Hollywood Beach - US A1A

Hollywood Beach, Florida

US A1A

“There’s somethin’ about this Sunday
It’s a most peculiar gray
Strollin’ down the avenue
That’s known as A1A.”
— from Jimmy Buffett’s
Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season 

There is the old Florida, that of Highway A1A, where the sunrises and sunsets are spectacular and there is no such thing as “in a hurry.”  It is best enjoyed slowly.  On our trip coming from Key West, Johnny and I were heading up the east coast to visit Cape Kennedy and the Kennedy Space Center.  From my car window somewhere along Highway A1A, between the towns of Miami and Fort Lauderdale Beach, the Atlantic Ocean and its sugar-soft dunes glide by in a dizzying landscape of colors and textures.  There is the beach, its sand polished to copper and ginger by billions of fragments of coquina shells, and beyond that the Atlantic Ocean, luscious in pastels of green and blue, and beyond that only the curvature of the earth.

Johnny and I meander around Miami Beach and in late afternoon play and swim in the ocean at Fort Lauderdale Beach.  We head north into the darkness with the Atlantic Ocean on our right and a few street lights to our left.  We find a nice deserted area of beach in Hollywood and break out the Coleman stove to make our dinner.  It was probably hot dogs and beans since that and chicken were our main diet on many of these trips.  We sat in the sand for a couple hours telling stories, laughing about our adventures and our boyish dreams.  Around ten that night we were ready to crash on the soft sandy beach.

We rolled out our sleeping bags and got inside hoping the mosquitos would not be so bad since there was a slight ocean breeze and it was not long before we were asleep.  Occasionally we were awakened by people walking on the beach but quickly fell into another dream state.  It was easier to do without the constant buzzing around our heads from things trying to get inside our cozy sleeping bags.

About 2:30 in the morning we were rudely awakened by someone kicking our sleeping bags and yelling at us to get up.  We must not have moved quite fast enough as before our bags unzipped and bodies started out the two men grabbed us and pulled us to our feet yelling, “What the hell are you doing sleeping on my beach?!”  We were groggily trying to wake up and quickly realized it was Hollywood’s finest men in blue yelling at us.  I was trying to be polite and funny but they were not having any of it keeping a stern attitude throwing us off “their” beach.  As we were escorted back to my car we learned there was a double homicide just down the beach from where we were sleeping and they had not caught whoever did it.  It sounded like pure BS to us but we did not want a repeat of Alice’s Restaurant on our hands or have to sing all the verses so we quickly packed up the car and headed north like we were told to do.  This time neither one of us remembered seeing any “no camping” nor “sleeping on the beach” signs around.

We drove into the night along A1A to Delray Beach where we found another quiet place to sleep under the stars and half-moon night.  Here, there was no breeze so the bugs kept us awake as we were swatting and trying to keep our sleeping bags closed the rest of the night.

We continued on our trip to the Kennedy Space Center; this was several months after the Apollo 1 fire and the loss of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee.  We wanted to see what was going on since the space flights had been shutdown of after the accident.  KSC was interesting and always spiked my imagination but this trip had a very somber tone to it, not like other trips before.

I also wanted to write about one of my favorite highways, US 1, as it has the nostalgia of Route 66 out west and for hikers, the Appalachian Trail.  I have driven much of this highway but still have not driven the last section in Maine, the last of the fifty states I wish to visit in my travels. 

U.S. Route 1 (US 1) is a major north–south U.S. Highway that serves the East Coast of the United States.  It runs 2,369 miles, from Fort Kent, Maine, at the Canada–US border, south to Key West, Florida, making it the longest north–south road in the United States.  Construction of the Interstate Highway system gradually changed the use and character of US 1 and I-95 became the major north–south East Coast highway by the late 1960s.

US 1 travels along the east coast of Florida, beginning at 490 Whitehead St. in Key West and passes through Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Pierce,  Cocoa, Daytona Beach, St. Augustine, and  Jacksonville.  The southernmost piece through the chain islands of the Florida Keys, about 100 miles (160 km) long, is the two-lane Overseas Highway, originally built in the late 1930s.  Railroad tycoon Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway's Overseas Railroad, built 1905-1912 on stone pillars was ruined by the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 and later became a highway over the water. The rest of US 1 in Florida is generally a four-lane divided highway, despite the existence of the newer I-95 not far away.  Famous as a vacation scenic route, Florida State Road A1A is a continuous oceanfront alternate to US 1 that runs along the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean, cut only by assorted un-bridged inlets and the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. 

Once you leave Florida, US 1 turns inland sometimes a far as a couple hundred miles from the ocean.  Along the way, US1 passes through Savannah, the Outer Banks, up into Philadelphia, Boston, and into Maine.

Johnny and I had talked about driving the whole length from Key West to the Canadian border but it was an adventure that has, so far, been unrealized.

Ice