide →Collier County. Big Cypress and Big Thicket in Texas were designated the same year, creating a new category in the National Park System: land protected but still open to hunting, to off-road vehicles under permit, and to traditional use by the Miccosukee and the Seminole, who hold permanent rights to occupy and use it.
Open the guide →Polk County. Edward Bok edited the Ladies Home Journal. He and his wife Mary Louise Curtis Bok spent a winter near the Lake Wales Ridge in 1921 and decided to turn what he called an arid sandhill into something else entirely.
Open the guide →Miami-Dade County. Deering had the International Harvester fortune behind him and spent about fifteen million dollars of it here. F. Burrall Hoffman was the architect, Paul Chalfin the designer who chose and arranged almost everything inside, and Diego Suarez laid out the gardens.
Open the guide →Monroe County. Seven small keys break the surface: Loggerhead at sixty-four acres, Garden Key at forty-two, Bush Key at thirty, and Long, Hospital, Middle and East Keys. Some have vanished and come back with storms.
Open the guide →Venice in Sarasota County calls itself the shark tooth capital of the world, and its beaches back it up.
On the Space Coast. The Indian River Lagoon in Brevard County, which takes in the Indian River, the Banana River and Mosquito Lagoon, is where people go to see the water light up blue-green when a paddle or a fish stirs it.
Yes. The Florida black bear is the only bear in the state, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission estimates there are about 4,050 of them.
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