Overseas Highway: Marathon to Key West

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Marathon

   Marathon is the middle of the Florida Keys, a flat, tropical working town strung along Key Vaca and its neighbours, and the place where the Overseas Highway pauses to take a breath before the famous long bridge. About nine thousand people live here, enough for plenty of fuel, supermarkets, diners and marine shops, and most travellers stop for coffee and a pit stop before the next stretch. The sea sits on both sides of the road, turquoise on the Gulf side and a deeper blue on the Atlantic.

   Read the complete Marathon write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Marathon is where the day begins. Next is Seven Mile Bridge.

2. 2. Seven Mile Bridge

   Nearly eleven kilometres of road laid across open water, with the Gulf of Mexico on one hand and the Atlantic on the other: the Seven Mile Bridge is the great set piece of the Florida Keys. The modern span opened in 1982 and rises in a gentle hump in the middle to clear boat traffic, and from the crest you can see the water turning from pale green to deep blue in bands, with the horizon curving slightly and the keys scattered like dark commas. Riding it is a short, strange, wonderful experience, a few minutes in which there is nothing but sky, sea and a ribbon of tarmac.

   Read the complete Seven Mile Bridge write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Seven Mile Bridge comes up about 15 km into the recorded legs. Next is Bahia Honda.

3. 3. Bahia Honda

   Bahia Honda means deep bay, and the name is a clue to what makes this island special. Most of the Florida Keys are flat, fringed with mangroves and shallow, but here the water is deep enough close to shore that Henry Flagler's railway engineers had to build a long steel truss bridge to cross the channel. That bridge, completed in 1912 as part of the Overseas Railroad, carried trains to Key West until a hurricane in 1935 destroyed much of the line. The railroad's bridges were then converted for road traffic, and the old steel structure at Bahia Honda, with its girders overhead, was used by cars until the 1970s. Part of it now stands unused as a lookout, cut short in places, a rusty ghost above the water.

   Read the complete Bahia Honda write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 26 km into the recorded legs you reach Bahia Honda. Next is Key West.

4. 4. Key West

   Mile Marker 0 is a small thing to stand beside, a green sign at the corner of Whitehead and Fleming streets, but after about a hundred and thirty miles of bridges and causeways over water the colour of a swimming pool, it feels like a finish line in the most literal sense. Key West is the end of US 1, and the end of the road in the continental United States, closer to Havana than to Miami's downtown skyscrapers by a surprisingly small margin.

   Read the complete Key West write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Key West closes the day.