Drive to Key Largo

Florida in Winter... Jaguars at the beach ! Left to right : S-type, XJS, XKE, XK120 and XK150

Drive to Key Largo...
By Pascal Gademer

If you live up north and spent your Sunday afternoon shoveling snow and then looking at your Jaguar hibernating in the garage...

This one's for you...

Ok... this is real insensitive but hey... if you live up in New England or the Rockies... you have nice roads... we don't !

This was just an informal get together planned at the last minute around a simple idea : January in Florida is perfect driving weather so we should take advantage of this and drive somewhere for lunch... the Keys sounded like a fun destination so on Sunday, January 20th, a small group of us met downtown Miami near the end of I 95 for the 75 miles run to Key Largo : Bob and Susane Veder ( 1987 XJ6), Barry Moss ( XJS Coupe), Phil and Rosemary Odom ( 1994 XJS convertible ), new members Bob and Brenda Matzner ( 2000 S-type V8) and myself driving my 72 E-type 2+2.

We stopped on the way in Florida City, at the end of the Turnpike to hook up with 2 more cars, Marie Louise Yeamans ( 2000 XJ8 ) and Roger and Gloria Seitz ( 1954 XK120M) . After a short detour on Card Sound round for pictures we arrived in Key Largo for lunch at Sundowner's restaurant, right on the beach, where we met with yet another car, Jeff Hines and his wife, driving their XK150 OTS. Jeff and Tricia were the locals, living in Tavernier just down the road from Key Largo.

After more pictures and lunch, most of us continued down south on overseas highway for yet another nice spot Jeff knew... a small beach near the Star of the Sea Resort in Islamorada... palm trees, white sand, and blue waters... perfect background for beautiful cars...

A quick stop on the way back up to pick up some fresh seafood at the local market wrapped up another great driving day !

The picture gallery below has some nice shots of what winter driving in Florida is all about !

Picture Gallery
see notes below

- To view all 39 pictures in the gallery, use the Next Previous First and Last links, descriptions when available will appear under the picture. Once you've clicked on Next for the first time, you can just press Enter to activate that link again. The drop down box allows you to jump to a specific section.
- You can select a smaller image size by clicking on the small Med and Large link. Default size upon loading is medium, if your screen is large enough please switch to Large for best quality.
- Note that images are preloaded when you first loaded the page so there should not be any delays when viewing the gallery or switching sizes.

Note to Netscape users : Netscape doesn't seem to handle image manipulations in Javascript as well as Internet Explorer. Netscape 4.x limitations :
- the button used to change the size of the picture doesn't work
- vertical pictures appear distorded
- the formatting of the descriptions under the pictures doesn't blend as well...
These problems appear to be solved in Netscape 6.x .